In the introduction to Cyber Muslims: Mapping Islamic Digital Media in the Internet Age, the editor Robert Rozehnal reminds us of the Covid-19 pandemic. One repercussion of it is the ease with which all kinds of people, and of all generations, use the internet for the purposes of work, education, entertainment, sports, and politics. Not that this wasn’t the case before, but now it is different. It is “safe to say,” Rozehnal writes, “that the internet is not going away and that digital media will only become increasingly powerful and omnipresent in the years ahead” (15).
During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, Rozehnal, a professor of religious studies at Lehigh University who is specialised in Islam and the South Asian region, assembled scholars from the fields of Islamic studies, religious studies, communication and media studies, and American studies to write about digital media, in order to take a closer look at what he calls Islamic digital media and cyber Muslims and because he wanted to highlight “alternative pathways for self-imagining” (1). The contributors, a group of well-known scholars and experts in their respective fields, never met in person, but instead communicated entirely online.
Rozehnal organizes the fifteen chapters into four parts. The individual chapters deal with Muslim digital practices from different regions, including the United States, Iran, the Arab world more broadly, and Southeast Asia.
A great variety of themes, people, and genres are tackled in the book. Part 1, about authority and authenticity, looks at the contestation of Islamic authority in English-speaking online environments, especially during the pandemic in 2020–21 (chapter 1), the construction of identity based on online and offline experiences among young American Muslims between 2018 and 2019 (chapter 2), and the performance of Indonesian Sufi master Habib Luthfi Bin Yahya within different media and practices of mediatization (chapter 3).
Part 2 includes four essays related to community and identity, each centering on a different topic: an American podcast against anti-Muslim activity (chapter 4), the network of self-identified Latino-Muslims in the US and their digital landscape (chapter 5), the various empowering digital media activities of Muslim women and their production of third spaces on social media for discussing and promoting Islamic feminism (chapter 6), and an online magazine called Muslim Girl, started in 2009 and produced by and for Muslim girls and women from New Jersey (chapter 7).
Part 3 brings together articles about piety and performance, for example about the idea of wearing the niqāb—discussed on Rivka Sajida’s YouTube series “Deen Talk!”—while interacting online, in the “digital niqābosphere” (chapter 8); three “mindfulness apps” in the English language that were created by and for Muslims in 2020–21 and offer guided meditations in what has been called the “spiritual marketplace” (chapter 9); an introduction to Islam-related mobile apps in general and Mecca-related apps in English, Arabic, and Persian in particular, including an app for virtual hajj (chapter 10); and the image of Islam via Instagram posts visible during Eid al-Adha 2019, which is the feast of sacrifice marking the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (and not, as Rozehnal erroneously states in the introduction, an “expression of Muslim piety during Ramaḍān” [13]) (chapter 11).
The fourth and last part of the volume about visual and cultural (re)presentation includes four chapters on, respectively: digital reconfigurations and practices of Islamic art (chapter 12); the strategic use of humor in social media discourse in Indonesia today as a mode of Muslim visual and cultural representation (chapter 13); Shiʿi Iranian jurists on Instagram and other digital applications (chapter 14); and, finally, “the appearance of Muslims in a hypermediated economy of visibility” and their creative possibilities for escaping the “logic and calculations” of the “imperial gaze” of “security and management of threat” (238, chapter 15).
The volume thus closes with an important critique of how Muslim subjects are dealt with by the modern state, especially, but not exclusively, the US, focusing on its bureaucracy, economy, and politics. “Mapping” Islamic digital media, as announced in the subtitle of the volume, thus takes on a sensitive (even precarious) meaning, because one can be sure that the digital sphere in all its variety is watched closely. That was not always the case. The last chapter reminds us that the internet has a history too, involving chronology and historiography.
This history is in fact summarized in the introduction, where the editor provides a short overview of the development of the internet since the 1980s and the research on what he calls cyber Islam since the late 1990s. While Rozehnal spends quite some time referring to these older developments, the notions of “cyber Islam” and “cyber Muslim” are not explained (he does, however, explain the term “cyberspace”, [1–2]). One is left to wonder what exactly these terms refer to today and how, for example, Muslim digital practice has evolved over time. Could one suggest evaluating different practices pre- and post-9/11, or should one emphazise a difference in the practice of all actors, including the state, before and after the Arab revolutions in 2010–11? Another question relates to cyber Islam as a spatial concept. How exactly is Islamic cyber space connected to offline realities in various locations on the planet?
Although these questions almost impose themselves, especially given the complex and ever-growing internet (including its 2.0 and 3.0 iterations that people carry with them everywhere), they are barely touched on in the introduction. Nor does it mention phenomena and practices like cooking on TikTok, meme culture on Instagram, and YouTube Influencers, although these and similar practices are dealt with in the individual chapters of the volume. It becomes obvious—and this could possibly have been discussed in more depth—that different generations use and analyze the internet in very different ways.
These critical comments notwithstanding (and which in any case only concern the introduction that initiates the volume), I recommend the book to all students and teachers, no matter which disciplines and backgrounds they come from. It highlights exciting recent developments in the digital practices of Muslims—and, therefore, in Muslim self-representations—especially in the English-speaking digital realm.
Bettina Gräf is a lecturer at the Institute for the Near and Middle East, Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München (LMU Munich), Germany.
Bettina Graf
Date Of Review:
October 23, 2023
