iMuslims: rewiring the house of Islam

Daniel Martin Varisco, Contemporary Islam, DOI 10.1007/s11562-010-0115-x

Gary R. Bunt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 358pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-5966-7

Keywords : Cyberspace, Islam online, Jihad . Islamic rituals . Iraq . Palestine

‘The Prophet Muhammad stated: “Seek knowledge even as far as China.” The Internet could be seen as an extension of that quest”.’ (p. 26)

There is probably no scholar who has logged and blogged more hours searching websites by and about Muslims than Gary R. Bunt, a senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Wales. His latest book expands on two earlier studies, the pioneering Virtually Islamic (2000) and follow up Islam in the digital age: e-jihad, online fatwas amd cyber Islamic environments (2003). It is not surprising that in the early days of his online research Bunt was responsible for a meltdown of his university server due to the amount of Islam-related Internet traffic arriving in his e-mail account (p. 82). iMuslims is a study that not only locates Islam in cyberpace, but provides a rich documentation of websites, both ongoing and those which have disappeared. The present volume reintroduces the reader to his earlier concept of cyber-Islamic environments (CIE), surveys previous research, probes the wide range of sites and Muslim perspectives online, examines the trajectories of Islamic sacred content in cyberspace, and focuses on Muslim blogging and what he terms ‘digital jihadi’ websites, especially for the recent war in Iraq and the Palestinian issue.

As a scholar who studies Islam rather than a proponent for any particular Islamic worldview, Bunt proposes his ‘cyber-Islamic environment’ as an ‘umbrella term’ (p. 1), the diverse dimensions of which he illustrates in a massive chart (pp. 46–47) that interrelates sacred sources, the reading environment, translation issues, symbolism, content, players, technologies and media types, surfer profiles and globalization issues. He even encourages readers to provide their own amendments and additions to this chart via a wiki format on his main website (virtuallyislamic.com). Although the focus is primarily on Sunni, or what appear to be Sunni, sites, Bunt applies the term “Islamic” in the widest possible sense. One of the facets of CIE is that the classical notion of one idealized ummah no longer holds: ‘in fact there are numerous parallel ummah frameworks operating in cyberspace, reflecting diverse notions of the concept of community’ (p. 31).

A primary focus of Bunt’s research is the technological influence of the medium, cyberspace both as a space and increasingly as an online way of life and ‘second life’, on Muslims and representation of Islam. A distinction can be made between ‘online religion’ which can radically alter traditional modes of being Muslim, and ‘religion online,’ which may be little more than archiving materials. Bunt notes that some Muslims now explain their worldview in terms of specific websites rather than a local mosque or offline religious affiliation. One example of this is the following of Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a transplanted Egyptian preacher who has a regular presence on the satellite channel al-Jazeera and helped found the successful Islamic web portal Islam Online in 1997, in addition to having his own well-visited personal website. Here the medium greatly increases access to a specific charismatic individual, not unlike the case with American televanglists, but at the other extreme there is
now a Muslim avatar ummah in Second Life. Bunt mentions a Ramadan tent sponsored on Second Life in 2007 by Islam Online, but which saw harassment of Muslim female avatars by two non-Muslim males. Bias crimes are thus not limited to the real offline world, as the history of hacking illustrates only too well.

As in real life, Muslims interact in cyberspace with multiple identities. Although the earliest Muslim websites tended to be personal webpages, mainstream organizations like al-Azhar have in recent years begun to utilize the web in sophisticated ways. One can now navigate through cyberspace in what might be termed an Islamic ‘cloud.’ In addition to websites operated by Islamic organizations, there are now clones of most of the major social networking sites, including MuslimSpace (founded in 2006 by an Egyptian based in Finland), IslamicTorrents (a rival to YouTube), Muslimr (paralleling flickr), and a variety of Muslim dating
sites. There is even an OpenIslampedia variant of Wikipedia. One of the problems in researching CIEs, especially when documenting this in publications that take more than a year to get into print, is the rapidly evolving context in which software changes and websites appear and disappear. Thus, the data provided on online access in Muslim countries were already 3–4 years old when the book appeared.