Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas, and Cyber Islamic Environments

Two reviews of Gary Bunt’s book Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas, and Cyber Islamic Environments. One by Alan Sondheim and one by Robert Tynes

For people who don’t know it already, Gary Bunt’s Blog is an important source of information for my blog.

Read the reviews here:
Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas, and Cyber Islamic Environments

Author: Gary R. Bunt
Publisher: London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2003
Review Published: May 2005

REVIEW 1: Alan Sondheim

Gary Bunt’s Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas, and Cyber Islamic Environments is a book of innumerable subtexts — summaries of work already done, analyses of the Net in general and Net communities in particular, presentations of difficult issues in Islamic studies, analyses of online (“cyber”) Islamic resources, and a terrific resource for further work. The author writes from the viewpoint of an outsider, a researcher whose subject to some extent escapes him — the number of Islamic online sites is growing rapidly; the users of such sites are most often anonymous; the sites are often online for only a short period of time; many sites may be below the radar (unknown, “private”) of any researcher; sites may be in languages unknown to the researcher; and so forth. The outsider position is clear throughout the book; one feels a sense of peering into a complex web of fascinating worlds and debates, always from and within an “Other.” Because issues of jihad, e-jihad, hacking, and 9-11 are discussed, there is a sense of urgency and wariness in carrying out the research: the Other is beyond research, almost literally beyond the Pale. Islam in the Digital Age is a complex work, with several interesting elements.

First, there are wide-ranging descriptions of sites from a number of communities — Sunni, Shi’a, even Druze — that offer fatwas and other information on everything from suicide and credit cards to questions of religious belief and ideology. Examples are given throughout the book. Many of the sites are multi-media, and include spoken word and music, images of pilgrimage, even videos and flash pieces. Some of them have extensive question and answer sections, as well as chats; in fact, the overall impression one gets is that of both community and communality — the sites are for and of believers positioned according to particular tenets within Islam as a whole. Many sites reference and link to each other; there is, for example, a Jihad Webring, and almost all sites have extensive lists of other online resources.

The book attempts to make sense of all of this material through various classifications. The sites themselves range across and through the classifications, just as the Net itself is impossible to categorize. Bunt avoids rigidity here, which is to our benefit; there are no hard and fast categories. The chapter titles indicate his approach:

1. Introduction
2. ‘The Digital Sword’? and Defining ‘E-Jihad’
3. Hactivism, Hacking and Cracking in the Name of Islam
4. Cyber Islamic Reactions to 9-11: Mujahideen in Cyberspace
5. Cyber Islamic Reactions to 9-11: The ‘Inter’fada’ and Global E-Jihad
6. Cyber Islamic Reactions to 9-11: Jihad for Peace
7. Islamic Decision-Making and Advice Online
8. Sunni Religious Authority on the Internet I: Muslim Majority Contexts
9. Sunni Religious Authority on the Internet II: Muslim Minority
10. The Online Mujtahid: Islamic Diversity and Authority Online
11. Islam in the Digital Age

Clearly “Majority” and “Minority” are roughly demographically positioned at best, and what constitutes fatwa in relation to advice can be difficult to understand. Bunt is very much aware of this. The bias of the book, though to a lesser extent than it appears from the chapter headings, is towards analyses of online jihad and 9-11; both tend towards the topical, the immediacy of news events. The book was written at most two years after 9-11, and there are many references to Bin Laden and the Taliban, but these don’t obscure the greater horizon of the work — Islam online, Cyber Islam.

Cyber Islam is itself problematic; it involves representations of religion, religious states, religious judgments, and religious community, in an arena in which virtuality is paramount. Is the Qur’an online the same as the book itself? Are images of hajj, for example, permissible, given the injunctions concerning pictorial representation? What are the human manifestations of Allah in cyberspace?

What is jihad? What is e-jihad? Bunt makes an important distinction between two types of jihad — one which is internal, one external — one dealing with the Other, and one dealing with oneself: “If the ‘spiritual striving’ aspects of jihad can be located within online fatwas, then the more militaristic or combative aspects as expressed online can be located in what can be labeled ‘e-jihad’ and hacking/cracking” (34). I think that Bunt emphasizes the former, which is all to the good, given the Islamic stereotypes propagated in other non-Islamic media; the book presents, above all, the richness of Islamic thought and culture in general.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers of sites, cultures, decrees, and communities that really characterize Islam online. Fortunately, Bunt responds brilliantly to this. For the book works best, I think, as a handbook: the extensive netography of internet sites is invaluable, as is the more traditional bibliography with additional URLs. I found myself guided by Bunt’s site descriptions: I’d go to the URL, and then veer to create my own path of linked sites. The book is augmented by a very useful companion site called VirtuallyIslamic.com. In other words, VirtuallyIslamic.com extends and returns the book itself to cyberspace; it keeps the work current and relevant.

A second element of Islam in the Digital Age is Bunt’s treatment of Otherness as previously mentioned. As with any monotheism based on a corpus of approved texts and their inerrancy, there is almost always the presence of a theological Absolute. For example, in order to comprehend Kabbalah, one must read the Zohar, and read it in a particular fashion. The same is true for Islam; writing from the outside can only result in a partial reading (or reading from the outside can only result in a partial writing); a devout Muslim would have very a different take on the subject matter. The split is great and unknowable. For example, even given the debates described in Bunt’s work, I have no idea what the habits and habitus of the Net would be for a follower of, say, Ayatullah Khamene’i. Bunt himself writes of the difficulty of interviewing practitioners and readers of different websites who often depend on anonymity and who most likely would find a non-Islamic researcher to be an intrusion. There are what one might consider “guard qualifiers” throughout the book — statements on the limitations of the research, the need for further research, and perhaps the impossibility of further research in certain directions.

In other words, from the (various ideologies of the) Absolute, what are the values and uses of the Other? From within, what of the without? These divisions are fundamental, as writers from Mary Douglas (1970) to Kristeva (1982) have pointed out, and it seems to me (a “guard” qualifier itself) that they represent an impossibility or aporia in relation to Islam and Cyber Islamic research. Because of this, Islam in the Digital Age itself is a call for experience — for experiencing the websites, for reading beyond and through the book, for an understanding that borders, and must border, on empathy.

A third element is the style of Bunt’s work, which dramatically changes from academically-driven prose to exciting description. I found parts of the book somewhat dry and wordy — those dealing with the notion of cyberspace, with information on hacking and the variety of sites encountered, with definitions of all sorts, with speculations on Net community in general, and so forth. This material is drawn out and occasionally repetitive. It may be that I’m either not sufficiently academic, and/or too familiar with the Net and Net issues in general; in any case, I have difficulties with this element. On the other hand, Bunt seems to “get going” when he describes the sites themselves; it’s as if the very texture of the book changes. Because of the vastness of the subject, it doesn’t seem as if there’s an overarching thesis that is elucidated, only areas of research loosely defined and calls for further analyses.

This is a good thing. Certainly Bunt makes the case that online Islam responded to 9-11 pro-actively and thoughtfully, from a variety of viewpoints. His presentation of jihad reminded me of a combination of religious drives and the Freudian id — there is a huge area for research here. To the extent that Islam is externally stereotyped as warlike and faceless, as well as technologically primitive, Islam in the Digital Age provides an absolutely necessary corrective. To the extent that jihad is considered primarily murderous, the book describes a phenomenology of jihad that intelligently contradicts this.

The best element of all in the work is the presentation and analysis of material from a great number of sites. This ranges from fatwa through exhortations. For example, a page on the Neda al-Quds site states:

We want this website to be a bond joining us together and eliminating many of the damages inflicted by our enemy, at the head of which is disuniting us as a nation. We want this website to be a book or an encyclopedia from and for our nation, to the whole world. We want this website to be a website for freedom of our people and friends. (99)

Bunt goes on to say:

The effectiveness of this mission statement is open to question. However, given the resources that have been integrated into the site, it is clear that it is seen as part of an overall strategy of dissemination, primarily for Arabic-speaking supporters, of the “Islamic jihad” message. At the time of writing, the site also contained a substantial amount of online dialogue between supporters in the chatroom, the majority from “anonymous” Hotmail addresses; it would be interesting to determine whether this dialogue is from a dedicated core of users or from a broad range of users. The anonymity of the e-mail accounts, and the unlikelihood that users would respond to questions from researchers, leave this an open question at present. (99)

Although this is indicative of the aporia described above, there are passages that speak volumes. For example, from the Fatwa-Online website, Bunt gives a selection of topics found in the New Muslims section:

1. ‘Circumcision is obligatory so long as it does not create an aversion to Islaam.’
2. ‘Changing one’s name after embracing Islaam.’
3. ‘When a disbeliever accepts Islaam during the daytime in Ramadhaan.’
4. ‘The ruling concerning the salaah of one whose clothes are polluted by pork, lard, etc.’
5. ‘Does a new Muslim have to separate form his wife?’
6. ‘A non-Muslim touching a translation of the Qur’aan.’
7. ‘The uncleanliness of a disbeliever is of an abstract nature.’

and so forth.

For example, Bunt quotes a question “‘I am living in Jordan in a place where most of the residents are Christian brothers. We eat and drink together. Is my salaah [prayer] invalid? Is my living among them impermissible?'” (144).

Bunt continues: “The response condemns the notion of ‘Christian brothers’: “There can be no brotherhood between a believer and a disbeliever ever, rather it is mandatory for a believer not to take a disbeliever as a walee [friend]” (144-145).

Bunt goes on to analyze other fatwas from the site, as well as the site itself.

Such material is found throughout Islam in the Digital Age. I think (now perhaps I’m sounding like a high-school book-report) this book should be read by just about anyone who is online, and concerned with contemporary social, political, or religious issues. I found myself constantly coming up against my own ignorance — not only of online Islam, but of Islam in general. The more I read this book, and other books, the more I recognize my own ignorance in an area of vital importance — not only because of 9-11 and the ongoing mess in the “Middle East” — but also because of the very richness of an enormous group of cultures and histories that have remained unknown for far too long for many of the non-Islams in the “West.” I recommend this book, and of course, along with it the Qur’an itself, as well as the many commentaries available on subjects ranging from the Companions of Mohammed to jinns. Cyberspace itself (my “real” home) is increasingly replete with unknown territories, divisions, and boundaries, all fluid, just as online time and space are fluid. The mix is inexhaustible.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Penguin, 1970.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia, 1982.

Alan Sondheim:
Alan Sondheim’s books include the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988), .echo (alt-X digital arts, 2001), Vel (Blazevox, 2004-5), Sophia (Writers Forum, 2004) and The Wayward (Salt, 2004), as well as numerous other chapbooks, ebooks, and articles. Sondheim has long been associated with the Trace online writing community, and was second virtual-writer-in-residence. His video and filmwork have been widely shown. Sondheim co-moderates several email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture and Wryting. Since 1/94, he has been working on an “Internet Text,” a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality.

Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fatwas, and Cyber Islamic Environments

Author: Gary R. Bunt
Publisher: London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2003
Review Published: May 2005

REVIEW 2: Robert Tynes

“E-jihad! Slash, swipe, and stick it to code made by those who are not of the faith of Islam, those who don’t support the Palestinian cause!” That is the battle cry for some online Muslims who raise their digital sword whilst battling in cyberspace.

Okay, so maybe it’s not as dramatic as it sounds, maybe not all Muslims are charging like a digital light brigade across the Internet. There are, after all, many more facets to the Cyber Islamic Environment, a sizeable number of which are not about war waging activities. In Islam in the Digital Age: E-jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environments, Gary R. Bunt explores many of these religious online expressions, showing how Muslims are incorporating the Internet [1] as a modern tool, one that can help them submit to the will of Allah.

Bunt has made great headway here for both religious and Internet studies by exploring and cataloguing Muslim presence online. This is the second book of Bunt�s that delves into the world of Allah in cyberspace. According to Bunt, it is an attempt to go deeper into some of the issues first touched upon in his earlier work from 2000 titled Virtually Islamic: Computer-mediated Communication and Cyber Islamic Environments.

Bunt is adept at showing how the Internet has become a networking tool for Muslims and Islamic organizations, a strategy for getting around censorship, and a means of extending an audience for several Imams. Hence, Islam in the Digital Age does indeed provide some answers to one of the questions posed by the Series Editors of Critical Studies in Islam (of which Bunt’s book is a part of), that is: How are Muslims rethinking and reformulating Islam and shaping and reshaping the global agendas and discourses? Yet, as Bunt acknowledges, his work only begins to reveal the depth of Islam in cyberspace.

The major concepts that guide Bunt’s research are e-jihads and online fatwas. Bunt states that these are the “two areas that have seen a most significant integration of electronic activity with religion” (3). Both of these concepts are developed from the offline notion of jihad.

In Chapter Two, “‘The Digital Sword’? and Defining ‘E-Jihad,'” Bunt provides an excellent explanation and explication of jihad. He defines the term as the “‘striving’ to attain an Islamic objective” (28). There are two aspects to jihad: greater and lesser. Greater jihad concerns the “spiritual and religious striving on a path towards — and/or in the name of — God” (27). It is a peaceful quest for inner perfection, says Bunt, modeled after the actions and conduct of the Prophet Mohammed. In cyberspace, much of the knowledge about and guidance for greater jihad can be gleaned from online fatwas — those “‘authoritative’ statements or declarations” (129) which are issued by imams and ayatollah. On the other end of the spectrum stands the lesser jihad, which is the more publicized, Western take on Islam. Lesser jihad is “‘holy war,’ military action sanctioned (purportedly or otherwise) in the name of God” (27). When lesser jihad enters cyberspace, Bunt calls it e-jihad. In its most aggressive form, e-jihad is “a digital sword striking in a number of different ways at a broad selection of targets” (26). This includes such actions as hacking, cracking, and service disruption in the name of Islam. Milder forms of e-jihad include activism and campaigning.

The analysis in Islam in the Digital Age is most clear when discussing and presenting examples of greater jihad when manifest in cyberspace. This is what Bunt calls online fatwas. Chapters 7-10 examine how offline opinions or edicts from Islamic authorities (i.e. conventional fatwas) transform when channeled through a website to become online fatwas. At issue is how new media problematizes Muslim decision-making, and the legitimacy of authority. Bunt provides numerous websites from Sunni majority and minority contexts and several instances of Shi’a and Sufi presence on the web. This includes: Islam Q & A (www.islam-qa.com), Fatwa Online (www.fatwa-online.com), Ask-Imam.com (www.islam.tc/ask-imam), The Fiqh Council of North America (www.fiqhcouncil.org), Shiachat.com (www.shiachat.com), Ali Khamene’i (naqshbandi.org), and Zahuri Sufi Web Site (www.zahuri.dircon.co.uk). [2]

Combined, these sites serve several purposes, such as to teach Islamic doctrine and/or Arabic; to answer direct questions about issues including marriage, worship, women�s issues, and Internet use; and, to help solve soul and personal problems. Here is a sampling of posts from a section of Islam-Online (www.islamonline.net):

* “Want to marry a Muslim brother but his family won’t let me as I am a white revert.”

* “Dad was into drugs and I never knew him, but his death has left me in pain.”

* “Pregnant and stressed out over husband visiting pornographic sites on the Internet.”

* “Homosexual tendencies are hurting me and my marriage, are there Muslim counselors?”

* “Slept with a woman for the first time, and now I am so sad and depressed.”

And here is a reply to a question posted on the Pakistan Link website (www.pakistanlink.com):

“Q: I am writing you regarding a situation at our mosque. Recently the executive committee decided to stop women from attending the mosque.

What I want to know is, what does the Shari’ah say about this? As far as I know Islam treats both men and women equally.

A: The Prophet — peace be upon him — very clearly told men not to exclude women from the mosques . . . In America especially women go everywhere. They are in the markets, in malls, in restaurants, in offices. It is ironic that some men allow them to go to all the places of temptation but they want to stop them from coming to the places where they can pray to their Lord and learn about their faith. Please ask your executive committee to change this un-Islamic decision.”

Examples such as these (from pp. 149-150, and then p. 175), followed by Bunt’s analysis, are some of the best offerings from Islam in the Digital Age. They provide a deeper look into the discourse being constructed by Muslims in cyberspace. They show us the obvious: Muslims, like others, are complex people: They stress over sex and issues of sexuality, they too have “family problems,” and they too have noticed pornography on the web. Bunt shows how Islamic authority is being accessed in cyberspace and how in some cases offline authorities are being usurped by virtual imams.

The more confrontational or riling findings in Islam in the Digital Age are presented in Chapters 2-6, in which Bunt discusses e-jihad, Islamic hacking, and the post-911 Cyber Islamic Environment. Within these chapters lie many of the stereotypes, prejudices, and fears of Western policymakers. Bunt discusses how cyber entities such as the Muslim Hackers Club (MHC), the Pakistani Hackerz, and Doctor Nuker are hacking away from a Muslim perspective. MHC members have purportedly been involved in “pro-Palestinian activities of ‘cyber-war'” (39). Doktor Nuker “compromised the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) website, and obtained its e-mailing list of 3,500 names, together with another list containing about 700 credit card account details of AIPAC donors, which were published online” (50). And GFORCE “succeeded in hacking US government agencies, military and other targets via Taiwan-based platforms” (53).

At issue, though, is whether or not actions by these groups as well as the others mentioned by Bunt can be categorized as purely Islamic-centered e-jihadi. In some instances, the evidence does suggest an aggressive Islamic e-jihad. And many online entities freely declare that they are performing a militaristic jihad via the Internet. But in other cases, it is difficult to untangle religious-based motives from politically-based motives, from personal recognition-based motives. This makes the concept of e-jihad more problematic, a point that Bunt concedes.

What is more readily apparent from Bunt’s research concerning lesser jihad is that offline groups are using websites to inform about and promote militancy. Jihad Online (www.jihad-online.net, but now offline) posted ‘memorial pages’ for suicide bombers and covered a “‘martyrdom operation’ that killed over 20 Israelis on a bus” (98). This type of extension from offline to cyberspace is notable and well-documented in the book. The fact that many of these websites are transient and/or temporal makes Bunt’s work even more valuable.

Overall, Islam in the Digital Age is filled with many, many powerful and interesting avenues that beckon others to explore further. Bunt has provided a progressive step forward for the field. A general weakness of the book, though, is how those avenues are presented, i.e. the book’s structure. By discussing the lesser jihad material upfront, the reader might be swayed towards Western prejudices about Islam and militancy. Granted, hacking, cracking, and digital swords are enticing concepts; nevertheless, when presented first, they feed the more negative perceptions of Islam; and only after persevering through the first half of the book does the reader see that aggression and militancy is only a small portion of the Cyber Islamic Environment. This is a minor note, but worthy of attention given that Islam in the Digital Age was written partly “to defuse the alarmist tendencies and realistically posit a rational analysis and discussion that does not incorporate fear of the Internet or fear of Islam” (3).

Possibly the strongest feature of Bunt’s research is that it points to a discursive arena that probably does not exist anywhere else but on the Internet. Where else can one see/witness the multiple effects of new media and globalization on Islam? Where else do so many threads of Islamic experience intersect, combining pro-Palestinian political thought, with greater and lesser jihad, with a multi-layered visual culture (as opposed to a more traditional calligraphic visual culture), with the post-9-11 social psyche, with Muslim societies in Bangladesh, Chechnya, Kashmir, England, Pakistan, Bosnia, the United States, and Saudi Arabia? What Bunt proves is that cyberspace is, to be sure, a viable global arena for Muslims, one in which they can promote and practice their faith.

[1] Although Bunt uses the term Internet throughout the book, his data is pulled from websites. He does address this distinction, of the Web being a subset of the Internet, but tends to use the term “Internet” more often. This review follows Bunt’s use of terminology.

[2] On a stylistic note, it is particularly irksome that URLs for the prominent websites mentioned in the book are not provided side-by-side with the website’s name. In many instances, the reader will have to dig through the footnotes to discern the exact web-location of the Islamic site mentioned.

Robert Tynes:
Robert Tynes is an adjunct faculty member at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His research focuses on West African cyberculture, conflict, and political systems.