Introduction

Religion is not just transmitted via particular media. The forms of mediation should actually be regarded as an integral part of the definition of religion. Religions are to a large extent shaped by their dominant means of communication. Whether they are mainly oral, codified in writing, or further distributed in print has significance. Printing technology was an ‘agent of change’ in the Protestant Reformation in Europe (Eisenstein 1979), and likewise digital technologies are probably crucial to transformations of contemporary religious systems.

Throughout history, religious traditions have had to be translated (or ‘transmediated’) for new generations in changing contexts of communication. Religion ‘cannot be analysed outside the forms and practices of mediation that define it’ (Meyer and Moors 2006: 7). It then becomes paramount to explore how the transition from one mode of mediated communication to another contributes to reconfiguring a particular religious practice. The focus should be on the cultural practices of mediation rather than on the media themselves, as already suggested by the communication scholar Jesús Martín-Barbero (Martín-Barbero and Fox 1993), based on his Latin American experiences. ‘It is in the emergence of the interstices’, Homi Bhabha writes, ‘– the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural values are negotiated’ (Bhabha 1994: 2). One could say the same for Shi‘a religious communities, in the context of the new digital world, when ideas and institutions are contested and created through a process of mediation and, as will be discussed below, mediatisation.

However, the extent to which new media technologies are driving forces in transformations of the Shi‘a branch of the Islamic religion and in the creation of third spaces of religious hybridity is a key issue that will distinguish the theoretical approach to be discussed in this chapter. By ‘new media’, this contribution points to the contemporary digitisation of communication. Small-scale digital media present a ritual view of the communication of new energy, as these tools are woven into daily social interaction within a variety of communities. They invite ‘user-generated content’ as symbolic sharing, although the transmission of view still applies when religious actors use these new media to reach out via new forms of mediation (Lundby 2013: 226).