Critical Perspectives on Digital Islam

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past twenty years, the digital turn in religious identity, expression, and practice has led to small- and large-scale shifts in the theories and methods that religious studies scholars use to investigate and analyze contemporary religious phenomena, opening up new research questions. Scholars of Islam have engaged with these shifts from early on, including Jon W. Anderson and Dale Eickelman’s New Media in the Muslim World (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Gary Bunt’s Virtually Islamic: Computer-mediated Communication and Cyber Islamic Environments (University of Wales Press, 2000). The field has grown along with the terrain: studies of Muslims’ engagement with social media platforms, studies of extremist groups’ online recruiting, studies of religious celebrities and their online engagements, studies of sacred spaces and ritual practices and online platforms, and studies of virtual communities, just to provide a partial list.

This Special Issue looks to gather a cross-section of current work in religious studies and related fields on Islam, Muslims, and digital religion. It looks for case studies that offer carefully contextualized specificities, grounded in theoretically-informed analyses, that help to lay out the broad terrain of a critical understanding of digital Islam at a time when religious identities, expressions, and practices have become almost normatively expected to happen online as well as offline.

Articles covering subjects from across the online and offline Muslim world, including lesser-known platforms and non-Middle Eastern Muslim communities, are welcome. Articles from junior and independent scholars are welcome.

Possible themes and topics of interest include the following:

* Digital topographies of particular Muslim communities or affinity groups;

* Religious authority/ies in the digital sphere;

* Jurisprudence and religious knowledge;

* Ritual practices and expressions in the digital sphere;

* The cultivation of pious selves in connection with online platforms;

* Political economies of religious apps and other parts of the digital sphere;

* State politics and digital Islam;

* Digital activism among Muslim communities;

* Children’s engagement and religious education through online platforms;

* Muslim youth cultures online;

* Integrating online/offline public spheres.

Submissions on other themes and topics are also welcome.

Please send any questions, including ideas for possible papers, to [email protected].

Cordially,

Prof. Andrea Stanton
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Digital Islam
• Islam and digital religion
• Religious apps
• Online ritual