INTERNET

The Islamic presence in cyberspace relates to both religious authority and the accessibility of authoritative texts, scriptural and juridical, reflecting a spectrum of views internal to the diverse Muslim community. Digital Islam projects Muslim values yet is also bound by them. It is further influenced by the American origins of the World Wide Web: Afro-Asian Muslim students who came to the United States to be trained as engineers were also the first to create specifically Islamic websites (especially through Muslim Student Associations, or MSAs). Their concerns remain the concerns of Muslims worldwide: to foster cyber Islamic environments that reinforce Muslim values no matter what the dominant culture or the vocational demands that individual Muslims face.

The Boundaries of Digital Islam

One of the most fertile and recurrent metaphors from Muslim imagery is the Straight Path. It is first introduced in the opening chapter of the Qur?an. "Guide us on the Straight Path," each Muslim asks of Allah each day and each time that he or she engages in canonical prayer (salat). The Straight Path, and only the Straight Path, leads to peace, to truth, to certainty, in this world and also in the next.

The boundaries of digital Islam reflect the scriptural, creedal, and historical boundaries of Islamic thinking before the Information Age. There can be no Islam without limits or without guideposts. One cannot have a Straight Path unless what is beyond or outside or against the Straight Path is known. Cyberspace, like social space, must be monitored to be effectively Muslim. As Gary Bunt has noted, "much is done by Muslims in the name of Islam that is dismissed as inappropriate, or worse, by other Muslims. Not every surfer (Muslim or non-Muslim) is able to make appropriate judgments, or possess the knowledge to determine 'the truth.'"

Yet the horizontal, open-ended nature of the Internet makes the boundaries of digital Islam more porous and more subject to change than those of its predecessors. There are still the same guideposts: the scripture (the Qur?an), the person (the Last Prophet) and the law (with the ulema or religious specialists as its custodians). Each has to be defined or redefined in cyberspace in order to reflect the staggering diversity within the worldwide Muslim community (umma). The cyber-umma remains a subset of, not a substitute for, the actual umma.

The most profound diversity is the global distribution of Muslims themselves. Muslims comprise between one-quarter and one-third of the world's population. More Muslims are Asian than African, more are African than Arab, and many Muslims now live outside their countries of origin, whether in Europe or North America. It is Euro-American Muslim immigrants who form the leading edge for change in the Muslim world as a whole. Children of the information technology revolution, they have a heightened sense of diversity, at the same time that they use expanded human and material resources to link themselves with other, like-minded groups.

There is a debate about whether or not the Internet encourages democracy in the Muslim world. Some cybernauts have assumed that the expansive technology of the World Wide Web makes it as democratic in access as it is global in scope. But others claim that the Internet further shores up traditional authority, since only certain groups of Asian (or Arab or Iranian) Muslim immigrants get their views projected on web pages in cyberspace. The South Asian cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar (1996), for instance, lambasts cyberspace as "social engineering of the worst kind. . . . The supposed democracy of cyberspace only hands control more effectively back to a centralized elite, the ideology of the free citizen making everyone oblivious to the more enduring structures of control."

The Internet and the Information Age

For those Muslims who do have access to cyberspace, two key terms frame their experience of the Internet. Both terms, Muslim networks and the Information Age, come together in digital Islam. Muslim networks precede and inform the Information Age. Manuel Castells accents the difference inaugurated by the information technology revolution. This revolution did not erase prior networks, but it did enhance the way they function. The information technology revolution has made the internal diversity and historical networking of Muslims more apparent. The Internet, in particular, opens up access to communities that were closed or inaccessible, thus facilitating an investigation of the ways in which diverse peoples encounter their diversity and interpret their experiences. It provides options for new forms of collective interaction.

During the 1990s, the Internet became part of daily life in many parts of the world. While access in Africa and Asia remains limited for economic and political reasons, grassroots organizations are learning how to exploit the democratizing potential of e-connectivity and to circumvent attempts to centralize control. In Malaysia, for example, networks opposed to the government have established a tiered system of distribution. Elites with computer access download materials as hard copies, which are then widely distributed into rural areas, where they can be read aloud to groups of illiterate people. Virtual communities are becoming the norm, even as technophiles debate with neo-Luddites about whether they are the harbingers of a brave new world or the end of fully human life.

While the information revolution emerges out of technological developments and organizational patterns long in place throughout the world, it can be marked as a revolution because of its difference from these same antecedent patterns. What is different are the speed, scope, and directness of communication, nowhere more evident than in the concept of telepresence.

Telepresence and Resistance

Telepresence is a new form of association, and, as such, it compels a reconsideration of the meaning of community: What is community when participants do not share place but can communicate as if they did? If shared place is not a necessary condition, is the notion of community as embodied contact a romantic projection of an idealized past? Sociologists since the nineteenth century have been worrying about the impact of technology on community, as though it possessed a solid, immutable core. But a century later, communities survive, albeit in less solid but no less real forms. While it is too early to predict how transformative the Internet will be, its impact on individual, communal, and national identity is growing.

The challenge for Muslim cybernauts is the same as for other "netizens" (a neologism meaning "internet citizens"): How to define place and community in new ways that do not oppose virtual and real but rather see them as complementary? Can social networking in the flows of the information superhighway provide an alternate context within which to build communities as small as a kinship group, or as large as a nation?

The cybernetic revolution provides unprecedented opportunities for local and transnational community formation. Whether Muslims aggregate in virtual associations, such as cyber-Muslim chat groups, or actual networks, such as Women Living Under Muslim Laws (<http://www.wluml.org>), they project a common pattern of fragmentation, dispersal, and reaggregation. In this era of mass migration, when violence and economic necessity have forced many to travel, diasporic Muslims are split from their birth communities. They are compelled to negotiate multiple speaking positions as they imagine and project national identities. Nationalism today, though geographically fragmented, is socially networked through language and systems of meaning that allow participants to share cultural practices and experiences. People are able to diversify their participation in various communities to reflect shared interests rather than shared place or shared ancestry. They may also form contingent virtual communities to respond to emergencies at the collective and individual levels, as well as to provide companionship, social support, and a sense of belonging.

The Internet seems to empower individuals who would not otherwise have a public voice to express and present their opinions to strangers. However divergent from the norm, an individual can insist on his or her unorthodox position. A debate that could be closed in real space by the assertion of dominance by a majority remains open in virtual space. Consider the fierce debate concerning women's rights as human rights and Muslim women as fully the equal of Muslim men. Often this debate centers on one hadith of the prophet Muhammad, to wit, that "a nation which places its affairs in the hands of a woman shall never prosper." Traditionalists have used it to deny women any role in affairs of state or the public domain, but a contemporary Nigerian jurist, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has demonstrated through an essay circulated on the Internet (at <www.gamji.cm/sanusi.htm>) the extent to which rival interpretations of this hadith render it suspect as the eternal norm governing Muslim women's access to professional employment and political power.

Heteroglossia and contestation do not automatically replace the ideological closure of other forms of telecommunication such as newspapers, television, radio, and even telephone. Still, dissension that might have been quashed previously in an environment where hegemonic discourse held sway might today persist beyond presumed endings. To the extent that the necessarily horizontal nature of relationships on the Net challenges traditional hierarchies, the democratizing potential of the Net holds out hope for people living under authoritarian rule in many postcolonial Muslim states.

Consequences of the Information Technology Revolution

The Information Age is an age defined by media, whether print (newspapers), auditory (the radio and telephone), audiovisual (television and movies), or print-auditory-visual-tactile (the World Wide Web). There could be no World Wide Web without antecedent technological breakthroughs, yet it represents the culmination of a process the further consequences of which no one yet knows. While Muslims did not create the World Wide Web, they have been among its beneficiaries, at least in those nodes of the global capitalist community where Muslims work, live, and pray either in their own cosmopolitan centers or as part of the demographic pluralism of Western Europe, North America and South/Southeast Asia.

What will be the consequence of the information technology revolution for Islam during the next two decades? Castells has argued that it will augur the biggest revolution experienced by humankind since the invention of the Greek alphabet in 700 b.c.e. It is too early to confirm Castells' grand vision, but even if one acknowledges its long-term potential, its immediate impact has to be qualified on two major points. First, the boundaries of religious knowledge are not so easily or so swiftly changed. The major web site for Muslims in the Euro-American diaspora today is IslamiCity in Cyberspace, located at <www.islam.org>, <www.islamic.org>, and <www.islamicity.org>.

It has been embraced by Muslim Student Associations throughout North America, at the same time that it has benefited from the early endeavors of student-based webmasters to create Cyber Islamic environments. Because IslamiCity in Cyberspace claims 120 million hits since January 2001, it would seem that it fulfills its mission, namely, to service the global Muslim ecommunity.

But does IslamiCity actually represent all Muslims, in geographic space as well as in cyberspace? IslamiCity in Cyberspace is itself an offshoot of HADI, the acronym for a Saudi overseas holding company based in California: Human Assistance and Development International. In Arabic, hadi means guide or leader. Hadi is also one of the "99 Most Beautiful Names of God," and it echoes the phrase from the Qur?an cited above: "Guide us on the Straight Path." In this case, however, the Straight Path guides the Muslim cybernaut towards norms and values that reflect the Saudi sponsors of HADI. It reflects the effort of the Saudi government to project itself as the bastion of Islamic orthodoxy, at once the conduit and the center for the one billion strong umma. Yet the HADI-sponsored websites have little relationship to other cyber-Muslim voices with a variant notion of Islamic loyalty and ritual practice.

Among the numerous alternative Muslim websites, two kinds contrast sharply with Islamicity in Cyberspace. One is the principal Twelver Shi?ite website at <www.al-islam.org>. This site, like HADI, originates from North America, in this case from Canada, but instead of the dominant Sunni stress on scripture and Prophetic practice, it projects a personal loyalty to ?Ali, the cousin/son-in-law of the Prophet and an individual whom Shi?ite Muslims esteem as one of the Infallibles, or perfect beings who guide others to Allah. Also reflecting a personal loyalty, but to other semidivine mediators, are numerous Sufi sites, among them those dedicated to the Chishti-affiliated Sufi Order of the West and its founder, Hazrat Inayat Khan. For example, <www.cheraglibrary.org/library.htm> is the home page of a Chishti devotee from New Mexico, and it offers a broad appeal to numerous, non-Muslim spiritual paths, all under the canopy of a universal perspective of Sufism.

The huge conceptual gap between the IslamiCity sites and their Shi?ite or Sufi counterparts illustrates the second major demurral from a cyber-utopia of the sort that Castells projects. Differences in virtual space will be as multiple and myriad as ground-level disparities within the umma. Not only will there be a limited number of Muslims who have access to the World Wide Web, but those who do become Muslim netizens will find many competing notions of Islamic loyalty and options for ritual practice. It will also continue to matter where one resides. In Malaysia or Turkey the government is less prone to monitor or to filter websites than in Saudi Arabia or Syria, and, while hacking can take place as easily within a cyber-Islamic environment as elsewhere, it will occur more often in border zones of actual conflict, such as Palestine and Kashmir. Because information technologies, like religious traditions, are inherently conservative, they tend to reinforce global structures and asymmetries rather than to bode a new era for civil society and transformative justice. The information technology revolution will continue to benefit diasporic Muslims more than their homeland coreligionists. The disparity between north and south, between rich and poor will be as evident, alas, among Muslims as it is among non-Muslims, at least for the foreseeable future.

See alsoGlobalization ; Networks, Muslim .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bunt, Gary R. Virtually Islamic: Computer-Mediated Communication and Cyber Islamic Environments. Lampeter: University of Wales Press. 2000.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1997.

Eickelman, Dale F., and Anderson, Jon W., eds. New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Mandaville, Peter. "Digital Islam: Information Technology and the Changing Boundaries of Religious Knowledge." International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World Newsletter, no. 2 (March 1999): 21–24.

Sardar, Ziauddin. Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Bruce B. Lawrence Miriam Cooke