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Religious Authority and the

New Media

Bryan S. Turner

For we possess, and to some degree already experience, the facts of cross-
media fertilization. . . . Today we live in the world’s greatest period of culture,
for the oral heritages of all cultures are being poured through the visual
traditions to the enrichment of us all. . . . Just as history begins with writing,
so it ends with TV. Just as there was no history when there was no linear time
sense, so there is post-history now when everything that ever was in the world
becomes simultaneously present to our consciousness. (McLuhan, 1970: 122)

Introduction: From Enlightenment to Electronic Knowledge

M
ODERN INFORMATION technology has changed the social
conditions by which political and religious authority are produced.
Information society is not easily regulated either by governments
that cannot control the flow of information on TV channels, newspapers,
text-messages or the Internet, or by traditional religious leaders who might
want to impose some control over the content of the media. In this sense,
multimedia entertainment and communication systems challenge both the
print-based authority of secular governments and the traditional authority
of the world religions. In this discussion, the expression ‘new media’ refers
to web-based information systems – websites, email channels, chat rooms,
Internet cafes, blogging networks and so forth. We can also include in this
classification, in deference to Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media fertiliza-
tion, the use of videos, cassette tapes, digital imaging and telephone chat
lines. The central contradiction of the knowledge society is that governments
and corporations embrace an ideology of the free flow of information while
simultaneously trying to control information through patents and intellec-
tual property laws, and by attempting to control spam, hackers and elec-
tronic viruses. Authority over the contents and meaning of knowledge and
information becomes a critical issue of modern politics.

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 24(2): 117–134
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407075001

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118 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

New technologies have contradictory ideological effects. They provide

alternative, deregulated, devolved and local opportunities for debate and
discussion, and hence they make an indispensable contribution to a demo-
cratic civil society. The new media are important politically and socio-
logically, because they have the unintended effect of corroding traditional
forms of authority that are either based on oral transmission or on print-
based forms of textual learning that is linear, hierarchical, imitative and
repetitive. Knowledge based on oral transmission and memory, on the one
hand, and print-based knowledge on the other, are associated with
traditional forms of authority and certain pedagogical technologies that
produce a disciplinary self. At present, it is ironically unclear what disci-
plinary regimes, if any, are required in a knowledge society.
The God of the Abrahamic religions disclosed Himself, not through
rational discussion with men, but through various forms of revelation, the
carriers of which were charismatic figures: Moses, Jesus, Mohammed.
Authority is based on the correct and thereby unchanging reception of this
divine Speech. However, in post-prophetic times, revelation can now be
approached routinely by human beings through the written word – the
Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an – and increasingly
through religious websites that offer advice and free-flowing interpretation.
In what Max Weber (1968) called the routinization of charisma, these
religious cultures of the Book came to require learned scribes and scholars
who could interpret the Word and convey knowledge through repetitive
forms of learning. Before the invention of printing, memorizing these reve-
lations was an essential requirement of the survival of a religious
community, and exact recitation was proof of piety. Reproduction and
preservation of the original languages of these revelations – Hebrew, New
Testament Greek and classical Arabic – gave the scholars of these languages
a special status within their communities. Traditional Islamic and Qur’anic
learning are classical illustrations of a print-based religious culture that has
promoted oral transmission through a discipleship relation with elders and
religious teachers. Their traditional elites required specialized hermeneu-
tics as the basis for their authority of interpretation. The Qur’an, which was
according to tradition originally written down on the shoulder blades of
camels, is now available in a multimedia environment. The Mosaic code,
which was originally written on tablets of stone, is now available in the story-
line of innumerable Hollywood films.
This discussion of the media, religion and authority concentrates,
therefore, on the contradictory effects of information technology at the local
level, where the circulation of cassettes, text-messages and video clips was
initially an efficient method for religious revivalism. At the same time, the
flexibility and volume of this religious traffic in information threatens to
swamp traditional voices. This contradiction has been nicely expressed in
an ethnographic study of religious fundamentalists in the Songhay village
of Dar al-Salam in the Republic of Mali:

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In the Muslim world in particular the billboard now competes with the Book
as the purveyor of truths to live by (or, according to some, of dangerous false-
hoods to resist by every means possible), not to mention the cultural influ-
ence of television and the Internet. (Niezen, 2005: 168)

Although this argument might apply in general to religious authority,

it is nevertheless important to consider some of the institutional and cultural
differences between world religious traditions. In many respects, Christi-
anity, or at least Roman Catholicism, is unique in having a centralized
system of authority, namely the Papacy, and an equally powerful and distinct
system of the sacerdotal priesthood. Orthodoxy within this tradition has been
hierarchically organized around a bureaucratically trained professional
priesthood. This ecclesiastical structure has often been combined with
secular power to produce, in the terminology of Max Weber, ‘caesaropapism’.
Of course, Protestantism was more localized around the authority of the
chapel and embraced a form of individualism in which biblical authority
was open to dispute. Nevertheless, within the Protestant tradition, ministers
came to possess, as a result of what sociologists call ‘denominationaliza-
tion’, a professional status and an intellectual authority not enjoyed by the
laity, notwithstanding the legacy of ‘the priesthood of all believers’.
By contrast, in both Islam and Judaism the authority of the mullah
(‘master’) and the rabbi was based on what I want to call a local, discursive
and popular form of authority. Neither the mullah nor the rabbi was given
authority by a superior as a result, for example, of the laying on of hands.
Their authority is essentially the authority of a good teacher who comes to
earn the respect of his students and followers because he offers what is
regarded as sound advice on matters that have some spiritual import, such
as diet, marriage, sexual behaviour, domestic management of the household
or interaction with strangers. In short, Islam has no priests and an imam is
simply a person who leads the prayers and who is normally attached to a
mosque. A religious leader in Islam is one who has achieved considerable
popular recognition and support, and, as a consequence, religious leaders
in Islam tend to proliferate and have to engage in disputes about their
authority and their ability to issue a fatwa or legal judgment. Normally a
fatwa is issued by a mufti, who may or may not be qualified as a qadi or
judge. In Iran, the traditional office of the Ayatollah (‘the Sign of God’) was
occupied by a person who had achieved considerable acclaim, but after the
revolution there was a sudden increase in the number of people who claimed
this title, and within this category there was also the greater title of
Ayatollah al-Uzma (‘the greatest Sign of God’) which was held by Khomeini.
In the contemporary world, the traditional authority of the imams is often
rejected and unqualified, but popular leaders feel confident to issue legal
judgments. For example Osama bin Laden has issued fatwas against the
United States and other Western powers, but such judgments are in fact
contrary to custom and traditional practice.

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120 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

The authority of Jewish rabbis and Islamic ulama has a similar quality
of custom and consensus. They are experts in law and legal judgment, and
religious learning. The compendium of Jewish law (the Talmud) and rabbini-
cal commentary had to be mastered by aspiring scholars through disputa-
tion with rabbinical teachers. The basis of the traditional status of Jewish
and Muslim leaders was popular recognition of their learning and wisdom.
Within these communities, there was an important egalitarianism, at least
among men, most of whom would receive some religious and legal training.
In some Muslim societies, the ulama would be incorporated into the state
bureaucracy as judges and administrators. The rabbinate remained
somewhat closer to the masses, and could not easily challenge legal judg-
ments of state officials. They were never part of a formal bureaucratic hier-
archy of religious officials, and their status remained informal and based on
their piety (Sharot, 2001).
Authority in Judaism and Islam remained more open to continuous
disputation between religious teachers, and the authority of these men was
local, popular and customary. There was therefore nothing equivalent to
papal infallibility, a Roman imperial bureaucracy, an order of sacerdotal
priests or a monastic hierarchy. As a result, the democratizing consequences
of the Internet have tended to radicalize a traditional culture of disputatious
learning and argumentation, leaving even more open the question: who can
speak for the umma and who can speak for the kehillot, the lay community?
In the modern global media, the ability to claim religious authority has
been democratized in the sense that anybody can assume the role of an
imam. In Muslim communities in America, young people seek advice about
appropriate behaviour in a secular environment, especially about dating and
sexual relationships. Educated youth often compete with the established
specialists on fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). In a report in the Washington
Post in 1999, one Indian student in America summarized this situation by
observing that ‘The Internet has made everybody a mufti’ (Wax, 1999). The
pressures of a multicultural and secular environment on Islamic practice
among young people in America is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the
emergence of gay and lesbian Muslim groups. There is a Queer Jihad
website and the movement is especially strong in California, where Muslims
participate in the San Francisco Gay Pride parade (Leonard, 2003). Around
these new practices and movements, a host of websites have been
constructed to offer advice, much of which of course is innovative rather
than conservative.
Diaspora Democracy and the Invention of Tradition
Global information technologies and their associated cultures undermine
traditional forms of religious authority because they expand conventional
modes of communication, open up new opportunities for debate and create
alternative visions of the global community. The growing importance of the
pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca has been made possible by modern means of
transport. However, some Sufi orders, such as the Nimatullahi Order, make

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a distinction between the physical pilgrimage and the spiritual one, which
does not require an actual journey to Mecca. Such spiritual journeys can
now be simulated on websites. The opportunities for innovation in practice
among such diasporic Sufi movements is considerable (Fischer and Adebi,
1990).
Global network society and its pedagogy undermine traditional Islam
and simultaneously promote the conditions for political Islam, but the new
media are essentially democratic in terms of access. The new media can
have corrosive consequences for those professions associated with text-
based learning, such as religious scholars and clergy. While fundamental-
ist groups in Islam, Christianity and Judaism employ modern forms of
communication, the Internet promotes open discussion and hence prevents
forms of orthodox closure that were the basis of traditional authority. The
democratization of global Islam as a network of diasporic communities is
facilitated by the new information society in ways that bring into question
the traditional structures of learning and training. While orthodox Islam
claimed that ijtihad (the gate of interpretation) of the Qur’an was closed,
modern media technology has opened up religious debate, not on a local,
but on a global scale, with unpredictable consequences.
The political implications of the new media for Western societies are
equally radical. While there has been a profound concentration of media
ownership and power, no single corporation or state can control the global
flow of information. The American invasion of Iraq is a classic illustration.
Within the American commercial media, there was initially little critical
analysis of the war, but there was a virtual storm of critical information and
discussion available outside the commercial sphere of media influence
(Mann, 2003). While the concentration of ownership in newspapers and TV
is well documented, there has also been an important integration between
mass culture-entertainment industries, communication systems and news.
These giant corporations oversee the mass production of symbols that are
distributed globally through diverse outlets, including theme parks, sporting
events, TV, video games, CDs, DVDs and so forth. These media giants have
contributed to the trivialization of news-gathering and public debate in a
context where news-gathering and film-making intersect as entertainment.
Despite these tendencies towards a monopolization and trivialization
of information and knowledge, the US government finds it difficult to control
the flow of information because the technology relies upon freedom of access
through the Internet. As a result, it cannot easily establish any global control
over these flows and hence its political legitimacy as a global policeman is
constantly under critical scrutiny. To take one example, Al-Jazeera
continued to provide independent views and information about the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq despite US tank attacks on its offices, coming under
fire in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and being expelled from Iraq. While
the American press was largely mute about civilian casualties, figures on
civilian deaths and damage to public utilities and civilian areas are debated
and circulated on-line. Although journalism depends almost entirely on

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122 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

‘official sources’, the Internet provides endless opportunities for unofficial

news-gathering. These sources are obviously constantly undermined or
contained by political pressures, such as the recent debate about the
independence of Google, but the diversity of sources means that these
alternative channels can never be entirely silenced.
Because the business world depends on open, free and unrestrained
access to e-knowledge, it is difficult to see how governments or security
agencies can exercise surveillance or control over this global chatter. These
electronic sites do not require the corporeal presence of the participants.
They are not like conventional public meetings, protest marches or sit-ins.
Electronic democratic forums provide relatively safe sites for virtual
meetings; they are safe because bodies do not need to enter into them.
Website discussions and protests cannot be controlled with the same
efficiency with which, for example, the police can control public protests or
student marches.
These complex functions of global information systems require us to
rethink many conventional conceptual structures about power and author-
ity. For example, Weber’s three forms of legitimacy in his Economy and
Society (1968) – tradition, charisma and legal rational norms of authority –
do not adequately describe the emerging norms of legitimacy in web-based
systems. Modern sociological notions of how the network shapes society
have been significantly influenced by the sociological analysis of network
society by Manuel Castells (1996, 1997, 1998), whose sociology of the
media produced a new theory of power, authority and legitimacy that is post-
Weberian in rejecting the nation-state as the unit of analysis. A number of
changes are crucial and have been identified in the sociology of network
society by Castells. These include: the emergence of ubiquitous mobile tele-
communications and computing links; the consolidation of electronically
integrated, global financial markets; the expansion of an interlinked,
cohesive capitalist economy; the shift in the labour force from primary and
manufacturing industries to knowledge, information and communication
industries; and the emergence of ‘real virtuality’ in the hypertexting of
cultural and economic relations. Nation-states operate with legal boundaries
of legitimacy. Network society and networking recognize ‘flow’ as the conduit
through which legitimacy is realized. The analysis of networking identifies
those who occupy the switchpoints of space and time flows as key power-
brokers in informational capitalism. Flows disconnect power from hierarchy.
While they achieve greater market penetration, informational systems
decentralize power to actors located at decisive points in the sequence of
continuous communicative activity.
While traditional forms of hierarchical power operated through chains
of command between people, network society operates through data rather
than people. These chains of authority are somewhat different from the
chains of authorization in Islamic traditions in which the hadith (sayings
and customs of the Prophet) are regarded as legitimate where they have a
continuous chain of known persons to verify their legitimacy. Data do not

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Turner – Religious Authority and the New Media 123

possess the identity to resist, and they do not have a focus to oppose. Power
is not necessarily embodied; it is a switchpoint in the information flow.
While Castells recognizes that the dominant managerial elites claim
national control of informational flows, the logic of networking is that control
cannot be concentrated for long at any single switchpoint in the system. A
further aspect of network society is the emergence of ‘real virtuality’ to illus-
trate the prolific quality of cultural exchange. Castells has identified a
cultural system in which electronic representation establishes symbolic and
discursive parameters of social interaction.
We can elaborate this argument to suggest a dialectic between local-
ized struggles that employ networks to gain some control over their lives
and spaces, and global network power systems that seek to centralize and
monopolize control employing the same technologies. These struggles have
been a constant feature of network society through its history, for example
the struggle between hackers and network managers for access to infor-
mation. Network society is the site of struggles where hacking, cracking and
viruses mark the new boundaries of such power conflicts. However, ‘the
Internet was born at the unlikely intersection of big science, military
research and libertarian culture’ and all three have interests (business,
military and social) in the development of open, free and cheap communi-
cation (Castells, 2001: 17). The openness of the architecture of the Internet
is its main strength, as users become both producers and shapers of the
technology. The future of this openness will be an effect of the relations of
struggle and competition between what Castells identifies as four cultures
and their elites: the techno-meritocratic culture, the virtual communitarian
culture, the hacker culture and the entrepreneurial culture. For different
reasons, these cultures require open access, and hence democratic oppor-
tunities are built in to the technology of communication. Castells has there-
fore identified two norms that emerge from these technological
requirements. These are freedom of horizontal communication and access
to e-knowledge, and the right to unimpeded self-steering. In some respects,
these two freedoms of access and movement reflect the liberal rights of the
market place. Individuals should have the right to unrestricted access to the
Internet (market of information) and they should be free to negotiate their
way through the Internet without (undue) interference. These ‘net-rights’
resemble the liberal rights of non-interference and they emerge from the
technical opportunities of information exchange. They are a product of the
technological characteristics of the Internet and the contradictory interests
of the elites who attempt to own and manage the global flow of knowledge.
They are features of an e-democracy that makes possible a global demo-
cratic discourse, while also providing ideal conditions for promoting modern
slavery, child pornography, global crime and terrorism.
Network society brings with it complex questions about intellectual
property, patents, ownership and control. In particular, this set of questions
about the globalization of knowledge converges on the problem of author-
ity: who or what might exercise authority in an emerging system of global

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124 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

knowledge? In a devolved and ‘glocalized’ world of instant and continuous

communication, who can speak authoritatively for Islam? In Weber’s theory
of authority, it is clear that the authority and legitimacy of information
cannot be subsumed under traditional or charismatic authority. E-democra-
cies are not traditional and make no claim to traditional legitimacy. The
network is not charismatic because it cannot be legitimized by a single
person, and no routinized charisma could significantly influence the web.
The new forms of authority are not legal-rational, however, because the
authority of a site or flow of information is not the product of the hierarchical
organization of a set of offices issuing commands in a linear chain of officers.
The authority of the Internet is devolved, dispersed and dissipated. There
is therefore a connection between net-rights, devolved systems of delivery
and access, and a global civil society. As an ideal type, the virtual author-
ity of the Internet requires the unimpeded operation of access and steering.
These conditions will not guarantee the truth or validity of communications,
but they establish essential criteria for the democratic conversation of the
web. In this sense, they match the criteria of communicative rationality in
the theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984). The authority and
legitimacy of communication can only be secured in terms of the adequacy
of the two critical net-rights.
Tradition, Memorization and Recitation
Although the global Internet has transformed modern societies, there is an
important interaction between global communication and traditional
knowledge. Traditional forms of authority continue to dominate local
communities in Islam, where memorization and recitation continue to play
a central role in religious revivalism and in sustaining the cohesion of local
communities.
Generalizations about Islam in terms of traditionalism and reformism
are notoriously dangerous and unreliable. We can usefully illustrate these
issues by an examination of some research from Indonesia. Many academics
would regard Indonesia as a special case in the sense that liberal Islam
appears to have flourished within a civil society that has remained relatively
open, despite the pressures of fundamentalism and militancy (Heffner,
2000). The contrast with Islam in China could not be more dramatic. In
China, Islam has been subjected to sinicization for centuries, but it is now
equally subject to modernization in China’s drive towards economic power.
Islam in China survived because the Hui and Uyghur peoples adopted a
strategy of ‘cohesion and peaceful participation’ (Berlie, 2004). As a result,
Islam in China has remained relatively traditional. Whereas in Indonesia
women have played a central role in Islamic revivalism, in China the
mosque is a male space and the Qur’an is traditionally taught to men only.
The problem of religious authority has as a result to be understood within
very diverse social and political contexts.
There has been an Islamic revival in Indonesia in which collective
memorization and recitation of the Qur’an played an important role in the

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creation of religious communities that are in many ways resistant to the

emergence of secular knowledge-based societies. Traditional forms of
learning through memorizing, recitation and collective performance
continue to be important, because they train children into the collective
expectations of the community, they sustain an emotional bond between the
self and the collectivity and they reward a particular type of personality.
Traditional pedagogies are important because, in the Muslim world, they
sustain an ethical and aesthetic order that is encapsulated in the Arabic
notion of adab or rectitude, meritorious behaviour or ethical comportment.
These traditional patterns of ritualized learning are changing, but they
remain important for the Islamization of societies. To understand the
problem of authority in Islam we must attend to these basic pedagogies of
religious knowledge.
Intensive exposure to the Qur’an through memorizing and chanting
verses produces a disciplined personality in terms of Michel Foucault’s
‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1993), but it also involves community
building. Qur’anic learning typically takes place in religious schools,
involves public recitation of passages and a competitive desire to achieve
status as a pious pupil. In her study of the revival of Islam in Indonesia,
Anna Gade (2004) in Perfection Makes Practice examines the emotional
bonds that connect learning, status and spirituality. Learning involves the
production of a controlled self, but it is also an intensely communal or social
activity that involves what she aptly calls a ‘technology of the community’.
Daily repetition of the Qur’an from memory is a central act of piety and a
necessary requirement of prayer. Communal involvement in memorizing not
only safeguards the individual from lapses of memory but also creates a
collective emotional effervescence. To memorize the Qur’an is not to repeat
it once, but to maintain the structure of memory of the Qur’an in its entirety.
This challenge requires constant practice and personal discipline that is
centred on the pious notion of adab or rectitude. In order to achieve this
disciplined subjectivity, the memorizer must have moral, as well as intel-
lectual, strength. The Arabic lexical root for ‘memory’ and ‘intelligence’ are
the same (dh-k-r), and this root also carries the connotation of strength. The
one who has the moral discipline of intelligent repetition also has spiritual
strength – and social standing in the community. These processes of memo-
rizing typically involve reading through the written text of the Qur’an,
memorizing alone and repeating the text before a teacher, and peer learning
with others.
In the 1990s, there was some experimentation with ‘modern’ methods
of Qur’anic learning that involved national competitions and which engen-
dered an enthusiasm for learning among young people. In Indonesia, there-
fore, the introduction of traditional forms of Qur’anic learning led eventually
to the transformation of such practices by the creation of national recitation
competitions. Nevertheless these collective technologies of the community
produce powerful emotions and have the consequence of consolidating the
coherence of the religious community and contributing to Islamic revivalism.

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126 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

Indonesian Islamic reformism, which has often been inspired by

contact with Middle Eastern fundamentalism such as the Wahhabi
movement, appears to have brought about the assertion of traditional author-
ity in gender relations by encouraging women to remain within the domestic
sphere, and yet there is evidence that women have moved increasingly into
public roles. Traditional values and the modernization of gender roles have
paradoxically gone hand in hand. While secularists feared that the revival
of Islam in Indonesia would result in the retardation of women, especially
in education, this conservative outcome has not developed (Brenner, 2005).
Similarly, the Sisters of Islam in Malaysia have contested the power of the
traditional ulama, arguing that well-educated women should be equipped
to engage in ijtihad or interpretation and independent reasoning in order to
interpret the Qur’an and traditions for themselves (Ong, 1999).
Diasporic Communities and Authority
New technologies, including media technologies, require different operat-
ing practices and different pedagogical assumptions. In turn, different
pedagogical environments produce different personalities. Book-based
learning by rote remains a common pedagogy, as we have seen in Indone-
sia. In fundamentalist Islam generally, the Deobandi school has been
particularly important, and represents something of a contrast to Indonesia,
which has generally been less strict in its development of religious
pedagogy. This Sunni revivalist sect emerged in British India in the 19th
century, and it has played an important part in the radicalization of Islamic
thought in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Whereas Indonesian religious schools
were relatively liberal and modernized, Pakistan’s religious foundations
were highly conservative and rigid. Deobandi madrassas played an import-
ant part in the training of the radical Taliban. The Deobandi school came
into existence around 1867 to defend Islamic traditions in a society domi-
nated by Hinduism. As a strategy of cultural survival, they developed a strict
interpretation of Islam, including strict control over women. By the 1980s
the Deobandi community found itself in conflict with Shi’ites in Pakistan
and Iran. In part this was an economic conflict, in which impoverished
Sunnis found themselves in conflict with rich Shi’ite landowners. The
conflict was also related to the payment of religious tax or zakat. Under Zia’s
dictatorship zakat was levied on bank accounts during Ramadan to show
the piety of the government. These taxes were used to fund religious schools,
and many Shi’ite groups (around 20% of the Pakistani population) who
claimed that they were already paying zakat taxes to their own ayatollahs,
were eventually exempted. The manner in which the zakat was collected
and distributed fuelled conflict between Sunni and Shi’ite communities. The
Deobandi movement has employed the idea of jihad to attack groups such
as the Ismailis, who are considered to be kafirs. The Deobandi madrassas
or religious schools have played an important part in creating powerful
social solidarity through an intimate dependency between students and their
ulama. Deobandi pedagogy emphasizes the memorizing of Qur’anic verses,

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repetitive learning and strict obedience to teachers. It creates a disciplined

self that is very different from the spontaneity, playfulness and shallowness
that are associated, for example, with surfing the net. Many students who
came out of the Pakistani Deobandi madrassas became Taliban followers,
and indeed ‘Taliban’ means ‘madrassa pupils’. These pupils became the
jihadist militants of the 1990s (Kepel, 2002). In short, Deobandi pedagogy
of strict submission to the word produced a technology of the Talibanic self
that creates a shield against the Western version of modernization.
For Islam, and many other cultures, globalization has meant migration
followed by the creation of diasporic communities. The Internet provides an
obvious method for dialogue within and between such diasporic groups, but
the unintended consequence is often that diasporic politics and their intel-
lectual elites come to depart radically from tradition, building up their own
internal notions of authority, authenticity and continuity. The Internet holds
the diasporic community together across space and then challenges
traditional authority, which is characteristically an oral, and print authority.
Although the new media have had important consequences for the Middle
East as a region, it is often in the diaspora that the democratic effects of the
media have their most important effect. Perhaps the most useful recent
discussion of Muslims, diaspora and the information superhighway is to be
found in Peter Mandaville’s Transnational Muslim Politics (2001). Many
young Muslims bypass their ulama and imams in order to learn about Islam
from pamphlets and sources in English, for example The Muslim News and
Q-News. The overwhelming majority of Muslim users of the Internet are in
Europe and North America. These diasporic Internet users are typically
Muslim students in Western universities undertaking technical degrees in
engineering, chemistry and accountancy. There is an important affinity
between their scientific backgrounds and their fundamentalist interpret-
ations of Islam. Because Internet access is often too expensive to be avail-
able in peasant communities in the Middle East and Asia, it is again
students in Western universities accessing the Internet for religious and
political communication. There is little real evidence that the Internet is
used by radical activists to promote terrorism against the West. By contrast,
the Internet tends to promote reasoned argument in a context where every-
body can, in principle, check the sources for themselves. ‘In the absence of
sanctioned information from recognized institutions, Muslims are increas-
ingly taking religion into their own hands’ (Mandaville, 2001: 168). Much
of this Internet discussion is about the proper conduct required by a ‘good
Muslim’ in a variety of contexts and circumstances. The majority of sites
are not developed by ‘official’ Muslim organizations, such as the Muslim
World League. Muslim sites tend to provide opportunities for discussion and
discourse outside the official culture. It is for this reason that the Internet
is a means of bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of Muslim orthodoxy.
The Internet also has a democratizing effect in the sense that it levels out
power differences between social groups; for example, the Ismailis can
appear to be as mainstream as other movements in Shi’ism.

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128 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

A major issue on the web, as we have seen, is the problem of author-

ity. Within the American diaspora, for example, because the educated
sheikhs of the Al-Azhar mosque are physically absent, any young student
in California can turn himself into a teacher by setting himself up with a
website and provide rulings on various questions relating to Muslim conduct
in the diaspora. These email fatwas are not yet recognized by sharia courts
as admissible evidence, but they clearly have an influence within the
diaspora. They become authoritative because users can check these rulings
against other sites and e-fatwas. In conclusion, Mandaville (2001: 170)
argues that the Internet is an important technology for creating an imagined
community for individuals and groups that are separated from their
homeland and existing in alien (often secular) cultures that are hostile to
Islam.
Global communication systems play a critical role in both sustaining
and creating identities in the diaspora. For example, the very large Iranian
community who fled the Revolution and who now live in London are held
together not only by multiple Internet networks but also by informal
meetings (sofreh) that are in particular supported by women. In these
diasporic contexts, traditional religious rites and beliefs are gradually trans-
formed to meet the needs of migrants and refugees. For example, many Sufi
teachers in London offer religious teaching and self-help therapy for
Iranians cut off from their traditional roots (Spellman, 2004).
The New ‘Micro Intellectuals’
Global Islamization has seen the growth of traditional patterns of Qur’anic
training, but it has also witnessed the emergence of new intellectuals who
are largely self-trained, independent, mobile and charismatic (Crow, 2000).
These new intellectuals, however, represent a sharp break from traditional,
conservative, formally trained Muslim leaders and religious authorities (the
ulama) of earlier generations, and their appeal is different from that of the
secular, nationalist intellectuals of the 1970s. Critics of these new intellec-
tuals often refer to them as ‘micro intellectuals’ and argue that they are
dumbing down the religious message of orthodox Islam (Roy, 1996). In many
parts of the Muslim world, these new intellectuals are replacing the author-
ity of traditional training and traditional sources of knowledge. In order to
establish a new debate with modernity, they have to appeal to the openness
of the Islamic legacy, and to the idea that interpretation is required to meet
the new challenges of modern society. In the process, while they claim to
apply Islamic principles, these are in fact being interpreted and adjusted
to new needs. While in many Shi’ite communities, such as southern Iraq,
the traditional clerics are emerging as political leaders in a context where
civil society has been largely destroyed by invasion and civil war, through
much of the Muslim world there is an explosion of modern models of
leadership.
The development of these new intellectuals is a function of the spread
of higher education in the Islamic world and a consequence of deep social

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Turner – Religious Authority and the New Media 129

frustrations resulting from the failure of modernization, especially under

conditions of neoliberal globalization. The audience of the new micro intel-
lectuals is to be found not, of course, in the Friday mosque, but in the
bookshop, on the website and at the university. Political Islam or Islamism
is the consequence of the social and economic frustrations following from
the economic crises that were the result of the global dominance of neolib-
eralism in the 1970s and 1980s. The demographic expansion of the post-
war period produced a significant cohort of young Muslims, who, while often
educated to college level, have been unable to find adequate occupational
opportunities to satisfy their aspirations for social mobility and secular
success. However, these radical Islamic movements of the 20th century have
their origins in the 19th century. These movements have attacked the
failures of modern Muslim societies in the name of the original Islam of the
early community of the Prophet, and hence they are ‘fundamentalist’ in
the sense that they wish to return to an imaginary community of origin. In
the 19th century, these reformist movements were hostile to both traditional
folk religion such as Sufism and to external Western threats. What we might
call traditional reformism included Wahhabism in Arabia, the Mahdi in the
Sudan, the Sanusis in North Africa and Islamic reform movements in Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1940s redefined the idea of jihad,
not as an internal spiritual struggle but as armed aggression towards
invaders and infidels. In the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel and the
Iranian Revolution in 1978–9, political Islam flourished, and was nourished
by opposition to the Russian incursion into Afghanistan. With the Gulf War
in 1990, and the entry of American troops into Saudi Arabia, Islamic radi-
calism further evolved into a significant threat to key Western military and
economic interests (Juergensmeyer, 2000).
Twentieth-century political Islam is a product the social frustrations
of specific social strata (civil servants, teachers, engineers and academics),
whose economic interests have not been well served by either the national-
ism of Nasser, Muhammad Reza Shah and Suharto or the Ba’athist ideology
of Saddam Hussein, or the neoliberal reformist governments of Anwar
Saddat in Egypt or Chadli Benjedid in Algeria. The ideological carriers of
Islamism at the local level were the ‘young intellectuals, freshly graduated
from technical and science departments, who had themselves been inspired
by the ideologues of the 1960s’ (Kepel, 2002: 6). The social dislocations
created by the global economy produced ideal conditions for external
Western support of those secular elites in the Arab world who benefit signifi-
cantly from oil revenues; bureaucratic authoritarianism has been the politi-
cal result (Kepel, 2004: 14). In summary, Islamism is a product of a religious
crisis of traditional authority, the economic failures of nationalist govern-
ments and the social divisions that have been exacerbated by economic
globalization. Radical Islam has been the unintended consequence of the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of communist ideology and the
resulting disruptions in Central Asia, especially in the Fergana Valley
(Rashid, 2002).

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130 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

The new media have had an important role in the global spread of
fundamentalism, especially after the Iranian Revolution, but it is important
to keep in mind the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is specifically opposed
to both Islamic traditionalism and liberalism. Fundamentalist movements
have attacked Sufi traditionalism and liberal movements that they consider
to be deviant, such as the Ismailis in Pakistan and Iran, and more recently
the Ahmadiyah movement in Lonbok Tengah, Indonesia, where the Ulema
Council issued a fatwa in 2005 to define them as heretical. The movement
to return to fundamentals is the basis for the criticism of conservative Islam,
which is seen to have failed to defend Islam against the West. The global
media have provided the communication channels for fundamentalism, not
as the defence of tradition, but as the means of creating a new Islamic
consciousness as an alternative modernity (Eisenstadt, 2000; Turner, 2001).
Fundamentalism is also a movement against nationalist governments that
are seen as having failed to provide solutions for Muslim communities.
Islamic themes of justice and equality were mobilized against those
regimes that were corrupt, bankrupt and authoritarian, and often supported
by the West in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet empire. Radical
fundamentalist movements in the Middle East profited from the social and
ideological bankruptcy of the Ba’athist regimes and from the declining
fortunes of the middle classes (Achcar, 2004). Political Islam as a funda-
mentalist movement has in fact had to invent traditions. There have been
radical changes in the notion of jihad in the last century, for example, in
which a religious or moral notion of internal spiritual development was
initially transformed into a political struggle against British colonialism in
Egypt. In addition, the notion of nizam or order has been developed into the
idea of the unity of religion and state (din-wa-dawla). The rise of these new
intellectuals has involved innovative discourses of Islam that in fact threaten
the historical authority of traditional leaders, especially over the issue of
the social relevance of religion to critical modern problems. Perhaps the
most influential examples of these transformations of traditional authority
took place in Iran. Many Iranian Shi’ite intellectuals, in order to fully justify
political activism against the state, sought to dispel the Western critique of
Islamic theology – that it encouraged fatalism as a consequence of its
commitment to doctrine of predestination. The leading intellectual of this
period was Ali Shariati (1933–77), who, while attempting to preserve the
authority of religion, defended the idea of individual responsibility for
action, despite his overt antipathy to the notion that the individual can be
a carrier of an autonomous will. The example of Ali Shariati is also inter-
esting because it illustrates the tensions that exist between the religious
leaders who are the product of traditional teaching and the rising new intel-
lectual elite, which has been thoroughly exposed to Western secularism.
With Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Motahhari, Shariati was one
of the principal intellectual architects of Shi’ite revolutionary thought as
a direct response to the ideology of modernity, and as a challenge to the
modernization agenda of the Pahlavi dynasty. His ideas circulated on

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Turner – Religious Authority and the New Media 131

tape-recordings, videos and websites. The authorities were unable to contain

his influence, despite his periodic imprisonments. During the reign of
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941–79), the overwhelming political desire to
suppress communism meant that there was relative tolerance of Islamic
movements. During the 20 years before the Revolution, Islamic associations
flourished among intellectual groups, and religious societies among the
urban poor provided an important political network.
Shariati emphasized the role of intellectuals in defending Islamic
culture against consumerism, but he was also critical of the intellectual
elite, because he thought they had become alienated from the mass of the
population. In Fatemah is Fatemah (1971), he supported intellectuals in
their quest for freedom and equality for the masses, but he also criticized
them for departing from their traditional religious roots, calling them
‘modernized pseudo-intellectuals’. In part, these criticisms reflect differ-
ences between Shia and Sunni traditions in the sense that, in Iran, intellec-
tual life was dominated by the clerical hierarchy. Regarding religion as a
bulwark against imperialism, Shariati rejected secularism as a philosophy
of the intellectual class. Although the West had achieved modernity as a
result of the Enlightenment, each society must find its own enlightenment
in terms of its own cultural traditions. Because the Enlightenment had been
imposed without respect for the integrity of other cultures, its claims to
universalism had been corrupted by its association with European imperial-
ism. Intellectuals had to recognize the problem of living in what Shariati
called a ‘dual society’, in which only a small elite had become modernized,
leaving the urban masses in a state of poverty and powerlessness. In Whence
Do We Begin? (1975), Shariati argued that only the religiously motivated
intellectuals could bridge the gap between the educated, secularized elite
and the masses.
Shariati’s socio-theology exhibited the tension between insisting that
human free will is the defining characteristic of humanity, and arguing that
human subjectivity presupposes submission to God (Vahdat, 2002). He tried
to resolve this dilemma by interpreting human existence as a journey from
material existence to the spiritual life. Humans are ontologically alienated
in nature rather than from nature, and the spiritual life requires the subor-
dination of the body to a religious purpose. The human body is merely a
‘desolate abode’ or a corporeal prison from which we must escape in order
to realize our true essence. Contempt for the body is a precondition of the
journey towards authentic subjectivity.
Employing a Marxist vocabulary of alienation to describe this human
bewilderment, in Marxism and Other Western Fallacies (1980), Shariati was
critical of Marx. Following the legacy of Marx’s critique of bourgeois culture,
Shariati was opposed to the liberal notion of the individual and emphasized
collective, not individual, agency. The agency of the mass of ordinary people
was recognized by Islam, and Shariati developed the revolutionary proposi-
tion that the voice of the people is God. It was to the salvation of the power-
less and the cancellation of the forces of oppression that the message of the

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132 Theory, Culture & Society 24(2)

Qur’an was directed. Although Shariati stressed the moral responsibility of

the individual, the revolutionary role of Islam, the political responsibility of
the intellectual and the sovereignty of the people, he did not, in his major
political text Community and Leadership (1979), advocate popular democ-
racy, but instead adumbrated the historical role of the charismatic imam
who is neither elected nor selected. Shariati’s philosophy perfectly illus-
trates the dilemma of authority, since the revolutionary idea of the voice of
the people appears to question divine power.
Conclusion: Religious Markets and the Challenge of
Authority
As the traditional authority of print-based Islam is challenged directly or
indirectly by new media, the appeal to the religious law becomes ever more
urgent, and hence there is a sort of bidding war in which competing
authorities attempt to out-do each other in terms of the strictness of their
interpretation of legal norms. These legal interpretations have a certain
urgency in diasporic Islam. There is, therefore, an inflationary expansion of
claims to purity and strictness that has a compulsory upward trajectory. As
traditional forms of authority are challenged, these inflationary claims push
Islam towards a fundamentalist view of law that is incompatible with
customary arrangements and prescriptions. One conclusion from this survey
of the issues is that the potential for innovative change, and hence the poten-
tial for a challenge to traditional learning, are maximized in the diaspora,
where websites are critical for offering guidance that is deemed to be
relevant to people living in secular cultures.
In summary, what are the main social changes that have produced this
challenge to authority? First, the spread of mass education and literacy
along with mass communication has produced a systematization of Islamic
thought through the medium of religious pamphlets, advice books, personal
guides and catechisms, resulting in a more self-conscious and reflexive
religiosity. The paradox of this systematization has been that often it leads
to either implicit or explicit questioning of the traditional forms of knowl-
edge that were once the preserve of a traditional elite. This systematization
has often gone on outside the traditional sources of authority, and has been
typically undertaken by diasporic, nomadic intellectuals. Second, the
growth of literacy and the emergence of a global mass market for religious
texts have expanded lay access to printed texts and to religious websites.
One result is the expansion of interpretations and interpreters of Islam, and
competition between them over who has authority to speak for and about
Islam. These new interpreters are the products, not of the traditional
schools, but of faculties within secular institutions of higher education. The
new Muslim intellectuals are more likely to be products of engineering
faculties than they are of mosque schools. Teachers prove their credentials
by proclaiming what is and what is not compatible with Shari’a; the more
radical and definitive the interpretation, the more prestige is associated with
a particular teacher. Claims to authority tend, therefore, to be inflationary.

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Turner – Religious Authority and the New Media 133

Third, this competition between traditional ulama, new intellectuals and the
state to control religious ideology is now also being undertaken in a variety
of vernacular languages. While Arabic still retains its orthodox authority,
the Islamic masses are encountering religion in their native languages often
for the first time (Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996). Given the fact that
Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in terms of population, these
educational and intellectual changes imply also that South-East Asian Islam
may well play an increasingly important role in global Islam.

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Bryan S. Turner is a professor of sociology and research leader in the

Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He edited Islam:
Critical Concepts in Sociology (2003) and recently published Vulnerability
and Human Rights (2006).

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