Virtual citizenship: Islam, culture, and politics in the digital age

Abstract

This article investigates the complex relationship between digital media, religion, and politics in Egypt since the early 1990s. Charting the emergence of a new media landscape – one that is facilitated by technological innovations such as mobile telephony, high‐speed Internet, and small digital cameras – this paper explores how a very strong Islamic revivalist trend is capitalizing on the power and reach of these new media practices in an effort to develop Islamically inflected models of citizenship. The paper argues that such a mediascape is contributing to the development of new models of nationalism and civic citizenship in Egypt – ones that are not orchestrated by the Egyptian State but are mediated through oppositional groups, mainly of the Islamist variety. The paper aims to chart a map of media practices in Egypt in the past two decades, and trace how these practices are informing the rise of new notions of citizenship, cultural policy, digital activism, and media consumption.

Keywords:

• new media
• Islam
• culture
• cyber policing
• popular culture
• homosexuality

Notes

1. Egyptian State television was established in 1960 – the high moment of Nasserist socialist and pan‐Arabist ideology. The mission of Egyptian television was – and, to a large extent, still is, despite changing ideologies, neoliberal reforms, and the proliferation of privately owned Egyptian and Arab satellite channels – both entertainment and education. Hence, a curatorial concern of programming on Egyptian State television can be described as didactic.

2. Iftar is the Arabic word for the breaking of the fast at sunset.

3. For a succinct analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood’s forays in Parliamentary politics see Brown and Hamzawy 2010.

4. http://www.emarketing-egypt.com/Facebook-in-Egypt-E-Marketing-insights/2/0/10.

5. The Muslim Brotherhood was established in 1928. Commentators on political Islam find it useful to analyze the movement in terms of generations. The first generation of Muslim Brothers are those who faced the repression of Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s; the term ‘second generation’ is often used to refer to Muslim Brothers who capitalized on the openings that were granted to them under Sadat in the 1970s; the third generation of Brothers are those who reorganized during the 1980s; and finally the fourth‐generation Muslim Brothers are typically urban, educated, technologically savvy young men who find themselves in opposition to the old guard on a number of ideological issues. Lynch (2007) offers a cogent analysis of the use of cyber technology by the fourth‐generation Brothers.