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

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 a postsecular lens, where religion enters into new engagement with the secular by addressing questions about the public role of faith, it is important to look at how secular middlebrow creative platforms, such as TED, produce knowledge on Islam and how both Muslim and non-Muslim spokespersons interpret Islam.

New media studies on Islam have been empirically focused on a range of practices and discourses, including Islamic activism (Eckert et al., 2019; Sumiala & Korpiola, 2017), online militaristic discourse (Kepel & Ghazaleh, 2004; Pennington & Krona, 2019), dynamics of Islamic authority (Bunt, 2003; Turner, 2007; Bunt, 2018), the role of Internet to eradicate misrepresentations of Islam (Larsson, 2007), and virtual Islamic discussion groups (Kesvani, 2019; Larsson, 2016). Eickelman and Anderson (2003) identify cyberspace as an emerging public sphere that attempts to “re-intellectualize Islam” through pushing the discourse on Islam beyond the confines of institutionalized voices. Such re-intellectualization produces a non-state version of Islam or, more precisely, as Sajoo (2004) puts forward, a “Civic Islam.” These intellectual processes using new media platforms as a mouthpiece often focus on the importance of ensuring social, cultural, and economic participation of Muslims with their non-Muslim counterparts (Dessing et al., 2016; Van Bruinessen & Allievi, 2013). Such endeavors often seek to challenge traditional positions, including patriarchy, radicalization, cultural dominance, and religious authoritarianism. These tendencies of challenging traditional positions and narrating Islam to make it broadly compatible with secular norms are very evident in TED Talks. By analyzing TED’s discursive orientations while talking about Islam, this study contributes to discussions on internal factors and ideological commitments evident in most contemporary narratives on Islam produced in new media.

TED Talks form a new popularizing quasi-academic genre that presents innovative ideas and stories using various discursive techniques to narrate some unique challenges and compelling and awe-inducing opportunities in not more than 20 min on average. TED has been widely criticized for its pseudo-intellectualism and elitism because of its strong editorial policies, censorship, and exclusivity in selecting ideas, speakers, and even the audience. For instance, Wilson (2013) argues that TED presentations are often “bathed in the atmosphere of celebrity and revelation” (p. 43). According to Wilson (2013), the democratizing rhetoric, particularly evident in TED’s new media presence, is often shadowed by TED’s strict, authoritative editorial instruction and lack of room for debate or questions. Others have noted that TED is essentially “middlebrow mega-church infotainment” (Bratton, 2013), and the TEDx talks series shows that TED no longer controls its content or its brand (Merchant, 2013). Cadwalladr (2010), by looking at how the TED platform functions and how TED recruits both its conference audience and speakers, observes TED as “awfully elitist.” These evaluations indicate that TED is deeply influenced by elitism, corporatism, and intellectual practice that bestows a privileged position to Western liberal humanism and secular social orders.

Yet, it is important not to ignore the peculiar communication style practiced by TED speakers that lends itself particularly well to disseminating innovative ideas, characterized by condensing knowledge in a conducive and persuasive way to capture the interest of the global audience. There are numerous studies that examine TED’s communication styles and popularity. For instance, di Carlo (2015, 2016) examines the characteristics of TED Talks as a popular genre. Sugimoto and Thelwall (2013) identify TED as one of the most successful mediated initiatives in science popularization. The popularity of TED Talks, according to them, is also an indication of the way in which TED enables itself to cater to the public perception of science. However, these studies have been evaluating TED with a narrowed disciplinary focus. While some studies extend their focus to explore the elitism and corporatism in TED Talks with sharp criticism (Lacy, 2008, 2010), others ignore these implications and proceed with developing a sense of the “success story” of TED’s communication strategies (DaVia Rubenstein, 2012). This article takes a third path and acknowledges the importance of TED’s specific communication style and discursive strategies without ignoring the serious implications of TED’s elitism (Said, 1983) and authoritarian editorial policies.

There is a tendency for TED speakers to develop a narrative on Islam by highlighting the aspects of Islam that are perceived to be more relatable to a secular Western audience. In particular, TED speakers on Islam have drawn on Judeo-Christian models of the divine message, spirituality, justice, and religious extremism to represent a version of Islam that is arguably acceptable to a secular liberal Western audience.

Lesley Hazelton,¹ in her TED Talk titled On reading the Koran, says:

The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. So, one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh – jealously insisting on no other gods…

Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter, that is the Lord’s Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined.

Hazleton conducts a cross-scriptural analysis of the Qur’ān with Biblical discourse to articulate the Qur’ān—(1) as a continuation of the Biblical revelations, (2) as a scripture containing Biblical characters, and (3) as an utterance on the concept of God that is already familiar to Judeo-Christian world of faith. For instance, by using the notion of “the Qur’ān as a continuation of Judeo-Christian scriptures,” she attempts to generate a consensus with the audience on common points such as universal truth, transcultural values, and scriptural interconnection. Her approach in introducing key figures as “Biblical figures” reveals that in the exchange of knowledge on Islam within her talk, Judeo-Christian understanding remains front and center.

Her words also echo an important postsecular imagination of Islam using a Judeo-Christian framework due to the innate connection between the secular norms and Judeo-Christian religious tradition, albeit by negation. For the West, the awareness of what is missing, as Habermas (2008) articulated as the emptiness of the secular, has motivated to once again come in contact with the Judeo-Christian tradition in their search for answers that secularity has failed to provide. Media studies indicate that these references [to Judeo-Christian tradition], in general, are not a mere “affirmation of faith but rather a rhetorical device used to compare a social core of values with a group or activity either in an expansive or restrictive context” (Hartmann et al., 2005, p. 230). This complex entanglement between the lingering presence of the Judeo-Christian worldview rests on the notion that secularism, both as practice and a philosophical frame, is a distillation of Judeo-Christian standpoints. In other words, in a postsecular communication, the emphasis on Judeo-Christian tradition often means a spiritual affirmation of the secular, Western norms and is employed as a theological frame to express the religious background of secular values.

However, there is a hermeneutical quandary in these postsecular communications of Islam using the Judeo-Christian framework. Firstly, Judeo-Christian religious understanding and Islamic perspectives on the Abrahamic figures such as Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are far more complex than, for instance, how Hazleton tries to represent. In other words, the Qur’ān deemphasizes the uniqueness that Judaism and Christianity observe in some Abrahamic figures. Rather, it considers their spiritual dynamics as the same as that of other prophets. Therefore, the difficulty of establishing a smooth interaction and dialogue between Islam and Judeo-Christian tradition is compounded by the de-emphasizing of certain essential Articles of faith, such as the divine sonship of Jesus and crucifixion. Secondly, the overall framework of scriptural reasoning used in the above extract undermines a clearer cross-scriptural analysis because of the sheer amount of indefensible concepts from both sides (Islam and Judeo-Christian) left unattended. In such contexts, more focus is directed towards a consensus of taste than the consensus of truth.

While Hazleton prefers to engage in an evaluation of the articles of faith from a Judeo-Christian perspective, another TED Speaker, Dalia Mogahed,² employs the Christian framework to evaluate the tension caused and demonization of religion as an aftermath of the acts of militant factions and terrorist groups.

Mogahed, in her TED Talk titled What it’s like to be Muslim in America, says:

ISIS has as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity. Both groups claim to base their ideology on their holy book. But when you look at them, they’re not motivated by what they read in their holy book. It’s their brutality that makes them read these things into the scripture.

Mogahed ascertains that the trend of locating the source of terrorism in religion or tagging ISIS with Islam, in fact, obscures ISIS’s political origin. Mogahed’s approach, in some ways, reflects broader critiques of Western populist assumptions that link terrorism and Islam. As Jackson (2007) argues, such an assumption “depoliticizes, decontextualizes and dehistoricizes the grievances and political struggles of groups and societies, thereby de-linking the motives of the terrorists from the policies of Western states or their allies” (p. 421). Mogahed’s framing is influenced by the arguments that equating terrorism with Islam and unwillingness to see parallels in other religious terrorist groups justifies anti-Islamic sentiments. Therefore, Mogahed argues for an alternative reading of ISIS by locating it in a broader space of “religious terrorism.” She employs a reference to Christianity to see how religious terrorism exists and functions in this religion, using the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as an example.

In other words, Mogahed sees there is a popular narrative in the West that projects Islam as the only source of any forms of religious terrorism or religiously inspired violence. These narratives often undermine the religious connection of other terrorist groups with religions like Christianity. Mogahed sees these biased narratives as problematic because they engender anti-Islamic sentiments in the secular West. She invites her secular audience to re-orient their engagement with Islam by centering it on a renewed understanding of Islamic terrorism that aligns with other forms of violent religious ideology (i.e., the Ku Klux Klan) within the Judeo-Christian majority societies.

Precisely, the recurrence of a Judeo-Christian framework in these two TED Talks demonstrates the pivotal role of Judeo-Christian references in narrating Islam to a secular-influenced audience of TED Talks. Rather than making a micro-level analysis of the dichotomy between Judaic and Christian understandings, these TED speakers develop a framework grounded on the idea of a unified Judeo-Christian discourse. More clearly, this emphasized reference to Judeo-Christian faith and practices in discussions on Islam is a strong indication of the privileged spiritual position that the former enjoys in a secular society. The prominence of Judeo-Christian references also highlights how TED speakers conceive Judeo-Christian tradition as a prolific source of compassion, justice, and other egalitarian and secular values.

Another more apparent discourse feature emphasizes creating awe-inducing moments to explore the opportunities wherein the affective forces of those moments can propel a postsecular rapprochement. In her TED Talk, Lesley Hazleton explains her encounter with the Qur’ān using a language that is infused with both secular rationality and the possibility of enchantment.

While talking about the Qur’ān, Hazleton says:

I knew enough, that is, to know that I’d be a tourist in the Koran – an informed one, an experienced one even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading someone else’s holy book. (Laughter) So I read slowly…

But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Qur’ān – that feeling of ‘I get it now’ – it would slip away overnight, and I’d come back in the morning wondering if I wasn’t lost in a strange land, and yet the terrain was very familiar…

The larger background of her description is based on recognizing the Qur’ān as a sacred text; more clearly, someone else’s [lines 2–3] sacred scripture. Using phrases such as “tourist in the Koran” [line 1] and “reading someone else’s holy book” [line 3], Hazleton establishes her identity as an outsider. She uses these disclaimers to convey her doctrinal distance from the Qur’ān and her possible disenfranchisement with scripturalist reading. For instance, she uses a non-religious expression—“tourist in the Koran”—instead of saying, for instance, “pilgrim in the Qur’ān” to convey her quest for a pleasurable yet transient experience that underlies the logic of modernity. However, Hazleton does not identify her touristic journey with the Qur’ān as a non-expert one. She legitimizes her expertise by describing her authorship as a biographer of Muhammad as well as by explicitly stating that she is informed and experienced.

Hazleton continues:

The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells, and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. And I began to grasp why it is said that the Qur’ān is really the Qur’ān only in Arabic. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue.

The careful yet creative selection of these leitmotifs from the Qur’ān is employed to seek a middle path between the sacred and secular. She approaches metaphors as vehicles to obscure ‘Otherness’. Rather than deepening on religious hermeneutics to interpret the Qur’ān, she connects the plots in the Qur’ān with her personal experience in the Sinai Desert of Yemen.

At the same time, Hazleton creates a sense of awe, wonder, and mystery to make her explanation more captivating. For instance, she elucidates her almost magical experience with the Qur’ān using expressions such as “the rhythmic cadence of [the language of the Qur’ān],” “the Qur’ān is really the Qur’ān only in Arabic,” “the more you add, the more seems to go missing,” and “Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality” [lines 5–7]. By using these expressions, Hazleton depicts an irresistible dimension of human experience with the Qur’ān beyond the realms of religiosity and infuses inspiration into the minds of her secular audience.

These forms of imagining of Islamic scripture strongly engage in moving beyond the normative narratives and representations of this religious scripture by the religious (as a sacred text) as well as by the radical secular (as irrelevant text). In other words, the speaker adopts a new commitment to Islam that is different from that of both the religious and secular. This new commitment to Islam, this study argues, is a marker of postsecular imagination, in which the journey is moving beyond the secular but without falling back to conventional forms of religiosity. These awe-inducing and revelational expressions come to represent, in emerging new media discourse on Islam, for instance, the ultimate sign of postsecular personalized narrative.

Given the complexity of the postsecular imagination, what sort of emphasis/de-emphasis could express a path beyond religious fundamentalism and radical secularism? Hazleton highlights the importance of artistic beauty in the Qur’ān rather than discussing and clarifying the linguistic significance of specific words. She recreates the history of the Qur’ān by highlighting its interconnection with Arabian indigenous poetry and literary public spheres. For instance, she says the rhythmic language reminds her “of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory” [lines 3–4]. Hazelton connects scriptural reading to artistic and cultural performances, literary forms, and sensory travel experiences to create a sense of secular aesthetic value in the text.

Hazleton also uses various types of awe-inducing expressions to motivate her listeners. Using these expressions, she legitimizes a search for meaning in the Qur’ān that is outside the premises of institutionalized and traditional religious belief. For instance, Hazleton uses expressions such as “resist the temptation,” “mystical chapters,” “feeling of ‘I get it now’,” “wondering if I wasn’t lost in a strange land,” “the rhythmic cadence,” and “an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read”; these indicate the abundant enthrallment, emotion, and a sense of enchantment. The recurrent words of enchantment with both their connotative and denotative meanings constitute a powerful postsecular reading of the Qur’ān that aims to fuel listeners and arouse their desire to experience the Qur’ān. This communicative strategy, operating as part of a postsecular imagination, represents active efforts to acknowledge, embrace, and seek affective thinking in a way that goes beyond conventional secular rationality.

While Hazleton talks about the Qur’ān by identifying herself as a non-Muslim “tourist,” a Muslim TED speaker—Dalia Mogahed—narrates her encounter with the Qur’ān differently.

Mogahed says:

I did not just passively accept the faith of my parents. I wrestled with the Qur’ān. I read and reflected and questioned and doubted and, ultimately, believed. My relationship with God – it was not love at first sight. It was a trust and a slow surrender that deepened with every reading of the Qur’ān. Its rhythmic beauty sometimes moves me to tears. I see myself in it. I feel that God knows me. Have you ever felt like someone sees you, completely understands you, and yet loves you anyway? That’s how it feels.

Mogahed elucidates her encounter with the Qur’ān as that of a Muslim during the process of faith formation by emphasizing the efficacy of an individualized interpretation. She highlights the independent formulation of faith rather than a traditional mode of faith transportation from generation to generation. She uses the phrase “relationship with God” [lines 2–3] to signify her agentic participation in the faith. Mogahed, by using the phrase “I wrestled with the Qur’ān” [line 1], also sets up a counter-discourse to the popular Western misrepresentation of Muslim women as a group that has been “brainwashed” by patriarchal religious culture (Wheeler, 2014). She uses wrestling as a metaphor to denote her engagement with the Qur’ān as an intellectually laborious and strenuous journey. She uses this phrase to implicitly express her opposition to the narrow and negative stereotyped construction and projection of the roles of Muslim women in religious spheres as passive believers. She illustrates her tryst with the Qur’ān as a “slow surrender” [lines 3–4], a growing recognition of the divinity of the scripture rather than a blind and immediate acceptance. She masks the act of “surrender” with the tones of mystical enchantment to make it more appealing. This expression of self-surrender as an essential spiritual virtue has a centuries-old history and has strong connections with Judeo-Christian mystical language. It is, for instance, significant in the work of Meister Eckhart (Caputo, 1974; McGinn, 2008). Mogahed employs awe-inducing expressions such as slow surrender and literary exaltations of the Qur’ān to depict a spirituality that takes the form of an inner encounter of the divinity mobilized by one’s open-ended questions. She uses this language of felt experience to develop the collective learning of the Qur’ān along with her audience.

Precisely, both TED speakers employ awe-inducing language, describing complex emotions in depicting their profound experience with the Qur’ān as meaningful, and filled with amazement and beauty. However, they use it differently. While the first TED speaker, being self-identified as non-Muslim, illustrates the encounter with the Qur’ān from an agnostic aspect by connecting it with her lived experiences, the second speaker highlights mystical aspects filled with emotions, critical and rational thinking, and independent journey to faith as well as expressions of power. Furthermore, both speakers repeatedly emphasize the aesthetic aspect of the Qur’ān, its literary beauty. These narrative patterns, as Ratti (2013) argues, echo new aesthetic turns dominant in postsecular communications that opens up avenues for a re-enchantment through aesthetics. The interconnection between aestheticism and postsecularism then leads to seeing the sacred through secularism; thus, it offers a new framework for secular translations of the sacred in new media discourse.

Another dominant feature of TED Talks on Islam is the emphasis given upon secular translation of Islamic themes and idioms, which is actualized through the process of re-imagining Islamic topics with an aim to establish a postsecular hermeneutic margin and allow Islamic idea to gain popularity, acceptance, and legitimacy beyond its context of origin.

Naif Al-Mutawa,³ in his TED Talk titled Superheroes Inspired by Islam, says:

Consider this: like the prophets, all the superheroes are missing parents. Superman’s parents die on Krypton before the age of one. Bruce Wayne, who becomes Batman, loses his parents at the age of six in Gotham City. Spiderman is raised by his aunt and uncle. And all of them, just like the prophets who get their message from God through Gabriel, get their message from above. Peter Parker is in a library in Manhattan when the spider descends from above and gives him his message through a bite. Bruce Wayne is in his bedroom when a big bat flies over his head, and he sees it as an omen to become Batman. Superman is not only sent to Earth from the heavens or Krypton, but he’s sent in a pod, much like Moses was on the Nile. (Laughter) And you hear the voice of his father, Jor-El, saying to Earth, “I have sent to you my only son”.

Al-Mutawa introduces prophets of Islam by comparing them with fictional characters rooted within American pop culture. The depiction of religious themes using comics and humorous language is no longer considered a deviant form (Lindsey & Heeren, 1992). The increasing role of popular culture in religious discourses shows they are no longer restricted to the traditional communication schemes set by religious institutions. This changing pattern in disseminating a wide range of religious and spiritual beliefs, ideas, identities, and praxis also highlights the need to focus on the role of the translation process of religious ideas into popular genres, like comics (Santo, 2014). Al-Mutawa highlights a secular translation that, rather than openly propagating an “Islamic way,” adopts a language that emblematizes an essentially humanist and universalistic Islam and spotlights commonality through shifting boundaries and connecting identities. Instead of depicting saints and prophets with common traits such as masculinity, mysticism, and enchantment, Al-Mutawa focuses on comparative analysis, thereby translating spiritual figures into superheroes of fiction using a series of life events and social functions. In other words, Al-Mutawa translates mystical figures such as prophets through careful selection of expressions.

However, the selection process not only informs a translation of the sacred into secular but also reflects the interaction that Al-Mutawa aims to build between Islam and Judeo-Christian and North American pop culture. For instance, in the above extract, Al-Mutawa emphasizes Judeo-Christian spiritual figures such as Jesus and Moses. While Jesus is represented without referring to his name directly, Moses has been explicitly compared. In contrast, Muhammad is only implicitly referred to through indications such as missing parents during childhood and receiving a divine message through Gabriel. Moreover, the comic characters and superheroes he has considered for comparison are all from American comic culture. In other words, while talking about a creative narrative that is inspired by Islam, Al-Mutawa pays equal attention to the Judeo-Christian context as well as to secular American pop culture. Nevertheless, there are more patterns of secular translations evident in TED Talks on Islam.

Faisal Abdul Rauf,⁴ in his TED Talk titled Lose Your Ego, Find Your Compassion, attempts to outline the reasons and rationale for the necessity of exploring a “common God.”

Rauf says:

Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab – and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. One is asking for angur – one is, say, an Englishman – one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. And they have a fight and an argument because – “I want grapes”. “I want eneb”. “I want angur” – not knowing that the word that they are using refers to the same reality in different languages.

By highlighting an Islamic idea using Sufi interpretations, Rauf focuses on the need to assimilate Islam into the modern Western religious landscape. He legitimizes this argument by referring to a Sufi anecdote attributed to a 13th-century Sufi mystic Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi. Rauf personalizes the story attributed to Rumi to make it more convincing to his TED audience. In the actual story depicted in one of the earliest English translations of Rumi’s magnum opus, Mathnawī, the conversation is between four people—a Persian, an Arab, a Turk, and a Greek (Nicholson, 1926, p. 413). Rauf customizes the anecdote by changing it into a conversation between three people—a Turk, an Arab, and an Englishman. He acknowledges this modification by saying, “but for my sake.” Firstly, he chooses a “Malay” and then changes into “an Englishman.” This attempt of translation or personalization reflects the prominence given to a Western secular audience. This process of constructing and reproducing Western versions of Islamic themes and stories revolves around the securitization and normalization process to generate a sense of “Islam possible” among the Western and secular influenced worldviews (Mavelli, 2013). Therefore, the metaphors in the above extract of Rauf’s TED Talk act as “metaphors of interaction” rather than mere extensions of meaning.

Both speakers use the concept of negotiation to underline the dynamic linkages between different standpoints on faith. They use various translation mechanisms in this open-ended process of constructing identities with efforts to dissolve boundaries. By doing so, they attempt to remind their TED audience about the significance of a complementary learning process (Habermas, 2008) to balance shared identity. Notwithstanding, such negotiations are often held within a framework based on mainstream and dominant religious and socio-cultural norms and, in this case, that measuring scale is a combination of Christian-Western-Secular values.

Since the truth claims of Islam are deeply interwoven with its own particular language, a great deal of theological and spiritual significance of these Islamic topics is already “lost in secular translation.” The moral weight given to the secular knowledge framework offers a strong argument against the complementary learning process because of the tendency to exclude traditional religious interpretations. By endorsing a moderate translation of Islamic themes into a secular-acceptable language, these TED speakers promote a highly attenuated understanding of Islam. At the same time, by establishing a connection with history, language, and spirituality, these translations of Islam on TED, to a limited degree, evoke a counter-hegemonic narrative on Islam that challenges the traditional authoritative (mis)representations of Islam. As textual evidence of new mediatized narratives on Islam, these secular translations offer emotional anchors to the emerging online spokespersons for the continued (re)invention of Islam with moderate tones.