New from Bloomsbury: New Media Discourses, Culture and Politics after the Arab Spring Case Studies from Egypt and Beyond Eid Mohamed (Anthology Editor), Aziz Douai (Anthology Editor) Hopefully a cheaper version will be made ...

"Professor Leila Ahmed's book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992) was published in a time in which there was little scholarship on the history of women in Islam. Over the years, it became a classic and was re-published in 2021 with a new foreword by Professor Kecia Ali, who has used it in her own scholarship ...

Reuters, Egyptian court confirms dismissal of lecturer who shared belly dancing clip "A top Egyptian court has upheld a decision to expel an academic from her university job after she published a video ...

Syaifudin Zuhr; Mahmud Syaltout Syahidulhaqq; Sunarwoto, Munirul Ikhwan; DNajib Kailani; Bimantoro; Alfon Satria, Muhammad Zulkarnain, Laporan Penelitian, Digital Humanities Dan Big Data Dalam Studi Islam, Pusat Studi Mukaddima. Research ...

I was pleased to see this comprehensive review, which also has some striking graphics (see the Twitter thread below):

Izmy Khumairoh, The Suryakanta, ...

Martin Chulov, The Guardian, Massacre in Tadamon: how two academics hunted ...

I participated in the first session of this Lehigh conference organised by Rob Rozehnal (via Zoom), alongside Sana Patel and Ismail Fajrie Alatas, in a panel on Authority and Authenticity. It was interesting to hear their papers, and to to receive comments from respondent Dheepa Sundaram. I also caught Madelina Nuñez and Harold Morales presenting ...

Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, Why the Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid "Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s ...

Digital Religion Yearbook 2021 (Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies)

"The Digital Religion Yearbook is a new publication compiled and published by the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies. It aims is to spotlight important ...

Long read: Kamran Bokhari, Newslines, The Long Shadow of Deobandism in South Asia "The new Taliban government in Afghanistan represents the realization of the 155-year-old Deobandi movement’s objective of establishing a regime led by Sunni clergy."

Ahmed El Shamsy, New Lines Magazine, The Hoax in the ISIS Flag "Claiming to channel pure Islam, the Islamic State fell for a long-debunked 19th century hoax" An interesting long-read.

I’m pleased to have just received my copy of The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an, ...

Muhammad Afzal Upal and Carole M. Cusack (Eds.), Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements (Brill) is currently available as a free PDF download. It looks really useful.

Stories from the weeks following 9-11 (focused on Islam, Muslims and the net) can be found on the Wayback Archive of Virtually Islamic.

I captured a great deal more content over the months after 9-11, some of which appeared in my Islam in the Digital ...

Cyber Muslims: Mapping Islamic Digital Media in the Internet Age, Robert Rozehnal (Anthology Editor), Bloomsbury, 2022

'Cyber Muslims' (edited by Robert Rozehnal) will be out in April next year. I'm looking forward to reading it (I also have contributed to this).

New and noted:

Zachary Sheldon and Heidi A. Campbell, Divine Revelation and Digital Religion, chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation Edited by Balázs M. Mezei, Francesca Aran Murphy, and Kenneth Oakes, 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198795353.013.40

"This ...

I'm going back to individual posts on the Taliban situation in Afghanistan, as the evacuation phase is reaching its initial conclusion. You can track back on earlier posts by clicking the 'Taliban' category (above). The inordinate file sizes for the pages meant that they were becoming difficult to access. I am prepping a chapter on this for my next ...

Amy Chew, SCMP, Afghanistan: Taliban’s return ‘boosts morale’ of militant groups in Southeast Asia

"“Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern ...

Great profile in the Guardian of Paul Gilroy, very influential in many academic zones.

Yohann Koshy, The Guardian, The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy ...

Uzma Jalil, Islamophobia and Epistemological Ignorance

"In this post, Uzma Jamil reflects on the dynamics of Islamophobia in Canada, and more specifically in the province of Quebec. She contends that recent legislation has sought to ...

Virtually Islamic: Islamic Responses to COVID-19 Conference Videos

Conference YouTube Channel

The edited videos from the recent UWTSD 'Islamic Responses to COVID-19 Conference' are now available

Videos can be viewed sequentially ...

Mujahidul Islam, The Maydan, Islamic Ethics and The Rise of Digital Technology

Interesting long-read and big-questions (some of which are familiar): "“Muslim discourse on ICTs tends to focus on what one is using the technology for. So if you are ...

I'm pleased to say that Owen Watkin's PhD on A.J. Arberry is now available via the UWTSD Repository. I was Director of Studies, with Prof. Catrin Williams as co-supervisor. Do check it out:

Watkin, ...

BBC News, Actor Riz Ahmed wants to stop Hollywood's 'toxic portrayals' of Muslims

"The study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, titled Missing and Maligned, found that fewer than 10% of top-grossing films released between 2017-2019 from the UK, US and Australia featured ...

Acquired via Facebook, this one got me laughing.

Khadijah Elshayyal, Cage, Rethinking Muslim Representation – 20 years after 9/11

"What can a Muslim political advocacy look like, that addresses Britain’s Muslims themselves and their institutions, with all their diversity and disagreements, their rivalries ...

Cambridge Muslim College, The First English Qur'an

From Cambridge Muslim College:

"Lubaaba Al-Azami tells us more about the first English Qur’an and why it was written, bringing to light that the seeds of our Islamic community in Britian were planted a lot earlier than we realise."

'Rewiring the House of God: Religious Self-World Relations in the Digital Environment'. Online workshop organized by Fouad Gehad Marei (University of Birmingham) and Gabriel ...

CFP, Rewiring the House of God: Religious Self-World Relations in the Digital Environment

Online Workshop, 15th – 17th September 2021, organized by Fouad Gehad Marei (University of Birmingham) and Gabriel Malli (University of Graz / University of Erfurt)

I will be one of the discussants at ...

News of the Khalidi Library, which has a substantial online component.

It’s completed and it’s beautiful! On the occasion of its centennial, the Khalidiyya in #Jerusalem launches its new website with access ...

Arab News, Saudi female students promote Arabic, Islamic content for online encyclopedia

"The initiative has formed part of the Wiki Dawwin project adopted by the King Abdul Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives’ (Darah) publishing house, represented by its center for digital ...

Noorhaidi Hasan has a chapter on Cyber Islam in Indonesia out in 'Commerce, Knowledge and Faith', a new book from NCKU Taiwan. When I get more details I will post them