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Danyushina Y.V.,
Doctor in Linguistics, PhD
State University of Management, Moscow, Russia
Muslim Web Discourses
Islam has an increasing
representation on the Internet, and Muslim web discourses deserve specific
linguistic (rhetoric, pragmatic, stylistic) analysis. It is a challenging task
for linguists to explore the ways in which the classic Islamic concepts are
expressed via innovative electronic interfaces and new media mechanisms. The
terms of “iMuslims”, “cyber-Islamic environment”, and “online or digital Islam”
encode particular communicative Muslim identity on the Internet and encompass
wide and various cultural-religious contexts of web communication. The
mechanism of (networked) peer-to-peer sharing and contributing offers a
valuable system adopted in many spheres of human knowledge and activities,
resulting in a collaborative intellectual, emotional and spiritual product.
Open-source information combined with rapid communication critically enhance
knowledge circulation and the sense of connection vitally important for any
philosophy or religion, causing a paradigmatic shift to grassroots levels and
thus empowering the participants and multiplying their quantities.
The language of Muslim
websites like MuslimSpace.com or IslamicTube.com displays its own specifics,
although the content is basically derived from Arabic and English sources: “On
websites in every European language, whether jihadist or pietist, ‘trendy’ jargon
blends in with an intense polemic founded on obscure religious reference to
medieval scholars whose work was written in abstruse Arabic” [Kepel 2004, 256].
Globalization and the rapid spread of new ITs have caused creolization of
Muslim web discourses making new communicative ties between “the Islam of
intellectuals” and “the Islam of the folks”, which has been noticed by
researchers of language and religion,
by journalists and media scholars. Blogging is an essential element of Muslim
web discourses. Many Islamic bloggers call themselves with the Arabic term
“mudawin” derived from the verb “d’w’n” (to record, to write down), and the new
term “mufakkira” (blog) associates with diaries and notebooks. During the
recent “IT-inspired” revolutions in Arab countries, blogs were seen and used as
a means of “promoting democracy” and a revolutionary tool. In addition to the
Arabic blogging, blogging in other Muslim languages (Farsi, Urdu, Bengali and
others) has been available since early 2000s, with the development of script
tool applications.
In
the West, Muslim web
discourses are increasingly studied, often in terms of homeland or
international security. The main object of security and intelligence agencies’
research of Islamic discourses on the Internet are so called “jihadi websites”
and the al-Qaeda related communication.
References:
1. Kepel G. The war for
Muslim minds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2004.