Safa Mubgar1
Recommendations for GCC and Iraqi Policymakers:
• While the youth’s use of social media in the GCC has been much remarked upon and reported, the use by conservative forces has gone comparatively unnoticed. A closer study of social media use by such forces and its impact on youth activists and GCC society at large is critical.
• Consider the changing platforms and applications which these groups use, together with their traditional means, and then encourage greater plurality by promoting comparable but moderate voices to run parallel to that.
• This chapter identifies the general outliers to standard patterns and suggests some reasons for this divergence. In light of this, GCC policymakers should assess and develop more nuanced and cohesive (rather than reactive) policies to deal creatively with modern day transnational social media networks.
1. I am grateful to James Spencer for his invaluable contribution, Dr Bashir Zain Al Abdin for his instructive guidance and commentary, Dr Omar Al-Ubaydli for his insightful comments and for organizing this workshop, and the wonderful Stephanie Lamy for being such a whiz kid.
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• Iraqi social media use is growing despite the very traditional structure of Iraqi society. However, moderate Iraqi politicians are not (with possible notable exceptions, such as Mahmoud Othman and Ayad Allawi) as proactive in utilizing social media as their more religious counterparts. This balance needs to be redressed by local moderate voices engaging with the people.
• Young Iraqis are now far more news and media savvy and are calling for reforms to fight corruption and improve social services across the sectarian, race, and religious divides. Promoting youth social activism and good citizenship through open, free, and interactive social media will be a stepping stone to greater future social cohesion.
• Both government and opposition figures and civil society actors should take to social media platforms, to outline, discuss, and debate social programs, development programs, and reforms. Such discussions need to be interactive and independent, allowing people to freely express their concerns, and importantly, to overcome their skepticism of government-controlled media messages or propaganda of the past.
• Iraqis have higher expectations of their government today and are more sceptical of old media, TV and newspapers; many believe social media is the future. External and divisive religious channels should not be permitted to determine this future.
Introduction
Much has been made of the role that modern communications technology, and in particular social media, played in fostering the Arab Spring in 2010/11: in mobilizing and organizing within the countries, in generating support among the diaspora, and public relations/lobbying of foreign governments. The upswelling of democratic yearning was visible not only via the traditional media channels of newspapers, radio and television, but also to everyone who chose to follow any of the actors – or the action – online. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, all contributed to events in ways and dimensions that would have been unimaginable only 20 years before.
Facebook now has well over 1 billion users and Twitter 500 million, so it is easy to see why an increasingly wide range of religious organizations are also turning to social media to make new contacts and build their public profiles. Although it is too early to say whether these networks have changed the way in which people practice
religion (and research in this area of interest is still very limited), faith-related pages and posts are now undeniably a major feature of many social media sites.
As a result of this cyber-migration, the e-battle for hearts and minds soon acquired more importance than the internal communications organizing and orchestrating the protests, particularly among the helpless but involved diaspora.
Similar actions and commentary were also seen during the Tehran Spring of 2009, from which many in the region, and among global youth as a whole, seem to have learned lessons.
Commentaries and analyses have also looked at the response of Arab governments – monarchies and republics alike – to the new media: their responsive e-tactics, hardware and software procurements, and methods of coping with the results. As with any other advance in capability, both sides have learnt from each other: the governments have learnt to be proactive in disseminating information from the activists, while the activists have learnt discretion and dissimulation.
Yet, there is another conservative group whose power is also threatened by the popular revolution but whose position and positioning has received little notice – the clerics. This chapter will attempt to examine how Islamist clerics, both Sunni and Shii, have adapted to the social media age. It will discuss the platforms they use and their means of propagation of their message as they seek to retain their influence, domestically and internationally, in an era when religion is ever more challenged by modernity and secularism and hierarchy by egalitarianism and individualism.
Indeed, the world is now in an age of iCTivism (“i” as in “I have the power to change things”, iPhone, iMac etc; ICT as in Information Communications Technology). Online jihad examples aside, religious messages are distributed widely, and the culture of “i” can lead some to act “glocally” (global issues, local impact) – for good and ill – in the search for transnational allies and followers. Extremist voices are currently resonating louder than those of reason and moderation, but the latter are gradually making themselves heard.
Indeed, while non-state actors and transnational networks in the Islamic world currently have a malign connotation, in fact most major Islamic organizations (Sufi, Ismaili Shia, Twelver Shia groups) are both major non-state actors – sometimes their budgets match that of small states – and transnational networks. While not necessarily pro-Western, they are usually a benign and moderating influence in the debate (although there are exceptions) and increasingly so as they expand their online presence.
Given the very recent nature of the online evolution, little research has as yet been carried out in the area of religious use of social media. Sources used therefore
are a mixture of news reports dealing with the subject, online research, and interviews with participants and recipients.
Researching the use of social media is a new and evolving field, and one to which the author comes as a practitioner, rather than an academic. While it is possible to contain one’s purview to the religious, to try to limit social media to a geographical area – in this case the Gulf States and Iraq – is almost impossible because social media has no boundaries. It exists across cultural and regional divides, bridging languages and time in an instant: raw information is pushed and opinions traded in this online sea of words and pictures.
It is probably worth pointing out here that the periodic calls for the Internet to be controlled clash not only with cherished democratic values, but also with the equally important right of freedom of religion. This applies whether it is government which tries to control the medium, or the major ISP, social media and search companies. There are ample legal tools to address bigoted articles and messages, whatever medium carries them: lawyers have successfully – and profitably – adapted from the age of newsprint, to broadcast media, and now to electronic and social media.2