When Islam goes to TED Talk: discourse features of a postsecular storytelling on Islam in new media

Contemporary Islam https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-022-00496-4 When Islam goes to TED: features of a postsecular storytelling on Islam in new media Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath1,2 Accepted: 9 October 2022 © The Author(s) 2022 Abstract New media studies on Islam are focused on investigating the characteristics of Islamic discourse or Muslim practices in digital landscape. Since there is increasing visibility of knowledge production on Islam by non-Islamic, secular middlebrow spaces such as TED, it is significant to examine their way of communicating Islamic ideas to a global audience. By conducting a discourse analysis of TED Talks on Islam, this study explores the dominant discursive strategies of TED Talks on Islam. By doing so, this study introduces how a more empirically and context-oriented understanding of the concept of the postsecular would benefit considerably from examining the discursive features of the contemporary nexus of Islam, new media, popular culture, and storytelling. Three main discourse features are found: (1) emphasis on a Judeo-Christian framework, (2) use of awe-inducing, personalized storytelling, and (3) secular translation of Islamic themes. While this emerging online-mediated discourse on Islam informs about new storytelling strategies, the language used adopts a highly attenuated perception of Islamic themes, and a great deal of traditional Islamic interpretation is replaced with excessively individualistic assumptions that are often tailored to cater to Western secular liberal mindsets. Keywords New media · Islam · Secular · TED Talks · Postsecular · Storytelling Introduction Contemporary discourse on Islam is actively engaged in imagining itself beyond the false binaries of “the Islam and the West.” This transition, as Dabashi (2013) remarks, “requires the crafting of a new language for coming * Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath 1 Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia 2 Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Building EM, Parramatta Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Contemporary Islam to terms with Islam…[a] language [that] is in conversation with the emerging, not the disappearing, world” (p. 3–4). These new narratives should also be capable of addressing questions such as how spokespersons of Islam, particularly the ones with experience in engaging with the Western secular societies, have been able to use innovative and creative mediatized spaces to craft stories on Islam. By locating TED Talks on Islam as examples of these new narratives, this study seeks to understand the discursive features of the new mediatization of Islam in terms of what makes them persuasive and popular and how Islamic themes and vocabulary manifest themselves in TED Talks. It also asks how TED speakers on Islam make choices that define the nuances of their religious identity and explore how that is associated with parts of their identities. By examining the discursive features of TED Talks on Islam, this study introduces an empirically and context-oriented understanding of the postsecular discourse and develops the concept of the postsecular into a broader interpretive framework for studying the most recent trends in online mediated storytelling on Islam in contemporary secular Western societies. An engagement with these questions of Islam’s relation to the secular reflects Habermasian ideas of post-secularism that argue for a revision of the secularization hypothesis to accelerate a renewed debate on religion and the secular (Habermas, 2008). In turn, Ratti (2013) describes the postsecular as a paradox; an effort “to find a nonsecular secularism, a non-religious religion” (p. xx). From a new media studies perspective, it is necessary to understand this renewed engagement between the secular West and Islam not only as a result of the socio-political changes but also as a result of the advance of contemporary media technologies that open up more spaces to offer “re-imaginations of Islam.” In other words, the new media storytellers with a postsecular approach validate and accept principles of faith so long as they are flexible and befittingly progressive with scope for developing a liberal subject formation and do not represent any institutionalized interpretation of the religious discourse. This study explores some of the dominant features of a set of TED Talks on Islam presented by both Muslim and non-Muslim experts with an aim to communicate beyond the confines of religion. TED (technology, entertainment, and design), founded in 1984, is a non-profit organization dedicated to presenting and curating innovative ideas through storytelling. TED organizes conferences to bring together “prominent academics, educators, researchers, philanthropists, environmentalists, scientists, technologists, artists, activists, and others to attend and present short lectures – …TED Talks – in their areas of research and expertise” (TED, n.d). The video recordings of these presentations are curated and released under a Creative Commons license allowing their free promotions and reproductions. They also made available with transcripts and subtitles in more than 100 languages. This study conducts a detailed discourse analysis of the selected TED Talks on Islam to explore how speakers produce knowledge about Islam using storytelling and how the speakers perceive and interpret Islam. 13 Contemporary Islam Literature review This literature review will briefly describe the major concepts of framing, discuss existing studies on new media discourse on Islam and provide a critical review of TED Talks with a particular focus on the platform and its knowledge production patterns. New media and Islam Numerous studies have sought to investigate Islam in the digital era and the features of mediatized discourses. Most of these studies have limited their investigation to Islamic outlets, such as mainstream Islamic websites, Islamic digital videos, and Muslim online content producers such as bloggers and vloggers (Bunt, 2000, 2009; Campbell, 2010). These studies have tried to make sense of the role of new media in a Muslim’s religious life and the number of social and faith-based factors which inform and guide their responses to the possibilities and challenges offered by digital media. They also led to the formation of theories of Islamic identity in a digital age (Larsson, 2007; Sands, 2010; Hoffmann & Larsson, 2014; Pennington & Kahn, 2018; Kesvani, 2019; Fakhruroji, 2019). However, there are only limited studies that investigate the discursive features and nature of the new media narratives on digital media (el-Nawawy & Khamis, 2009; Moll, 2012; Echchaibi, 2011, 2012). Again, one of the limitations is that the central focus is often upon new media spaces occupied by religious communities and directed toward religious audiences. However, in thinking through Islam in new media via (...truncated)