Let me paraphrase William Gibson, at the risk of a bit of technological determinism. The Dark Ages are already here, just unevenly distributed.
Middle Eastern scholar Mark Lynch reflects on the recent story about the Grand Mufti of Egypt suggesting that Muslim apostates don't necessarily merit death. Lynch notes that new media news stories cycle around the world and across borders with great speed, opening up new connections and opportunities for sharing information and views. Which isn't news. But Lynch goes further. In this case, to a degree
...the internet has made it impossible for Islamists - or anyone - to really engage in 'double talk' anymore. Maybe there was a time when Arab Islamists could say one thing to a Western audience and another to an Arabic audience - as critics of Islamists always charge - but that time has passed. When[grand mufti] Gomaa said something relatively liberal in English, it almost immediately filtered back into the Egyptian public sphere - forcing him to either defend the assertion or else repudiate it. It's not that these things haven't happened before, that statements made in one realm have traveled back to the other, but it happens much faster now, and more routinely to the point where it has to be expected rather than coming as a surprise.
This is hugely important. It's the flip side of increased access to documents and digital objects, since reactions to those objects are also part of the information ecology's circulation. Again, this is a vital point for teachers to consider, since this is a large part of the world students inhabit, and a larger part of the world they're heading into. Are silos the best place for students to learn about this?
Back to Lynch: while
[t]hese new media trends promote transparency... they don't necessarily promote liberalizing trends... In this case, [mufti] Gomaa's relatively liberal interpretation got walked back when Egyptians and other Muslims got wind of it. Rather than forcefully defend the position, he tried to weasel out of it and then essentially repudiated it (at least as I read his interviews published today in various papers). That in itself says something about the conservatism of the Egyptian public realm and the entrenchment of Islamist worldviews.
Lynch connects this point to commentary by "the highly influential Yusuf al-Qaradawi". If Mufti Gomaa argues that changes in religious belief deserve social sanction only when there's a negative social effect, consider a response when the context sees one's religion as driving specific, tangible social benefits, and mitigating real social woes:
since Islam was so central to the identity of Muslims and their states, apostasy in and of itself represented a threat to society and even treason to the nation.
The great accessibility of foundational Islamist Sayyid Qutb's writings, seriously banned in Egypt, has shown this as well.
In short, new news media, mechanisms of transparency, and planetary systems of information circulation can also serve theocracy. al-Qaradawi invokes state power to enforce religious and social ends; "weary giants of flesh and steel" can, in fact, lurch into life at the service of currents circulating through cyberspace.
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