Abstract
This paper examines the e-religious discourse that Australian Muslims produce on the internet. The study of two online discussions on MuslimVillage forums—one of Australia’s largest online Muslim communities—about polygamy and homosexuality will illustrate how online interaction within virtual Islamic environments provides both greater and lesser fluidity to e-Islamic normative discourses associated with gender and sexuality. Muslim forums provide opportunities for members to display a variety of views and opinions: on the one hand, they allow Muslims to post views that may challenge, contest, or even transgress Islamic gender and sexuality norms, while equally allowing members, on the other hand, to reaffirm more authoritative normative Islamic views. The various voices that inhabit Australia’s Islamicyberspace’s new Muslim social and networked environments thus need to negotiate virtual normative representations.
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Notes
Not knowing if names of avatars that greatly resemble recognizable names might be those of members or not, I have altered them (to preserve anonymity).
According to the 2001 census, 10% of first generation immigrants were from Lebanon, 8% from Turkey, 3.5% from Afghanistan, 3.5% from Bosnia-Herzegovina, 3.2% from Pakistan, and 2.9% from Indonesia.
Although one should not forget that the internet can also be subject to greater scrutiny (e.g., Mandaville 2004, 50).
IslamicSydney.com is “a non-sectarian, non-profit web site run by volunteers, and relies on the support and good will of brothers and sisters in the community to survive. It was established to provide a focal point for Muslims living in Sydney, to bind the community together and be an extensive source of information for locals and visitors,” cf. http://muslimvillage.com/story.php?id=41
The same is true of other Australian Muslim forums, such as Brisbane MuslimForums.com (cf. http://forum.brisbanemuslims.com/portal.php) and AussieMuslims.com (cf. http://www.aussiemuslims.com/forums).
AussieMuslims.com forums has over 3,796 members, 25,450 threads (some in Arabic) and 278,831 posts (as of late May 2009), cf. http://www.aussiemuslims.com/forums/index.php
Forums also enable virtual forms of “socialization,” e.g., some of the most popular threads on MuslimVillage forums are: “Highlight of Today” (over 12,700 posts and 210,900 views), “What Are You Cooking?” (over 5,000 posts and 88,000 views), “Random Thoughts” (over 5,500 posts and 68,000 views), “Missing Members” (over 2,200 posts and 61,500 views), “Crescent Project” about volunteering in Sydney (over 1,100 posts and 38,200 views), “Lowlight of the Day” (over 1,300 posts and 35,000 views), and “How are U Feeling Right Now?” (over 2,900 posts and 24,600 views).
Formal confessional sites constitute one of Karaflogka’s (2006, 164–171) types of her “iconoclastic” approach to the study of e-religious discourse.
Many online forums include “Board Statistics” that indicate how many users have been active in the last 15 minutes, the number of guests, members, anonymous members and members’ pseudonyms.
For example, the heated debates and discussions on MuslimVillage forums following Amina Wadud’s infamous March 2005 leading of a mixed Friday congregational prayer in New York survive on at least three different threads that together generated almost 300 posts and more than 16,000 views from early March to the end of May 2005. These posts provide a snapshot of the hotly debated issue that ensued among participating members of MuslimVillage forums.
Under the “Forum Rules, Terms, and Conditions,” Guideline 12 stipulates that “Qoting from these forums is permitted as long as credit is given to the MuslimsVillage network,” cf. http://muslimvillage.com/forums/index.php?. Throughout the paper, no attempts have been made to correct spelling and/or grammatical errors appearing in quoted excerpts.
Bunt (2000, 71–73) discusses Muslim women in “online Islamic environments” only very briefly.
See McCutcheon (1999).
Naturally, the veracity of such an assumption remains to be demonstrated.
Alhamdulilah [Arabic] = Praise be to God.
MuslimVillage forums provide their own normative e-Islamic gender relation guidelines. Under the “Forum Rules, Terms, and Conditions,” Guideline 5 stipulates that “This forum provides a Private Messaging (PM) feature with the proviso that its use remains within Islamic guidelines. What this means is that chatting with people of the opposite sex without a valid reason is haram and sinful. Although it cannot be enforced, in no way is the PM service provided so that this type of activity can take place, nor do we endorse or encourage it,” cf. http://muslimvillage.com/forums/index.php?
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23916409-661,00.html. Keysar Trad is founder and spokesperson of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia Inc., cf. http://www.speednet.com.au/~keysar
No attempt has been made to correct spelling and/or grammar mistakes in quoted material from the forums.
Polygyny = (polygamy) with more than one female partner; while polyandry = (polygamy) with more than one male partner.
OMG = OhMyGod!, i.e., a reference to one of her earlier posts.
That is converts to Islam in the sense of returning to one’s natural religion.
MV = MuslimVillage forums.
S.A.W. = abbreviation of “salla Allah ‘alaihi wa sallama” [Arabic] = “May Allah’s peace and blessings be upon Him,” i.e., Muhammad the Prophet (also PBUH = Peace be upon Him).
Sahabah [Arabic] = Companions of the Prophet.
Khair [Arabic] = good or merit.
Kufur [Arabic] = here, most probably “unbelievers,” i.e., kuffar [Arabic].
Troll = someone who seeks to disrupt normal online discussion by posting messages that are controversial, irrelevant or off-topic with the intention of provoking other members into emotional responses.
Nikkah [Arabic] = marriage (contract).
http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1&ID=1885&CATE=10. The site is provided and maintained by SunniPath Foundation, a “non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the state of New Jersey” in the US, cf. http://www.sunnipathfoundation.org
Some jurists go so far as to condemn to death unrepentant male homosexuals.
LOL = Laughing Out Loud.
Shirk [Arabic] = associating something with God, i.e., holding un-Islamic beliefs that undermine God’s absolute unicity.
As opposed to Mandaville’s (2002, 62) “globalizing the local.”
See my forthcoming “Muslim Women’s Scholarship and the New Gender Jihad,” forthcoming in Women and Islam, edited by Zayn Kassam (Women and Religion in the World Series; Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, ABC-CLIO), in which I use the idea of diasporic third space to try to explain the emergence of a phenomenon of Muslim women scholar-activists in the West.
Horrigan labels them “virtual third spaces.”
For the full report, based on 22 different U.S. based case studies with 800 youth and young adults interviewed (5,000 h of online observations), cf. http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/report
The workshop was sponsored by the Humanities Council, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Center for the Study of Religion (CSR), the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, the Department of Religion, and the Program in Near Eastern Studies.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank both the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, and its director, Professor Graeme Turner, for the Faculty Visiting Fellowship (fall 2007) I received for the project “Prescription, Construction, and Contestation of Selves, Identities, and Representations of Muslim Women in Cyberspace” and Dr. Juliane Hammer, Visiting Professor at Princeton University who, together with Professor Cemil Aydın (also Visiting Professor at Princeton University), organized a very successful 2 day workshop entitled “Muslims and Media: Representation, Discourse, and Participation,” held at Princeton University (USA), May 1–2, 2008; they and the other participants of the workshop were most forthcoming with encouragements and feedback.Footnote 41 I would also like to thank the Department of Religious Studies of Seoul National University, for their invitation to present part of this research at a departmental seminar on October 2, 2008, and which I subsequently presented at a seminar for the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, October 21, 2008. Last but not least, I need to thank heartily anonymous reviewers whose suggestions for improving this paper have been invaluable.