The new issue of the Orient journal focuses on the Muslim world and the Internet, and contains different perspectives on issues related to political discourse, political activism and media-mediated authority in Islam. The journal, published by the Deutsche Orient-Stiftung and the Deutsches Orient-Institut, is available online.

Islamopedia is a collection of rulings and religious opinions addressing the most debated topics of Islamic tradition today: gender, sexuality, non-Muslims, violence, secularism. In the near future, it will present scholarly analysis of and commentary on these rulings and opinions.

A multitude of fatwa services sprung up on the Internet during the last few years and has grown since. One finds askimam.org, islamicity.com, islamonline.net, and islamqa.com among them. Yet it is not only these private Muslim jurisconsults who maintain websites, but also government-affiliated muftis and agencies have increasingly established an online presence. At the same time the private online muftis are not a monolithic group themselves. Therefore this paper sheds some light on the different actors and their competition. Who are they? And, more importantly still, which norms do they set? This paper argues that there is a competition between these fatwa services for the conclusive authority of Islamic legal interpretations and their creators over the minds of Muslims situated in non-Muslim political discourse spheres. Within the context of the norm-setting processes these online fatwas have the potential to influence and shape Muslims’ opinions especially in predominantly non-Muslim societies. So how do the norms presented relate to existing norms there? Examples of where the Muslim authorities position themselves when it comes to contested or topical issues like migration and integration into the states of Western Europe will be provided. The research is initially based on a quantitative content analysis regarding these questions. Nonetheless it shall be supported by a theoretical framework including the notion of Peter Mandaville’s (2001) “modes of translocality”.

In the dissertation Identities and Lifestyle on Islamic Satellite TV, PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen Ehab Galal investigates the ways in which these mainly Islamic satellite TV channels construct religious identity. Galal, who is affiliated with the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, has thus analysed a large number of different TV shows in order to assess the influence that the satellite TV channels exercise on the Muslim world.