Crowdsourcing shari'a : digital fiqh and changing discourses of textual authority, individual reason, and social coercion
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgetown University, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references.; Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. The relationship of textual authority and individual reasoning forms the basic dynamic found in the work of classical Islamic jurists. Using primary sources drawn from websites, blogs, and online messageboards, I will explore the ways in which digital fiqh alters the prescriptive discourses of this basic interaction. I will argue that the Internet's tendency to democratize knowledge and encourage the formation of "echo chamber" communities of like-minded individuals, combined with the lack of functional systems of shari'a in the modern nation-state, will create a new normative discourse of fiqh in which personal knowledge and moral reasoning outweigh classical constructions of text-based authority. In practical terms, popular Muslim conceptions of shari'a will become more individualistic, less likely to be derived from classical discourses, and more deeply rooted in personal experience and opinion. This process represents a reversion to the prescriptive discourses employed by the earliest Muslim jurists, who worked in sociopolitical circumstances surprisingly similar to those of contemporary digital Muslim communities.
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http://hdl.handle.net/10822/552834Date Published
2011Subject
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Georgetown University
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