MIDA · Mediating Islam in the Digital Age. Present issues and past experiences of technological revolutions

We are witnessing the emergence of what is in very important ways essentially a new religion. Digitisation and globalisation have influenced not only social and political practices and organisation, but also religious beliefs and practices. Islam, the Islamic commonwealth and the Muslims, are at the forefront of the most recent developments. Hitherto relatively marginal theological and ideological trends have acquired new prominence within Islam and this new Islam is being disseminated as a brand in an ever-expanding corpus of public images and imaginaries. This newly acquired hyper-visibility is reminiscent of the impact of the printing press on the Catholic church in the 16th century, and its role in the Reform movement. The impact today of technological innovations on the development of Islam requires urgent assessment.The MIDA proposal aims to understand how digitisation is shaping Islam (i.e. beliefs, practices, political and social institutions, and outlooks). How is this technological revolution modifying the relation Muslims have with the past? Why is it reshaping Islam in more profound ways than other monotheisms? We need to understand the developments that are transforming religious belief in our time and to do so scholarship itself needs to seize the resources of the technological revolution that is spurring change. The MIDA project will make possible the necessary training of a group of young researchers, able to answer collectively to the challenge, providing them inter-sectoral, interdisciplinary, international skills.To tackle the complexity of the issue, five interlocking work packages have been designed, each including comparative work on historical case-studies: ‘Narratives of the Self’; ‘Languages and Translation’; ‘Images and Materiality in Islam’; ‘Contested Authority and Knowledge Production’ and ‘Mobility and Mobilisation beyond Borders’.