Book Review | Preaching Islamic Renewal: Religious Authority and Media in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

The impacts of new media have long fascinated scholars of contemporary Muslim societies. Beginning from the premise that new media configurations portend the “fragmentation” of religious authority (Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Anderson 2003), such works often display a curious mix of euphoria and anxiety about the “democratizing” potential of new media; these works also offer opportunities for circulating “radical” ideologies. Few studies, however, offer extended engagement with one particular individual, and when they do, they often gravitate toward the most extreme examples. The prevalence of satellite television has furthermore encouraged scholarly focus on vanguard trends like Salafism (Field and Hamam 2009) or the rise of lay religious authorities (Moll 2010), while those scholars who fuse more “traditional” forms of Islamic discourse with new media technologies (sometimes toiling quietly under nation-state sanction) are generally ignored. As a result, the continuities that hold discursive traditions like Islam together are elided, and the supposed “rupture” that media technologies inflict on it becomes over-amplified.