Research Group Islam and Digitality: Mediality, Materiality, Hermeneutics

The research group Islam and Digitality: Mediality, Materiality, Hermeneutics explores how normative justifications of religious content, hermeneutic procedures, aesthetic practices and constructions of Islamic history are changing in the course of digital transformation. The project is based on a collaboration between the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Erfurt, the Institute for Studies in the Culture and Religion of Islam(ISKRI) at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology(BIIT) at Humboldt University in Berlin. The research is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and carried out under the umbrella of the Academy for Islam in Science and Society(AIWG).

In the sub-project at the University of Erfurt, Jasmin Eder and Christoph Günther explore ways in which Muslim actors create digital content such as podcasts, images and videos and publish them on social media platforms in order to articulate specific interpretations of how Islam should be lived, interpreted and proclaimed.  We connect this to examining perspectives of students of Islamic theology on these media and the respective content creators and how these contents are relevant to their own religiosity.