Abstract
Drawing on qualitative interviews with 278 self-identified Muslims from across Canada, this article examines how Muslim Canadians engage with sources of religious authority online. We focus on how participants assess the authoritativeness of websites, which figures they follow, and whether the Canadian context factors into how they interpret Islam-related material online. We both agree and disagree with scholarship that characterizes the Internet as democratizing the traditions of Islam (Bunt, 2018; Eickelman & Anderson, 2003; Mandaville in Theory, Culture & Society, 24:101–115, 2007; Robinson in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19:339–354, 2009; Sands in Contemporary Islam 4:139–155, 2010), and with who see it as unchanging (Berkey, 2016). Our interlocutors suggest that the online context fosters a notable and visible bi-directionality of authority; moreover, content remains shaped by view counts and algorithms. Lastly, despite the online nature of the World Wide Web, the materiality, textuality, and visual markers of the Qur’an remain vital for our interlocutors.
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The interview schedule can be located at: https://musulmanscanadiensenligne.uqam.ca/upload/files/Interview_schedule_(en)_(2016.06.14).pdf.
Notes
Heidi Campbell (2005:313) evokes Barzilai and Barzilai-Nahon’s (2005) concept of the Internet as cultured technology, and explains that “the Internet is a technology that frames these cultural spaces through complex social and value-construction processes.” In other words, the Internet is not neutral.
Not everyone agrees with this position. Robinson (2009:346-347) argues that growing literacy and access to the Qur’an in Indigenous languages, resulting from nineteenth and twentieth-century European colonization of Muslim lands, is a major cause of the shifting nature of Islamic authority, much more than the Internet. Mandaville (2007:102, 107) similarly stresses that globalization has bolstered the pluralization and decentralization of knowledge for Muslims. Both scholars accentuate socio-historical factors that do not include the Internet to explain the continued need for traditional Islamic authority figures.
The epistemic valence of authoritative texts among our participants comprises the Qur’an, hadith, scholarly commentaries, and fatwas.
The Muslims Online in Canada project was based at the University of Québec at Montréal (PI, Roxane Marcotte), with co-investigators at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador (Selby), the University of Cape Breton (Rubina Ramji; see Ramji, 2014) and the University of Regina (Brenda Anderson). These universities, in Québec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, served as launching points for our recruitment across Canada. We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of this project. All participants’ names and identifiers have been anonymized.
The full interview schedule is available on the project website (Marcotte et al., 2014).
Neither author conducted nor transcribed interviews for this project. The first author supervised six graduate students through Memorial University of NL (Liam Harvey-Cromwell, Cory Funk, Aizaz Afridi, Mehmet Ali Basak, and Maruf Dewan) who conducted interviews with participants in Winnipeg, Mississauga, Halifax and St. John’s. The second author was a graduate student who worked as a research assistant after the completion of the interviews and assisted with coding, analyzing, and theorizing the data.
In its telephone survey of 600 self-identified adult Muslims in Canada, the Environics Institute (2016:60-62) found that 64% of its sample identified as Sunni, 8% as Shi’a, 4% as Ahmadi, 3% as “just Muslim/I follow the Prophet,” 2% as other, and 18% did not answer or refused to answer. Our sample therefore appears to have a greater number of Sunnis (64%) and “Just Muslims” (23%, or 87% of our total sample) than the national Environics study. 8% of our sample self-identified as Shi’a, 2.9% as Ismaili and 1% (or 3 participants) as Ahmadi.
Zaman (2008:466) suggests that as many as 80% of American Muslims do not attend mosques regularly.
56% of our participants self-identified as male and 44% as female; no participants identified outside the gender binary. Only one participant identified as a refugee. Our sample is also more highly educated and more employed than data from Environics and Statistics Canada. While 2011 Statistics Canada data suggest that Muslims in Canada have the highest levels of unemployment of any religious group in the country, at 13.9%, which is substantially higher than the non-Muslim rate at 7.8% (see Hamdani, 2015: 38), in our sample, only 4% of participants were unemployed. Statistics Canada notes that 43.7% of the Muslim population between 25-64 held a university degree (compared to 25.8% of the non-Muslim population; see Hamdani, 2015: 38), where our sample again revealed far higher rates. Again, these discrepancies likely reflect our recruitment stemming from universities.
We define theology as an emphasis on key Islamic texts such as the Qur’an, hadith, and tafseer, as well as very broadly all that is considered sacred. Broadly speaking, one can read theology as referring to Islamic Sciences. In addition to understanding theology as discourse concerned with the essential nature of the divine, we also take theology, here Islamic, to encompass the nuanced ways in which “text” is performed in the lives of believers, extending beyond the rigid boundaries of traditionally authorized texts (see Campbell, 2010: 270). The pervasiveness of theology in the daily lives of our interlocutors—be it through their spiritual, gastronomic, sexual, soteriological, or intellectual identities—speaks to its mediatory capacity (see Sayeed, 2020 for his discussion of Islamic theology in conversation with religious authority online). Our younger participants especially described consulting the Internet for a wide range of concerns, which we see as capturing the pervasiveness of theology in their lives (see Selby, 2016 for examples of online theologically framed searches related to marriage).
Nouman Ali Khan is a Pakistani-American Islamic speaker and Arabic instructor who founded the Bayyinah Institute for Arabic and Qur’anic Studies in 2005 (see: https://bayyinah.com/index.html).
Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi was born in Houston, TX and completed a BSc in Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston, followed by a BA and MA from the Islamic University of Madinah, before completing a PhD in Islamic Studies from Yale University. He is currently Dean of The Islamic Seminary of America.
Imam Omar Suleiman is the founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research (see: https://yaqeeninstitute.org/), and an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Southern Methodist University.
Yasmin Mogahed is an American Islamic educator and motivational speaker. She is the first female instructor at US-based Al-Maghrib Institute. She is known for her ability to relate Qur’anic and prophetic stories to the everyday struggles of Muslims.
Imam Suhaib Webb is an American Muslim activist and speaker. He is a convert and a graduate of Al-Azhar University, Cairo. At the time of writing Webb served as the Imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury, MA.
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, an American Muslim convert, is a proponent of classical learning in Islam and has promoted Islamic sciences and classical teaching methodologies. He holds a PhD in North and West African intellectual history from the Department of Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, CA. He is the co-founder of Zaytuna College, North America’s first Muslim liberal arts college.
Since the time of our interviews, Nouman Ali Khan and Tariq Ramadan had been accused of sexual assault and rape (Allam, 2017). Their authority has thus been called into question. Oxford University placed Ramadan on leave in 2017 (Adams & Chrisafis, 2017). At the time of writing, Ramadan was cleared of charges in Switzerland, however, a decision remains pending in France.
At the time of writing, the only female resident scholar at al-Maghrib is Farhat Hashmi's daughter, Taimiyyah Zubair.
Due to the limited space and scope of this article we have not elaborated on the broader issues of patriarchy and gender disparities in Islamic religious authorities (see: Basarudin, 2016).
Hashmi is the founder of the Al-Huda Institute (see: alhudaonline.org). After pursuing her Master’s degree in Arabic language in Pakistan, Hashmi pursued a doctorate in Hadith Sciences from University of Glasgow and immigrated to Canada in 2005 (the Al Huda Institute opened in Mississauga, Ontario in 2001). She became known for online engagement of women around the world through her website (www.farhathashmi.com) and a YouTube channel (Dr. Farhat Hashmi Official, with 263k subscribers). In addition to facilitating Muslim women’s ability to interpret canonical texts, the Al-Huda has also been at the forefront of Islamic training for female teachers and social workers (Mushtaq, 2010). Analyzing the nature of her authority, Mushtaq (2010: 203) argues that Hashmi’s popularity lies less in her “static personal attributes”' and more in “her organizational innovations” (see Hasan, 2021; Mushtaq, 2010).
Ahmed Deedat, a South African of East Indian background, was Muslim missionary, orator, and a scholar of comparative religion. Although without formal training, he was known internationally for his ability to engage with Christian evangelical pastors in inter-religious debates. Deedat’s ability to quote the Bible and Qur’an by chapter and verse was a central source of his charisma. Deedat’s work inspired Zakir Naik, also on our list, to give up his medical profession.
Trained as a medical doctor, Zakir Abdul Karim Naik is a popular Indian Islamic televangelist and public orator. He is the founder and president of the Islamic Research Foundation and the Peace TV Network. He is currently based in Malaysia. Naik gained popularity due to his ability to cite different religious scriptures by memory.
Ismail Ibn Musa Menk, a Zimbabwean scholar of East Indian origin, studied at the Islamic University of Medina and holds a Doctorate of Social Guidance from Aldersgate University (see https://muftimenk.com/). Menk is a popular figure among youths and is known for his passionate, humour-filled motivational talks.
We did not collect data on how participants self-defined in terms of race, so we are not able to calculate the number of our participants who identified as Black or otherwise.
None of the 229 individuals named as sources of authority self-identify outside of the male/female binary. Despite the transnational nature of many of these individuals, we list their primary location at the time of the interview. For example, we coded Tariq Ramadan as European.
In analyzing Amina Wadud’s critique of Arabic speaking male non-American-born Muslims’ tendency to assume the role of authority, Albarghouthi (2011:32) concludes that fluency in Arabic is the “most portable and easily discernible marker of authority.”
Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (b. 1948) is an American Muslim convert, Islamic theologian, author, and educator. He received his doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Dr. Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988). Usama Canon (d. 2021) was a US-based Muslim convert, educator, preacher, and founder of Ta’leef Collective.
Ijtihād literally means “endeavour” or “self-exertion.” Semantically, it is opposite to taqlīd, passive acceptance of legal rulings without enquiring into its evidential basis (see Weiss, 1978).
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A Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (PI, Roxanne Marcotte, University of Quebec at Montreal), 2013–2019.
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Selby: 60%
Sayeed: 40%
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Ethics approvals for interviews were granted from the University of Québec at Montreal (home institution of the Principal Investigator, Dr. Roxanne Marcotte) and Memorial University of NL.
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Selby, J.A., Sayeed, R. Religious authorities in the digital age: the case of Muslims in Canada. Cont Islam 17, 467–488 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-023-00536-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-023-00536-7