Muslims and the New Media

Historical and Contemporary Debates

Göran Larsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317091028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Scholars from an extensive range of academic disciplines have focused on Islam in cyberspace and the media, but there are few historical studies that have outlined how Muslim 'ulama' have discussed and debated the introduction and impact of these new media. Muslims and the New Media explores how the introduction of the latest information and communication technologies are mirroring changes and developments within society, as well as the Middle East's relationship to the West. Examining how reformist and conservative Muslim 'ulama' have discussed the printing press, photography, the broadcasting media (radio and television), the cinema, the telephone and the Internet, case studies provide a contextual background to the historical, social and cultural situations that have influenced theological discussions; focusing on how the 'ulama' have debated the 'usefulness' or 'dangers' of the information and communication media. By including both historical and contemporary examples, this book exposes historical trajectories as well as different (and often contested) positions in the Islamic debate about the new media.

Chapter 1
The Print Revolution

From oral communication to print media

Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You will provide students with the appearance of intelligence, nor real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant.

(Plato, Phaedrus, 275a)1

Even though Johannes Gutenberg (1394/99–1468) of Mainz is often described as the founding father of print technology, he invented neither printing nor movable type, these technological innovations having already been developed in China long before the fifteenth century. His contribution to the history of printing is mainly connected with the fact that he perfected printing with movable type and by doing so brought print technology closer to its modern appearance.2 According to some estimates, the number of books that had been printed by the year 1500 was close to 13 million.3 These figures are of course difficult to substantiate and we should treat them with great care. Still it is relevant to talk about a print revolution. But why were the Ottomans so slow in adopting the technological innovations developed and refined by Johannes Gutenberg?

To come closer to an answer to this large question, it is necessary to delimit and define the scope of this chapter and to specify its aims. The first aim is to give a general background to the introduction of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire. In order to discuss the impact of printing, however, it is essential to consider how the shift from oral to written communication transformed societies dominated by Muslim and Islamic traditions. This is therefore the second aim of the chapter, which also contains general discussions about knowledge, memory and text in Islamic traditions. This backdrop is important because it casts light on how authority was established and conveyed prior to and after the introduction of the printing technology. This general background will also make it easier to understand the debate that followed with the introduction of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The main focus, however, is on how various Muslim authorities have discussed the introduction and rise of the print media.

By printing I am mainly referring to printing with moveable type, a method developed during the second half of the fifteenth century, but my text also contains a brief discussion of lithographic printing, which was invented by G.A. Senefelder in 1796.4 Most of the examples in the chapter derive from discussions in the Ottoman Empire, and more specifically, the areas of present-day Turkey and Egypt,5 two of the most important regions in the history of printing in the part of the world that today we call the Middle East. Even though the first sections of this chapter contain examples from the early and formative period of Islam, the great majority of examples date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, I will also briefly discuss the development and introduction of print technology in the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All in all, the chapter tries to determine whether the early Muslim ‘ulama’ included in my study believed that the introduction of print technology had the potential to change the transmission of Islamic knowledge and challenge the established religious authorities. If so, in what ways? What kinds of pros and cons were identified and discussed in relation to the printing press by the ‘ulama’? For example, does the source material show that the religious authorities (that is, the ‘ulama’) felt that they were being challenged by the new technique? If so, in what ways?

Before I try to answer these questions, it is essential to provide a general background to how religious knowledge was established, preserved and transmitted among the ‘ulama’ prior to the print revolution. By highlighting the pre-printing epoch, I am not saying that all of these methods for transmitting knowledge and for establishing authority were forgotten and abandoned with the rise of new information and communication technologies. Although with the introduction of print technology the oral transmission of knowledge was supported or combined with such technologies, they made oral communication and its methods for establishing authority easier to challenge.

Knowledge, memory and text

Before the printing press was introduced, ‘knowledge’, both secular and theological insights, was mainly transmitted orally and memorised by heart. Charles Hischkind argues, for example, that the authority and transmission of the Qur’an is based on a combination of hearing and listening. Religious authority interconnects and engages the ear, the heart and the voice, and it is not possible to apprehend the Qur’an through a single medium. This understanding makes, for example, a printed version of the holy text incomplete when compared to a recitation of the text.6 In order to understand the Qur’an, many Muslims argue that the believer should observe, pronounce and hear the word of Allah. As part of his creation and divine plan, God has given man ‘hearing’ and ‘sight’, as clearly illustrated by Q 16:78:

And God has brought you forth from your mothers’ wombs knowing nothing-but He has endowed you with hearing, and sight, and minds, so that you might have cause to be grateful.

Like most religious communities, the early Muslim community based their knowledge and authority on oral transmission and memorisation.7 From this point of view, it should come as no surprise that the introduction and development of printing created a new possibility to establish authority. Hence, the new technology harboured both possibilities as well as threats to the established order. Even though books had been produced long before printing, the ability to mass-produce books at a much lower cost had a tremendous effect on the book market. Printing obviously had a profound potential to transform society and change human consciousness of how authority was established. This represented a shift from a discourse of sounds to a discourse of text, that is, visual representation. Without exaggerating, print could easily be perceived as an attack on the very heart of how Muslims established religious and worldly authority. Even though this issue was much debated at the beginning of the eighteenth century – as we shall see in the following sections on the introduction of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire – it is also possible to find later examples. The reluctance to accept printing is, for example, vividly illustrated in a much later discussion by the Moroccan theologian, Muhammad al-Siba’i (d. 1914), who writes:

Printed books cause the abandonment of memorization, forgetting [Islamic] knowledge and diminishing a desire (among students and scholars) to pursue learning.8

A similar way of putting the argument is also found in the Fatawa Deoband collection of legal answers from India:

It is essentially impossible to find a person who fulfils all the conditions required for a mufti. However, since the books on hadith and fiqh, duly compiled and classified, have been published in the modern age and since the state of memory is not the same as it used to be in the old days, when a scholar could recall millions of hadith in his mind … persons who have an aptitude for fiqh and hadith, who are skilled in the studies of the Qur’an and sunna, and who have studied religious sciences under the guidance of religious scholars in a regular manner of training and discipline, those who have a profound aptitude for legal problems may be entrusted with this responsibility.9

If the above-quoted sources are correct in their conclusions, the introduction of printing promoted the erudition of Islamic knowledge, and the memorisation of Islamic texts lost its former importance. According to the Moroccan Muhammad al-Siba’i, it was this technological development that was the driving factor for the changes in the society. However, in this interpretation, al-Siba’i neglects or downplays the social, cultural and economic changes that had occurred in Moroccan society with the impact of modernity. Without developing this argument, al-Siba’i is an example and illustration of how certain ‘ulama’ could argue. It was the technology per se that had transformed society and challenged the established religious order. Even though this technologically driven argument is tempting, it is necessary to bring in other explanatory factors as well.10

The explanation given by al-Siba’i is therefore not complete. In order to understand the impact of the new information and communication technologies, it is also necessary to consider social, economic and cultural changes in society. Printing made it easier, more efficient and more profitable to mass-produce texts, but it was also necessary to create an audience for the printed books.11 Along with the introduction of a number of technological innovations (such as, for example, the steamship, factories and the telegraph),12 novel education systems influenced by the British and French colonial powers were introduced from the early nineteenth century, which, among other things, produced growing literacy, but also new ways of thinking about the world.13 The influence of the new technology is clearly illustrated by the following quotation from Roderic H. Davison and his analysis of the impact of the telegraph. He writes:

The telegraph system produced in its first two or three decades a new bureaucracy, many telegraph stations dotted about the empire, a telegraph school, a telegraph factory, an inspection system strung out over thousands of kilometres, many new laws and regulations, international agreements, coordinated weather reports, speed and new pressure in diplomacy and decision-making, westernizing influences of individuals and techniques, and increased use of French, new words ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Print Revolution
• 2 Muslim Conflicts over Images, Photography and the Representational Arts
• 3 ‘Ulama’ and the Motion Picture: The Transformative Effect of Information and Communication Technologies
• 4 From Airwaves to Satellite Television
• 5 ‘The Invisible Caller’: Islamic Opinions on the Use of the Telephone
• 6 ‘Do Not Engage in Unnecessary Chatting’: Fatwas on Internet Etiquette for Muslims
• 7 The Ultimate Test: The Qur’an and Information and Communication Technologies
• Conclusions
• References
• Index