When Islam goes to TED: features of a postsecular storytelling on Islam in new media

Abstract

New media studies on Islam are focused on investigating the characteristics of Islamic discourse or Muslim practices in digital landscape. Since there is increasing visibility of knowledge production on Islam by non-Islamic, secular middlebrow spaces such as TED, it is significant to examine their way of communicating Islamic ideas to a global audience. By conducting a discourse analysis of TED Talks on Islam, this study explores the dominant discursive strategies of TED Talks on Islam. By doing so, this study introduces how a more empirically and context-oriented understanding of the concept of the postsecular would benefit considerably from examining the discursive features of the contemporary nexus of Islam, new media, popular culture, and storytelling. Three main discourse features are found: (1) emphasis on a Judeo-Christian framework, (2) use of awe-inducing, personalized storytelling, and (3) secular translation of Islamic themes. While this emerging online-mediated discourse on Islam informs about new storytelling strategies, the language used adopts a highly attenuated perception of Islamic themes, and a great deal of traditional Islamic interpretation is replaced with excessively individualistic assumptions that are often tailored to cater to Western secular liberal mindsets.