Gary R. Bunt, Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority by Gary R. Bunt Sahar Khamis Gary R. Bunt, Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) The question of religious authority in Islam, commonly referred to as “who speaks for Islam,” has been receiving more attention and added visibility in recent years due to a variety of factors, including the fact that more diasporic Muslim communities are intermingling with the fabric of new societies and, thus, contributing to accelerating processes of cross-cultural inoculation and cross-intellectual fertilization. Additionally, there is the fast growing, and swiftly expanding, new realm of digitalization of religion in the age of cyberspace, which opens the door for new voices to be heard in the field of ijtihad (re-interpretation of Islamic religious scriptures). This means inviting a plethora of new views and readings of Islamic religious texts, some of which are coming from outside traditional religious establishments,1 which opens the floodgates for an amalgamation of both positive effects and negative consequences as indicated in some of the scholarly publications on this topic.2 [End Page 113] Gary R. Bunt is one of the pioneers in the field of digital Islam and has been writing extensively over the last two decades about how interactions in cyberspace have been reshaping and redefining modern Muslim societies.3 In his book, which consists of six chapters, Bunt takes us on an insightful exploration into this ever-changing realm of Islamic interactions in cyberspace with a special focus on how and why such interactions have been reshaping religious authority in the Muslim world. He unpacks the far-reaching implications and new dynamics of this phenomenon, arguing that “digital content has become a key part of expressions of contemporary Islam in many contexts, in terms of the ways in which faith, command, and control are manifest across complex systems of Muslim beliefs” (1). He pays special attention to the myriad ways cyber-Islamic environments (CIEs), a term which he coined, “has resulted in some cases in a reconfiguration of understandings of models of religious authority and the dissemination of Islamic knowledge” (4). Bunt delves deep into this evolving phenomenon, with all its hybridity, nuances, complexities, and even its paradoxes, contradictions, and contrasts, as it manifests itself across different spatial and temporal contexts. He attends particularly to the rich and vibrant period between 2009 and 2017, which witnessed a number of significant events, including the eruption of the Arab Spring movements in the Arab region in 2011; the escalation of tensions in several conflict zones, such as Palestine, Iraq, and Syria; the displacement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees; and the increased visibility and heightened impact of extremist and radicalized groups, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, to mention only a few. Bunt skillfully explains how these geopolitical shifts are accompanied, and sometimes even fueled, by parallel transitions in the realm of religious authority in the Muslim world, thanks to the increased digitalization of Islam and the prevalence of CIEs. He argues that one of the ways this phenomenon manifests itself is through the crossovers between the realms of formal and informal—as well as traditional and modern—forms of religious authority, which, in turn, open the door for a plethora of multifaceted and multilayered tensions, struggles, and push-and-pull mechanisms. In tackling these crossovers, he steers away from painting one universal image with a broad brush. He differentiates across countries ranging from Pakistan and Iran to Syria and Indonesia, as well as across generations ranging from the older and more orthodox traditional scholars to the younger, more [End Page 114] liberal, and more technologically-savvy newcomers to the field of fatwa (Islamic religious advice) online. In avoiding the temptation to generalize using a “one size fits all” description of modern Muslim societies, both online and offline, he also explores the overlaps and divergences between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, in addition to the “crossovers between religious and political discourses” (74). He explains how these “religio-political discourses” are both a cause and a consequence of a cacophony of different voices and discourses in cyberspace. In discussing...