Digital Islam across Europe: Understanding Muslims’ Participation in Online Islamic Environments

“Digital Islam in Europe: Understanding Muslims’ Participation in Islamic Online Environments” focuses on online environments in Lithuania, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The countries are selected to maximize both diversity and comparability.

The United Kingdom has a very visible digital presence and a strong influence partly due to its large and well-established Muslim population and partly due to the spread and place of the English language in digital environments.

But Muslim groups in Sweden and Spain have also grown strongly in recent decades, which has meant that these countries often appear as both producers and consumers of Islamic online environments (OIE).

Compared to the United Kingdom, Sweden and Spain, Muslims in Poland and Lithuania are mainly consumers of OIE (not least of websites and social platforms that publish in English). The University of Gothenburg is the Swedish partner in the project.

With their competencies in Islamic Studies, Church-State relations and quantitative sociology, PI Larsson and CO-I Willander will partly conduct a survey and interview study among Muslim online producers / consumers in Sweden and partly ensure that the other countries can conduct a survey study. which is comparable.

The most important research questions are: • What are Muslims in the five selected countries looking for when they turn to online platforms that aim to provide guidance to Muslims, and why? • How do individuals and groups become recognized online influencers or platforms that gain influence at national and / or transnational European level? • Do users of Muslim online guides change their religious and social practices as a result of how they use the internet and social media, and if so, how?

The project uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate what the interaction between online and offline environments looks like, as well as a netnographic method to analyze user habits when it comes to OIE.