International Conference

On 10–11 July 2026, the research group “Islam and Digitality: Media, Materiality, Hermeneutics”, funded by the Academy for Islam in Research and Society (AIWG) and the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), hosted its concluding international conference at Goethe University Frankfurt, bringing together scholars from Europe, North America, and Asia to explore how digitalisation is transforming Islamic religious life.

Over two days and six panels, speakers traced this transformation across three registers central to the project: media and memory, materiality, and hermeneutics. We heard how Instagram reshapes the memory of Black Muslim history, how AI tools risk amplifying historical misrepresentations of Ismaili heritage, how virtual-reality pilgrimage platforms create “proximal distance” to sacred sites, and how digital modelling of hadith transmission chains is opening new ways of reassessing early Shiʿi doctrinal history.
Two keynotes anchored the programme: Prof. Dr. Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor (Coventry) opened with findings on how digital and “analogue” Muslim life intersect across generations in the UK and Europe. Prof. Dr. Heidi Campbell (Texas A&M) followed with a proposal for understanding Islamic AI tools through their religious and “spiritual” affordances, comparing Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist AI models.

Across the panels, a few questions kept resurfacing: how religious authority today is co-produced between scholars, everyday users, and algorithms rather than handed down from one to the other; how digital tools are reshaping interpretive practice, from Qurʾanic lexicography to fatwa-making; and how the real gains in access and reach that digital platforms offer come bundled with real risks — AI hallucination, standardisation, and the flattening of religious nuance.

We were glad to welcome speakers working on Ahmadiyya social media practice, women influencers in Kyrgyzstan, sectarian YouTube preaching in South Asia, trans and queer Muslim community-building on Twitter, “halal dating” apps, and Sufi mentorship in the age of social media — proof of just how wide-ranging, and how urgent, the study of Islam and digitality has become.

Flyer with program: IUD-Flyer_Digital

Abstracts & Short Bios: IUD_Booklet