Fatwas on the Internet
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:22
Welcome, everybody, to the talk, fatwas on the internet, Islamic jurisprudence in the age of social media. My name is Miriam, this is my Twitter handle, in case you want to get in contact after the talk. All right, here, a short overview over what is going to happen in the next half hour.
00:40
I'm going to go with you through Islamic jurisprudence 101, just the very, very basics. I did a whole semester on Islamic law, and after half a year, I felt like I had not understood the basics at all, so it's just impossible to really explain it, but we just try to go through the very basics. Then I brought you a whole bunch of examples that I found on the internet that I deem
01:01
interesting, that I think are very good illustrating how Islamic jurisprudence has changed through the advent of the internet and social media, and at the very end, we're going to draw some conclusions. Just to explain this meme, the Haram things are pretty much everything, it's just a very conservative scholar that, whenever you ask him for advice, he's always going to
01:26
tell you that everything is prohibited, everything is forbidden, everything is Haram. We're going to have a few more memes throughout the presentation. A friend asked me yesterday if I had produced these memes specifically for this presentation. No, I did not. I did find all these memes already on the internet, and I just included them in the
01:44
presentation. All right, Islamic jurisprudence 101, what is a fatwa? I'm going to talk about a fatwa since the talk is called fatwas on the internet. A fatwa, contrary to common belief, is just a legal opinion or a religious ruling on a certain subject. The most important thing to remember is that a fatwa is not binding.
02:04
It really is just like you ask somebody whom you trust who has some authority, somebody where you think he knows best, he's an expert on a certain subject, you ask him for advice, and then he gives you this advice, and this advice, his opinion, his informed ruling, this is a fatwa.
02:21
It's not like a law, and if you break it, you're going to go to prison or something. It's just the opinion of one single person. This also means that you can actually ask different people or different persons, like should I do the thing? You can ask a certain scholar, should I do the thing, and he's going to say no. But then you also have the opportunity to ask five other scholars, should I do the
02:43
thing, and maybe the other five scholars who are also authorities in the field will tell you, yeah, you should do the thing, that's all right. And then, actually, it's up to you. You can decide whether you say, well, one said no, and five said yes. I'm going to say I'm going to go with a five because probably they are right, and I should do the thing, but you can also decide differently.
03:01
You could also say, well, I trust this one person more, or I think that this person has more credibility or more authority, and you just go along with this fatwa of this one person. All right, so we say a fatwa is a legal opinion by a scholar or a person trained in Islamic law. What does this mean?
03:20
It's somebody who is familiar with the source material of Islamic jurisprudence. What is the source material? These are four. The Quran, which is the holy scripture in Islam, the Muslims believe it is given by God. It's also the Sunnah. The Sunnah is the teaching and the deeds and the sayings of the prophet
03:42
Muhammad, so basically what he has said and done on different subjects. The third source is ijmaa. It's also consensus. It means that different scholars agree on a certain question, and then you can derive from this a ruling. And qiyas is analogy, which means that there's already a ruling that was
04:02
derived from the other sources like Quran and Sunnah, and now we have a new problem or a new circumstances, a new question, and you just derive the answer for this new problem from rulings that already exist. Just on a side note, what is sharia? Sharia is a body of moral and religious law that is derived from the holy
04:20
scriptures as opposed to human legislation, but I'm going to put that aside. Islamic law is incredibly complex. There is so much to say. There are so many different schools of law, for example. You probably all know that there is Sunni Islam and Shia Islam, and in Sunni Islam alone, you have four major different schools of law that have
04:42
different opinions on different questions, and depending on which school of law you follow, you will have different interpretations on different questions. Then you have different schools of law in Shia Islam, so there's a huge variety of different opinions. So just to make this clear again, a lot of people imagine sharia or fatwas
05:02
as something that is written in stone. This is how it is. It is irreversible, but there's a lot of room for interpretation. This is one of the major points that I'm trying to make today. So, in the former times, before the advent of the internet and social media,
05:20
you had basically only access to local scholars. Let's say you live in a small village in Egypt, and your brother dies and leaves behind two small children, and now you're wondering whether the adoption of these children is all right from a religious perspective. So should you adopt these children, yes or no? You're not sure about this, but the only possibility that you have is to go to
05:43
your local scholar, your local sheikh, maybe, who's preaching at the mosque, and you ask this person, and then you have this one opinion, and then you probably go along with it. Later on, still before the internet, some of the scholars would distribute their sermons or their fatwas and opinions and rulings via TV,
06:04
like tapes, videotapes, or audio tapes, of course books. But maybe if you live in a small village, you don't have access to books, or maybe you can't even read or write. So then you always fall back on your local scholar. So it means that advice-seeking was always very, very local.
06:23
Of course, there were huge centres of Islamic law and Islamic school of thoughts. So if you live in Baghdad or you go to Damascus or Cairo, you will actually find universities, huge mosques, where you have a lot of different scholars, and then you can actually go to these different scholars and ask them for different advice.
06:42
So now the internet comes around, and online fatwa services started around 1990, and they completely changed the traditional local practices of advice-giving, because now we have the possibility to ask anyone, anywhere in the world, for a certain ruling. So if you live, maybe still in your small village in Egypt,
07:01
and you wonder about this question, if you should adopt the two children, yes or no, you can go on the internet and you can actually find the opinion of a scholar in Indonesia or someone who lives in Canada or in South Africa or wherever, and you can actually take an informed decision. You can look for a lot of different opinions, and you can actually decide
07:22
which one you deem best or which makes the most sense to you. Okay, now we are going to look at a few different of these online platforms, where you can actually ask your question. It's a little bit like, for example, when I use LaTeX and I have a question that I have not encountered before, I just Google it, and very often,
07:42
somebody else had the problem before me, so I just find the answer. If I don't find the answer, I just go to a platform or a forum, I enter my question, and somebody's going to answer it. So this, for example, is the platform of the Sheikh Asa'id Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani. He's a Shia scholar. Some call him the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shia Muslims.
08:04
He's very famous. He has this huge platform. A lot of people seek his advice. He has put out a lot of fatwas. And we see here that there is the section that is called Question and Answer. So one of the first questions here is, I have a girlfriend whom I like to marry in the future.
08:21
Can I express my love for her? And people really have so many different questions that they are going to ask the scholars online. There are questions like, for example, say you live in a country in the north, like in Greenland or Iceland, for example, how do you pass during Ramadan? When do you pray? If there is continuous day or night,
08:40
whereas usually the prayer times coincide with the rising and setting of the sun. So you can ask a scholar online for that. But people also ask about anything, really. Are tattoos allowed in Islam? What about organ donation? Here, this is the section Question and Answer, and there are so many topics. Like, I scrolled down, I couldn't believe it. Just to give you a few examples, there's adoption, alcohol,
09:03
autopsy, animals, buying and selling, blood donation, black magic, birth control, and bribery, and backgammon. So there is no boundary to the questions that you might have. This is an example that I found very funny because it's very meta.
09:24
I already explained to you how you can actually seek advice. You find many different answers, and then you choose the one that makes most sense to you, or you choose the one from the scholar that you trust the most. So here's somebody who's asking a scholar. The scholar, by the way, is Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Munajid. We're going to meet him again later.
09:43
So just remember the name. So her question is, where is the noise coming from? No, her question was, she had many fatwas available to her, and she chose the one she felt most comfortable with. Then she has a long question. She's detailing what her question is. So basically what she says is, so if I ask for a question,
10:02
like I have a question, I ask for advice, and then I choose the one that I feel most comfortable with, is that okay, or should I do it otherwise? And then the sheikh gives a very, very long, detailed answer, basically saying, yeah, it's true, a lot of people choose the one fatwa that gives them the easiest way out.
10:23
She says also in her question, I personally prefer to choose the one that is more strict. And the sheikh says, yes, people should not choose the fatwa that suits their wishes best or frees them from any obligations. And just at the very end, so this is the end of his answer,
10:40
and what I just found funny is this is like related fatwas. It's like, if you like this fatwa, fatwas you might also be interested in, and then you can click on these. This is another example for a forum where you can ask your questions. It's called Islam Stack Exchange. I only knew Latin Stack Exchange and others,
11:01
but this is also really cool. You can post your question and you find answers. So this person is asking, is it allowed in Islam to load Quran into smartphone as PDF or audio format? Then he has more detailed questions about this. For example, is it allowed to enter the toilet when I have the smartphone in my pocket where the Quran is loaded as PDF or audio format?
11:22
So this really shows you that modern times demand modern fatwas. It's quite interesting because the scholar gives him the answer, yes, it is permissible, or different people answer him actually, and all the people agree, it is permissible to have the Holy Quran on your phone and also in your pocket as a PDF or audio format
11:42
because, attention, the text is stored in a binary and is then decoded, which means that it has no defined religious existence. So it's not the holy book per se, like physical, but it's stored in a binary, so it's okay to have it on your phone or in your pocket. But no, you should not take it on the toilet. You should not read it on the toilet.
12:05
This is an example from a few people that we're also going to have a talk later with, and this is basically for the German speakers in the audience. It's a YouTube video from the Datel Theta. It's my favourite videos of all times that they did.
12:21
It's called If Google Was an Imam, and it's perfectly illustrating what I just explained to you. So this is the Imam. He's like Google, he's a Google Imam, and the people come to him and they have a lot of different questions, and they ask him and then he gives them the answers. And this is a nice example, because somebody's asking, can I wish my Christian friends Merry Christmas as a Muslim, which is actually a question
12:41
that really a lot of people have on these forums. I found this very often, many times. It's a very common question that Muslims have. And then he says, I have 100,000 scholars who say yes, and a few who say no. And then, yeah, you can choose. Do you take the 100,000 that they say yes, or do you take the one that says no? So check this out if you're a German speaker.
13:02
Unfortunately, they don't have English subtitles yet, but check this video out. It's really hilarious. I love it a lot. So now we have a few very traditional organisations that are affiliated with Islamic law that have found their way on social media. Since I have lived and worked
13:21
for the two years in Saudi Arabia, a lot of the examples that I'm gonna show you are actually from Saudi Arabia. So this is the Saudi religious police who found their way on Twitter. They have 185,000 followers, which is pretty decent, I would say, but we're gonna meet some more celebrities who have even more followers later. And this is just an example of a tweet
13:42
that they tweeted out recently a few days ago. It's a campaign that they do against terrorism. Here it says, I'm a Muslim and I'm against it. So they have a social media campaign against terrorism, which I find just interesting to see that they campaign on the internet and find the people, bring their subjects to the audiences.
14:05
Now, we all know if you go online, if you go to social media and you have a lot of followers and you have very strong opinions, this can end very badly for everybody, but especially for the person with the strong opinions. So this is the Shaykh al-Munajid.
14:20
You remember I said before on one of the forums he gave the answer for one of the questions. And this happened in January of 2015. He is actually a Saudi scholar. In the January of 2015, it snowed very heavily in the north of Saudi Arabia. And in the desert, there was a lot of snowfall. The people were really excited
14:40
and they built a lot of snowmen. Actually, they also built snowwomen and snow camels. And he put out a fatwa and said, snowmen, snowwomen and snow camels are un-Islamic and are thus prohibited. He said this has to do with the Islamic prohibition of image representations. You should not play God. You should not create something
15:00
that looks like a living being. So he put out this fatwa and said, snowmen are un-Islamic. You should not do snowmen. And there was a huge backlash on the internet, on social media. People were really upset and they said, this ruling does not make any sense at all. Snowmen, snowwomen and snow camels are not an insult to Islam. It's perfectly fine to do them.
15:21
And this fatwa is ridiculous and he's just out of his mind. So there was this huge backlash and actually he was forced by this backlash to take back the fatwa or to alter it slightly because he looked like a fool and everybody was hating him. So he was kind of rowing back and he said, all right, snowmen, snowwomen, snow camels,
15:40
they are okay if there are not too many details on their faces. And I just find this very interesting because it's just one of actually many examples where scholars were forced by the backlash on social media to take back certain fatwas or rulings that they had put out. And there was another one, I'm not sure if it was the same scholar or another one,
16:01
but he put out a fatwa that said that men can divorce their wives via text message. People did not like this fatwa. He had to take it back. This is interesting because some people call this dynamics that has happened on social media a new form of ijmaa. You remember that I said before, this is consensus, like when people agree on something.
16:23
Usually it's understood as the consensus of different scholars, but some people say like, well, if the whole internet agrees that this fatwa is ridiculous, this can also be seen as consensus and then maybe it's not a good fatwa and should be taken back. So it's interesting because it means that people can actually influence Islamic jurisprudence.
16:42
Each and every one of the people can actually influence which direction Islamic jurisprudence is going. It can reject bad or impractical fatwas. Just to end the story, the Saudis continue to make a lot of snowmen, snowwomen and snow camels with very detailed faces.
17:01
So they didn't care about this. Another Shaykh with a shitstorm on his head, the Shaykh Al Gandhi, also a Saudi scholar, another example from Saudi Arabia. This was at the end of 2015. The interesting thing is that he was the former head of religious police in Mecca.
17:21
So you would think that he's a rather conservative person, right? He's very well known also. He has just 33,000 followers, but still a lot of people know him and they know him as a conservative. So what happened was that a young girl asked him on social media, is it okay if I post a picture of my face,
17:41
for example on Facebook, without a face veil, without a niqab, is that all right? And he put out a fatwa, he published it on Twitter and he said, yes, it's perfectly permissible, it's totally all right, you can post a picture of your face, like you can wear a hijab but you don't have to wear the face veil if you put up a picture of yourself on social media. And in the few hours after he published
18:01
this fatwa on Twitter, there was huge shitstorm. He had like tens of thousands of replies and there was everything between congratulations and like wow, you are more liberal than I ever thought and people who sent him death threats. So the way how he reacted, I love this very much,
18:20
so there was everything, the internet was on fire the day he put out this fatwa. The next day, he goes to the most popular Saudi TV show, we see him here, and he brings along his wife and he says in this TV show, no, it's perfectly fine, look at me, I have my wife with me, she's not wearing a face veil and it's totally all right. So of course he was sparking even more debate with this
18:42
and then the Saudi Grand Mufti, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia actually called him to heed, called him to order but the debate had already taken place. So I mean forever, people will know that there is a conservative sheikh who says that it's okay to post a picture of your face online without a face veil.
19:04
What we also see is that there's interaction between different types of media. This is a Turkish scholar, this is an example also from last year, from 2015, his name is Aliuriza Demirjan, he was on a TV show where he was talking about the question if oral sex is permissible.
19:22
And this example went viral because the TV host had a very hard time keeping a straight face, he was just cracking up all the time, she was giggling, she was laughing, she thought that his views were ridiculous because what he said was, he was talking about advanced oral sex and she was like whatever is advanced oral sex
19:41
and people on social media were talking about this for days, some ridiculing him, hating on him and there was a huge debate. So what we also see is that these discussions very often it's like there's somebody on the TV in a talk show or talking about a certain subject, people watch this, I mean you probably know this
20:01
from Germany or other countries as well, people watch this and then they will talk about this and then people will actually like just get, it will get to the intention that there is a discussion about this, maybe they have not seen the TV show or the TV clip but there's probably someone who will send them the link to the YouTube video blah blah blah and then the whole discussion just blows up
20:22
and goes out of space. So there's always interaction. This happens very often, something happens on TV then people go crazy on social media about the subject. These discussions about Islamic law give a lot of people the opportunity to talk rather freely about subjects like sexuality and rather openly on social media because if it's in the framework of a discussion
20:43
about Islamic law, it's perfectly fine, right? Because you just discuss whether this is permissible or no. And the question of oral sex is by the way one that I have also run across very, very often. Just to mention it, there is a Saudi Shaykh, his name is Abdelwahab al-Torayi and he made very positive comments about oral sex.
21:01
He said it is perfectly permissible between husband and wife as long as it does not replace the penetration and no body fluids must be swallowed. So oral sex is perfectly fine. This is another example also from last year. A Tunisian transgender person went on TV on a TV show.
21:21
Huge national discussion in Tunisia about transgender in general. How is the law treating them? Is sex reassignment surgery permissible in Islam? Yes or no. Huge thing. All right, we're gonna meet some more celebrities. Yusuf al-Kharadawi is the TV Shaykh from Al Jazeera.
21:42
He's originally from Egypt but he has been living in Qatar for many, many years and he's most famous for his TV show on Al Jazeera that is called Al Shariah Wal Haya, The Shariah and the Life, where he is discussing many of the questions if this or that is permissible in Islam. He's answering questions that people can't send in.
22:01
He's talking to people who call him on the show and this show is really, really famous. It has like 60 million viewers worldwide. Also, he has like more than one million followers and if you just imagine that Edward Snowden has two million followers right now, I think that's a lot.
22:21
Yeah, he has also published more than 120 books. He's a huge celebrity in the Arab world. This guy is called the social media king, Mohammed al-Arifi. This is his Facebook page. He has almost 22 million likes on his Facebook page and he's very apt in social media in general.
22:42
I mean, he's on all these platforms. I don't even know all of them, I guess, but you can follow him everywhere. He's also a Saudi writer and scholar. He's a Salafi. Even in his Wikipedia article, it is mentioned that one of his distinguishing features is that he has notable social media exposure. But he also holds very anti-Semitic views
23:03
and he is distancing himself from ISIS, but he was also accused to have contributed to the radicalization of some young British people. And these are just two of his multiple Twitter accounts. This is his private Twitter account. He has 171,000 followers on his private Twitter account and this is a Twitter account
23:20
that he has just for his fatwas, right? And that has also 63,000 followers on Twitter just where he's publishing his fatwas. Another example is that the religious battle is taking place on the internet. This is an example where some people have hacked a page in protest of the execution
23:41
of the Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia. This is an example where I think the webpage of an Australian airport has been hacked. And there are many, many more examples where followers of different schools of thought, different schools of law have hacked each other's websites. It's very often between Sunni and Shia groups.
24:02
There was an example in 2008 where hundreds of Shia websites were hacked by a group that was probably made up out of Salafis and Wahhabis. Then there was retaliation and hundreds of Salafi websites were hacked and so forth and so on.
24:21
Okay, we're getting to the end. Hoq's fatwas. Now, this gentleman over here is the Saudi Grand Mufti, the highest authority in Saudi Arabia, religious authority. He does not have a Twitter account, but what he does have is a problem. And the problem is that there is a Hoq's fatwa in circulation that he has actually never made.
24:44
So it appeared on the internet somewhere that he had said that it's okay if a hungry man eats his wife or parts of her body in the case of famine, or if eating his wife would result in saving his own life. And he has denied this 100,000 times, but you know how the internet works.
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If a Hoq's is out there once, you can never put the genie back in the bottle. The first mention of this Hoq's appeared on a Moroccan satire blog that is similar to The Onion. But if nobody makes the effort to trace it back, it's just out there forever and he can't get rid of it. People still ask him today about this fatwa
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and he's like, I never said that, but it doesn't help. Whoops, all right. Don't fall for the crazy fatwa. It's either false or just an opinion. It's a very good article. The link is down here, but you can also just Google the title of this article. A quote from this article. The problem is that crazy fatwas always go viral, but their debunking always languishes far behind.
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As I said, Hoq's are hard to kill once they're out in the world, and very often the Hoq's fatwas involve some bizarre sexual practices or are really ridiculous, and they mainly serve to satisfy negative stereotypes about Muslims. So if you see a fatwa that is particularly crazy,
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either somebody just made it up to slander Muslims in general and to serve stereotypes, or it's somebody who has this opinion and has put out this fatwa that maybe he is just one guy with a crazy opinion. So don't judge, don't think that all Muslims think this if you find a fatwa that is particularly ridiculous.
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Oh, okay. Conclusions. What have we learned in the last half hour? You can actually do pick and choose. You can do well-informed decisions. You have a lot of different answers for your questions available to you that you can choose from. This is both good and bad, because it can either mean that if you are an Islamist terrorist
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and you want to find out whether it's okay to slaughter all Jews and Muslims, all Jews and Christians and Muslims who don't think the way you think, you will definitely find a fatwa that says it's okay. So if you do pick and choose, you will always find something that is supporting you in your opinion that you already hold. But there's also, just to give you the opposite example,
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there's also school of thought of Islamic feminism. These are a lot of scholars who call for the reinterpretation of the source material. They say there are a lot of feminist thoughts in Quran and Sunnah. We just have to unearth them. So if you're an Islamic feminist, you will also find fatwa supporting,
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going to work, being independent, raising your children as a single parent, whatever. So you'll always find, yeah, the opinion that suits you best. Also, we have found that everybody can participate in the discussion nowadays due to social media. There's some kind of democratization of Islamic jurisprudence.
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That's ijmaa, as I said before. Everybody can participate in the way which direction Islamic jurisprudence is moving. We have interaction between different types of media, and the last thing that I wanna leave you with is don't fall for the crazy fatwa. It's either false or just an opinion. So thank you very much.
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Then I'll take this. Yeah, I think there is a little time for some questions. Anyone grabs a chance to ask Miriam, whatever you want.
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There is a question over there. Oh, please don't ask me something that I can't answer. Hi, I missed the first five minutes of the talk, so I hope I'm not repeating anything. But are these pages, you showed some in English.
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How are they not trolled the shit out of? I mean, there is so much opposition against Islam on the internet. I'm not condoning anything, but it's happening. And how are they not? Is the question why are these pages still up? Or how do they, are they getting trolled? And if yes, are they doing anything against it?
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Because I could imagine 100 ways to troll these fatwa accounts and pages. I think they're doing okay. I'm not sure, I'm sure that many of these platforms actually have good moderation. But I think you underestimate the number of Muslims in the world and the number of these platforms that we have. So even if you were saying today
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you want to troll the shit out of them, good luck, you have a lot to do. There are a lot of platforms. I don't want to do that. No, no, I'm not saying you are. I'm just saying there's a lot of work you have to do. And there are so many of them. These are just a few examples. There are hundreds of thousands, but yeah. Okay, thanks. I think they're doing okay.
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Also, I mean, of course I showed you examples in English, but of course most of the discussion takes place in Arabic but also in English. So I showed you English examples. Other questions? One last question maybe.
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Thanks, I also missed a bit of the first part. So same thing, excuse me if I'm repeating. I'm wondering, I mean, for me it seemed like this might have an impact also of Muslims themselves
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rather having a more questioning approach to fatwas than maybe it was before. Like you can compare so much online that maybe, I don't know how it worked before. That's where my question is going. You can compare someone says this, someone says that, so you see there's some contingency also
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in how they are decided upon. So my question is how did it actually work before for many Muslims, did they have like one imam or is it already traditionally something that you contact several people and ask them their opinion and then you see which is right for you.
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So is this something new to compare between fatwas or has it been there all along? I mean, just like today, it depends on how much time and money you have to actually spend time on researching, right? If you only have five minutes, you have only that much time to research. If you had time and money back then, you could actually travel to some of the centers
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of Islamic thought. You just go to Baghdad and you can talk to 500 scholars who have different opinions. If you don't have the time, you're thrown back to your local scholar basically, just like today. Thank you. Okay, one last question over here. So this is a question about the diaspora style communities,
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Muslims living in either smaller villages or places where there are not many mosques or Islamic communities. Has the internet, in your research, have you found the internet has increased participation or filled in a gap or? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, that was one of the main points of the whole presentation that it has filled gaps that have been there before.
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People just did not have other possibilities to access this knowledge, and now they have. And internet is pretty much everywhere. Even in the small village in upper Egypt, for example, you still can access the internet and find all the answers that you're looking for. Okay, thank you very much, Miriam,
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for this insightful talk about fatwares and social media surroundings. Thank you very much, a warm applause. Thank you. Thank you.