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Virtual
Diplomacy Homepage >> Virtual
Diplomacy Publications >> Is
the Internet Islam's 'Third Wave' or the 'End of Civilization'? 
Is the Internet Islam's 'Third Wave' or the
'End of Civilization'? by Jon W. Anderson In a recent report from Iraq, the government newspaper
al-Jamhuriyya denounced the Internet as an "American means to
enter every house in the world" and "the end of civilizations, cultures,
interests, and ethics" (Associated Press, 17 Feb. 1997). The New
York Times take on this story was conventionally to balance it with
the counter-example of "Iraqi exiles [who] are using the Internet to
preserve the culture and interests they miss, the Iraq of old that they
loved" (Iraqi
Exiles Reach for Home on Web Site," by Lisa Napoli.
The New York Times, Cyber Times. 20 Feb. 1997). This familiar
journalistic device of setting points of view into opposition parallels
and echoes terms in which the Internet as a social, political, economic
and, more broadly, cultural phenomenon is increasingly cast that, like
the journalist construction, places issues ahead of analysis. Cyberspace and Internet enthusiasts envision a new
paradigm of knowledge, information and work replacing those of the industrial
revolution with an information age/society/economy. Beyond the new-age
formulations in works such as Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave
(New York, 1981) are more specific enthusiasms for distributed (i.e.,
decentralized) networked computing as social models, such as in Howard
Rheingold's (New York, The
Virtual Community 1993) with its metaphors
of "electronic frontiers," and for multimedia as new epistemological,
such as Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (New York, 1995).
New Paradigm-ism extends to social scientists' treatments of "electronically
mediated" forms of being and relating to others, as in Sherry Turkle's
Life on the Screen (New York, 1995), subtitled "Identity in the
Age of the Internet." On the other hand, detractors include liberal humanists,
particularly among academics and journalists, who are tied to older
information regimes of print, editors, their values and institutional
forms (for example, "A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet," by Gertrude
Himmelfarb. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 November 1996,
A56). But detractors also include disappointed former enthusiasts, such
as Clifford Stoll, whose Silicon Snake-Oil (New York, 1995) develops
a strong form of the end-of-work thesis as "de-skilling" white-collar
workers, which some social scientists have seen as parallel to the earlier
effect of industrialization on the craft trades (e.g., The End of
Organized Capitalism, by Scott Lash and Joseph Urry. London, 1987).
In an interview, Stoll makes plain that the locus of this issue is rights
to interpret and to legitimate: "the data coming across America Online, or CompuServe or
whatever, nobody stands behind it. Is the author a medical doctor or
some bozo? I don't know, and they're behind a screen name anyway. It
might be an 11-year old girl or a 70-year old wizened philosopher. What's
missing is anyone who will say hey, this is no good. Editors serve as
barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent saying
no. Another thing missing from the information highway way is professional
reporters who are paid to post to it." - (Matthew L. Wald, "A Disillusioned Devotee Says The Internet
is Wearing No Clothes," The New York Times 30 April 1995: E7). Beneath such brouhaha is one clear fact, the manifestation
of which is that Iraq is not on the Internet, but Iraqis are, and one
of the things they do there is to represent and extend Iraq into an
international "cyberspace" populated by self-authorizing authors independently
of Iraq's formal authorities. Almost from the time that the Internet emerged from
the research labs that gave it birth into the wider research and educational
world that brought it up, it has provided facility for more than strictly
vocational interests. Early among those of engineers and scientists
who built it were more avocational political and cultural interests,
ties and associations, including those of émigrés, professionals
and foreign students in the high-tech precincts of western universities,
polytechnics and commercial laboratories. The New York Times
story cited above focuses, characteristically, on a "computer consultant
in Detroit," who happens to be Iraqi and who has successively used e-mail
to connect with friends, created a bulletin board and now a World Wide
Web site, called "Iraq
Net." For such persons, the Internet is a public
outlet. And any number of counterparts from other Middle East and Muslim
countries have used their skills to create, join, and debate in this
new space where otherwise aborted or suppressed projects of nation-building,
cultural exposition and religious outreach find outlets not available
at home. Since 1992, I have observed this development as editor of the
Middle
East Studies Association Bulletin for potential
information on the Middle East, some of which is summarized in On-Line
Resources for Research and Teaching in Middle East Studies (Middle
East Studies Association, 1995). Broadly, these efforts migrate existing discussions on-line,
highlight the concerns of diaspora communities in their home cultures
and in political and religious issues of their home societies, offer
cultural profiles, political news and commentary and religious witness,
and usually in advance of more official voices. The most striking feature
of the Internet in this regard is spontaneous, unofficial representation.
What this activity marks is an increasingly public, unmoderated (and
not infrequently immoderate) representation that additional participants
can join on their own authority and interest plus ability to use the
technology. The Internet is preeminently a realm of publication, less
a new consciousness than a forum greatly extended by an additional medium
with its own properties, felicities and barriers to entry that have
the effect of greatly expanding the range and number of persons who
can participate at the same time that participation is nearly world-wide
and nearly instantaneous. This does not resemble broadcasting and mass media so much
as it is comparable to spread of printing, whose impact among the overseas
"creole" populations of early modern European empires fostered what
Benedict Anderson termed senses of "imagined community" of ethno-linguistic
nationalism that marked the modern period (Imagined Communities,
Verso 1991). Their counterparts in the electronic information age of
late modernity are "new creoles" enabled by a new publication technology.
This creolization has several aspects: First are mixed discourses, intermediary between
more established forms that they borrow and mix. This mix may include
wire-service copy and other news items reposted as an electronic bulletin
board or e-mail list, interspersed with comments and requests for information.
Such, for instance, was the format of the Muslim Students Association,
until ownership and copyright infringement issues caused them to reorganize
as a list of connections to advocacy groups, university and other research
centers, and to news sources. Second, the characteristic activity is to seek and forge
links. This may begin with electronic mail, grow into special interest
mailing lists, and emerge as World Wide Web homepages of links to similar
others, each betokening a sense of gathering information toward an eventual
composition. Third, a characteristic of these efforts is mixed intellectual
techniques--classically but not only met in the application of modes
of reasoning and organization drawn from science and engineering and
applied to cultural, political and religious issues. The result is a
re-intellectualization of otherwise popular political and religious
ideas in a space legitimating the values of engineering and applied
science rather than those of traditional learning and conventional authority. Fourth, the first participants are members of the Middle
Eastern and Muslim world's overseas population, who occupy an intermediate
social space that they in part define and help to build; they are part
of a diasporic population of labor migrants, political exiles, longer
and shorter term émigrés and students who, through communication,
form communities, some of which predate the Internet and its "virtual
communities," others of which arise or expand with it. Taken together, these features are components in a process
by which projects of nation-building, intercommunity relations, intercommunal
dialogue and outreach not only take on a newly public life that Internet
theorists celebrate as a Third Wave comparable in impact to the neolithic
and industrial revolutions, or Internet detractors decry as the End
of Civilization. In addition, they mark a broad "creolization" that
extends from discourse (mixed messages that were previously kept apart
by institutional boundaries) to intellectual techniques (that were similarly
the realms of specialists) to personnel (who were previously marginalized). The process can be broken down into stages that permit
more precise specification of what "new voices" mean, facilitate and
invite in the way of public discourse and new qualifications for it
and for participating in it. In this case, there is a difference between
the Middle Eastern world and the Muslim world: the latter has been transnational
from its beginning and today appears to be becoming so again, while
the former is emerging from a long period of extended emigration and
urbanization. The Internet facilitates but does not determine a process
of rethinking Islam's social reach, which is already underway. But its
impact may be different than the relinking the Middle East's "overseas"
with the homelands and foster different kinds of convergences. In each perspective, the initial stages are similar.
Internet
social organization grew from work models and
needs of engineers and applied scientists, who built into it their professional
values of open, decentralized, economical, reliable communication for
multiple kinds of data. A careful reconstruction of Internet history
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
New York, 1996) shows that it was not the alleged need to survive thermonuclear
war that motivated the original defense project, but an environment
of scientists' values and work needs that were designed into the Internet.
Early on, it became a link to others outside the science and engineering
communities who shared those interests, so the Internet grew not only
technologically but also socially to encompass interests that could
be fitted to its values and frames, sometimes summarized as "narrow-casting." Notable among those frames and values are political
and religious interests and debates, which quickly found their way onto
the Internet. A sort of demarginalization was a primary motive. Usenet,
the technology for electronic discussion groups, was developed by Australian
universities. In the case of Middle Eastern and Muslim interests, Middle
Eastern and Muslim students scattered around the world pioneered discussion
fora and electronic publication for views about Middle Eastern countries
and about Islam, to find countrymen and co-religionists, to talk
about home, diaspora life and their issues. In
the process, they intersect with larger and established immigrant communities,
particularly among professionals, who follow them into on-line worlds.
Those feature a mix of "alternative" organizations and persons with
interests, but not necessarily with training, in discussing political
and religious issues. Such settings are notable for the absence of traditional
authorities and styles of interpretation, and the initial impression
is of almost post-modern variety:
So, while an increase in communication afforded by the
Internet is, in the first instance, a migration of existing messages,
it especially enables messages heretofore expressed in much more limited
settings -- say of coffee houses, university dormitories, political
cells -- to find more public outlets and thus to change the balance
of who and what is published. The subsequent stage is one of convergences, and here the
experience differs. On the one hand, transnational networks, cultures
and discussions in diaspora settings draw in and, subtly, draw on new
sources of authority and legitimacy such as those of applied science
and higher education. In this, they follow rather than lead a pattern
of vastly expanded access to mass and higher education that has transformed
the Muslim world by, among other things, making Islam a subject among
others and subject to comparisons on grounds not always of its traditional
authorities' own choosing or advantage. It is versions of this world,
not the world of the 'ulema who traditionally spoke for an intellectualized
and legalist Islam, nor the "folk" world of "popular" Islam of non-literate
masses, that comes onto the Internet. What comes is a more middle-brow
Islam associated with a more middling population: its versions range
from fundamentalist to liberal. James Piscatori and Dale Eickelman (Political
Islam. Princeton, 1996) have pointed out the diverse social bases
and expressions of these searches for meaning, which take the form of
re-intellectualizations of Islam that seek to relate it to perceptions
of current conditions and respond to the range and in the forms of those
conditions. The Internet is now part of that range. On it, increasingly
"official" voices find their way not just to challenge, or to meet the
challenge of, alternative voices; they also join the new forms for propagating,
defending and witnessing the faith beyond those of conventional madrassa-based
Islam of the 'ulema and community-based forms of popular or "folk" Islam.
Among these new forms are modernized educational programs, including
one offering international-standard masters degrees in Islamic studies
and, tellingly, pastoral practice. This offering is from a School
of Islamic and Social Sciences in Herndon, Virginia,
with ties to an earlier project there for islamization of knowledge
and particularly of social science. Another is the formally constituted
International
Islamic University of Malaysia, co-sponsored by
the Organization of the Islamic Conference, as an international-model
comprehensive university. Both have established presences on the Internet,
where they describe programs on offer and solicit applications much
like other, western universities, whose model of curricula and degrees
they adopt in preference to those of traditional madrassa. In part, Internet communities harbor potential new elites
not unlike the physicians and engineers and military cadets who for
a century and a half have proceeded them overseas for study and returned
home subsequently to contest for power. This has not happened yet with
computer science and multimedia students and professionals from Middle
Eastern countries. Neither has the emergence on-line of alternative
politics and religious discourse at regional universities appeared in
these media. Unlike the case in North America and western Europe, it
is not universities that have led the way on-line in the Middle East,
perhaps out of anxiety over just such a development, but "public-private
partnerships" between official and commercial sectors. In Egypt, RITSEC
is a joint project of the cabinet, engineering societies
and commercial firms to establish Internet policy, presence and access
for the public outside those previously restricted to international
organizations and select research labs. This program is specifically
designed to bring the Internet particularly to the commercial public,
where its first non-founder customers are public relations firms. Similarly,
Internet
services in Gulf countries are provided through
government-sponsored or sanctioned enterprises that invite public use
and attract mostly commercial users emphasizing business services and
commerce-enabling information services. These, and similar, more "private"
enterprises in Jordan,
Morocco and London, have begun with slicker production values and a
mix of "cultural" news with business and political information (especially
about regulatory and development matters) reminiscent of the content
of the Wall Street Journal and the style of USA Today
than of student papers or amateur-produced newsletters. Their typical
sponsors are Islamic banks and trade
services firms. In other words, shifting attention
from the larger Islamic world to Middle Eastern countries, it is commerce
that conveys and justifies the Internet, which is arriving at the time
not of its development in research and educational worlds, or in the
hands of the denizens of those worlds, but in the time of its "graduation"
and going to work in the globalized financial and services economy. By comparison to the larger Islamic world, convergence
of the Middle East's overseas with the homelands on the Internet is
in so far in commercial realms where private meets public enterprise.
The members of Middle East diaspora communities that are most able to
reconnect with the homelands through the Internet are not the overseas
professionals and students in the first instance, although they have
some capabilities, particularly in exile havens such as London; instead,
those in the Middle East's overseas able to reconnect with the homelands
through the Internet are engaged in business,
at least initially. Whereas the convergence in the Muslim world is on
new intellectual models that directly replace both high-brow and low-brow
forms with comparatively middle-brow ones, the convergences in the Middle
Eastern world are located in commercial classes and around commerce-enabling
information. In each of these domains, the Internet's impact is to facilitate
entry of additional participants, rearrange the priorities of discursive
styles and include more of the Middle Eastern and Muslim worlds' overseas.
Overall, the phenomena is an expanding "civil" sector or society, expansion
of linkages and in some cases relinkage to transnational communities
that increasingly are seen to complement political society (Augustus
R. Norton, ed. Civil Society in the Middle East. Leiden, 1995,
1996). This overall process is set in motion less by technology than
by larger structural parameters in which the technology is delivered
and from which, in part, it derives. The most narrow are, first, the
world of engineering and applied sciences which produced the Internet
in their own images and values of open, distributed communications.
Second comes a social connection through otherwise "avocational" interests
in the world of mass higher education, whose forms it assists in spreading.
Third, projected into the international realm is a world of new people
and newly creolized discourses that draw additional sources and forms
of authority, not only for alternative formulations but for alternative
legitimations for interpretation and even participation that change
the discursive ecology of political and religious interpretation. No
forms diffuse on their own: instead, they are fitted into expanding
international arenas in the form of new people and widening arenas of
discussion. We should expect to see the early "new creoles" of
the information age to coalesce senses of community
based on its properties of communication. Whether
or not these result in world-wide or at least transnational senses,
or more cultural and historical senses, they challenge existing modes
of authority tied to previous informational-communicational regimes,
much as print capitalism made religious senses of community and dynastic
senses of state problematic in the transition to modern times. Just
as an "official nationalism" grew up in response to "creole nationalism"
by adopting its means and senses of (in that case, ethnolinguistic)
community, so a contemporary counterpart is the semi-official sponsorship
of otherwise volunteer efforts, and a gamut of forms from the IIIT to
the IIUM. These, by comparison to the OIC and MWL, which are intergovernmental
organizations, are aimed at populations and at emerging community and
organizations of authority. The OIC and MWL belong to the world of international
organization diplomacy, not to communities based on shared techniques
of interpretation. Cast into this frame of reference, the Internet has
the appearance less of an epistemological Third Wave or of an institutional
breach and more that of a third force so far loosely identified as civil
society, and with all the associations of that notion with professionalized
middle classes, whose impending arrival it may mark. It is well to recall that Benedict Anderson labeled
the combination of printing and expanding literacy that took advantage
of it print capitalism. The recent and rapid emergence
in the Middle East of commercially based networks, Internet presences
and service providers, to be sure, often depends on official sponsorship
in some measure, such as in Egypt, the Gulf and in fledgling services
from within and outside Middle East countries, from arabia.on.line
in Jordan to Arab
Net and the Middle
East Business Review from London. On-line, they
join embassy
public affairs homepages on the one hand and the
Muslim Students Association or the Movement
for Islamic Society in Algeria on the other. The
"third" force between the outright official and the spontaneous alternative
shares command of the technology with avocationalists and of infrastructure
with the officials, as well as the widespread sense in an increasingly
information-oriented (and thus education-based) commercial world that
this is part of the wave of the future, perhaps a business opportunity
and at the very least a business
tool that promotes, as in the case of the migration
of Islam to cyberspace, already developing international standards for
developing international contexts. The Internet's impact comes in its ability to globalize
existing forms, to magnify the impact and reach of communications that
previously had limited reach, whether in the formal international conference
or in the informal modes of discussion and consultation such as the
majles, bazaar and madrassa and other informal networks through which
communication flows and in which information is sought in the Middle
East and Muslim world. Many issues are already being overtaken as individuals
and non-official bodies take it upon themselves to serve up a New Information
Order beyond anything discussed in the inter-governmental fora of UNESCO.
Peace
and human rights, environmentalist, opposition
and resistance
groups, for instance, have been able to open up and
join discussions by, essentially, making them more public; and such
groups proliferate on the Internet whence political dialogue, too, can
be carried on from a distance but without the distractions of distance. For this reason, the compelling comparison for globalization
of communication via the Internet is the development of newspapers in
the early modern period more than the electronic mass communication
of radio and TV of late modernity. The Internet does not pioneer new
forms; it gives some forms new reach, impact and scope. By comparison
to the asymmetrical arrangements of broadcasting, on the Internet barriers
to access are very little higher for senders than for receivers, and
those are coming down all over. This also means that, while those in
a position to take advantage of it are relatively few, they are strategically
placed in a globalizing information order that will in important respects
be less like the modern one of mass (centralized) communication than
like the decentralized one of face-to-face communication. And this means
not a single "new" form of communication/information such as imagined
by Internet theorists (and Internet alarmists), but a continuum of forms
that mediate a pattern of convergences that in turn begins to reverse
a pattern of elite and institutional maintenance through emigration. *Jon W. Anderson is Associate Professor
of Anthropology at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC,
and editor of the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, the journal
of review of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Feb. 26, 1997 The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate particular policies. This paper was prepared for the Virtual Diplomacyconference hosted by United States Institute of Peacein Washington, D.C. on April 1 and 2, 1997.
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