Muslims and social media : a scoping review

As Muslim individuals, communities, and institutions have been transformed by the digital revolution, a literature has developed that seeks to contribute knowledge about these changes. Pioneering studies in this field suggest that this literature has a focus on digital documents. This scoping literature review aims to find out whether this focus is still valid. Therefore, we examine all studies on Muslims and social media that can be retrieved from the databases Scopus, Web of Science, Index Islamicus and Atla Religion Database between 2010 and 2022, using the following keywords: Facebook; Twitter (tweets); YouTube; Instagram; TikTok; Snapchat; and Telegram (n = 359). Our findings show that interest in studying Muslims on social media has grown significantly in recent decades and that most studies have focused on non-conflictual use of social media. Most of the studies are corpus studies, i.e. big data, data scraping, or descriptive analysis of websites, Twitter accounts, or Facebook pages (82 percent). Thus, this literature review shows that the study of Islam, Muslims, and Islamic online environments is flourishing in various fields of scholarship. However, the strong focus on descriptive documentary studies should be complemented by more studies that collect new empirical data through interviews, surveys, and mixed methods. It is only by engaging with the users of these services that we can answer when, what, and why individuals do or do not do something on social media.
DIGITISLAM: Digital Islam across Europe – Understanding Muslim’s Participation in Online Islamic Environments