International Workshop: Islam online – offline – and beyond: Digital media, Islamic knowledge and authority in the West
This workshop investigates how digital media are used in the production of authoritative Islamic knowledge in the West. It refers to a long tradition of research and debate about interrelations between new media and authority structures in Islamic contexts.
Publications in this field are diverse in terms of their questions and methods as well as the scope of investigation and the claims put forward and it behooves us to briefly situate this workshop in relation to them.
Peter Mandaville has remarked that some studies are only interested in identifying “reconfigurations in the modalities of Islamic authority”, whereas others also seek to identify “the underlying forces that shape and animate constructions and contestations of authority” (Mandaville 2007, 103). To rephrase this somewhat, studies in this field differ from each other in how much space is given to a number of fundamental issues, such as the nature of media and religion, the features of the digital age, the functioning of public spheres, and so forth. While this set of questions is highly important, we want to emphasize that our knowledge of digital media production in Western Islamic contexts remains lacunary and is regularly simply not adequate to theorization.
Mindful of these limitations and constraints, we are soliciting papers and project presentations that investigate (1) how actors are using specific digital media platforms and tools in the production of Islamic knowledge in Western contexts and (2) how they intervene in relational processes of authorization.
Note that the reference to digital media does not presuppose a clear online/offline-distinction in the characterization of actors. Rather, as the workshop title indicates (“Islam offline – online – and beyond”), a central question to be discussed concerns the relation between “online” and “offline” discourses and how helpful the online/offline binary is in a given case. In order to better cover this question, the program will also include a number of presentations about “offline” actors, notably imams.
Date: 19.-20.09.2024
Venue: Nägelsbachstraße 25, Room 3.101, 91054 Erlangen
Contact: joern.thielmann@fau.de or julietta.cheliotis@fau.de
Here you find the programme.