The Digital Turn in the Humanities:
Islam in Cyberspace and Im/possibilities of Re/Shaping Religious Authority
Dr. Mimoune Daoudi
Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Department of English – Discourse, Society, and Creativity Research Laboratory
Faculty of Humanities – University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fes, Morocco
Abstract
The significant digital shift throughout the human sciences has increased academia’s deep interest in the humanities in general and digital humanities in particular. In fact, Digital humanities incorporate key insights from Religion, literature, history, media and communications, computer sciences and information studies and combine these different disciplines into new frameworks.The speedy rise of digital technologies has significantly altered the way religious knowledge is communicated and consumed. Therefore, the advent of these new technologies has triggered new challenges and paradigms to religious authority in the Muslim world. It has also introduced a new paradigm to the practice of religious instructions in a way that led to the delocalisation and deconstruction of Islamic authority. This paper explores the extent to which cyberspace has shaped Islamic discourse through the analysis of newly-born preachers in the new media platforms. It adopts a qualitative method to analyse some case studies from Moroccan digital platforms. The informal language and style, and the extensive use of modern media tools have become a new paradigm where these voices can contest the established, and book-oriented Muslim religious authority represented by the Ulama[1]. The paper seeks to examine not only the style of these preachers, but also their goals, their audience, the topics they address, and their influences.
[1] Ulama is an arabic word for institutionalised people of religious knowledge in the Muslim world.
Link to read and download the research:
https://iesacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/The-Digital-Turn-in-the-Humanities.pdf