The Center for the Study of Muslim Networks (CSMN) is located in Durham, North Carolina, the South East of the United States, but will extend outwards to encompass Islamic networks throughout the world. CSMN is to create an interlocking program of visiting fellows and workshops; international conferences; websites and other forms of public awareness and outreach; and a series of working papers available digitally and in book form. We also propose to continue to build on the courses we have offered so far. CSMN will foster collaboration among faculty concerned with Islamic studies from Duke, UNC-CH, North Carolina State University, Emory University, and several universities from the Muslim world. It will serve as a clearing house for information connected with Muslim networks while also bringing together representatives, whether scholars, activists or artists, from various institutions of knowledge production.

Distinctive to this program is its use of technology to study Muslim culture through the ages. The project of rethinking the Muslim world through the prism of information technology is new. There are few books and resources that deal specifically with the ways in which technicalization is affecting Muslim societies. CSMN will organize workshops to explore the role that the Internet has played in religious understanding, focusing as much as possible on the Muslim case. At the same time, it is hoped, the study of Muslim networks will increase humanists' use of, appreciation of and engagement with technological, comparative, and philosophical aspects of culture.

In short, CSMN will have three broad but complementary objectives: 1) to rethink Islam by focusing on the role of networks in Muslim societies; 2) to foster inclusive, sustained dialogue between international activists, artists and scholars of the Muslim world, and their US counterparts; and 3) to expand humanistic engagement with the benefits, as also the pitfalls, of technological appeals to cross-cultural norms and values.

CSMN will not be an area studies center nor will it be a center coordinating ecumenical dialogue. The civilizational dialogue envisioned will engage diverse collaborators who hope to learn from the exchange and who are not merely looking for a platform from which to articulate fixed positions, to affirm convergent world views or to reaffirm irreconcilable oppositions. CSMN will seek to identify shareable intellectual and material resources in order to face global challenges in such a way that all participants have a stake in its successful outcome.

Based at Duke University, CSMN will relate both to the Franklin Center and to its cluster of international program units and regional/ thematic centers.

Since the late seventies the popular western media has portrayed Muslim networks as contemporary expressions of collective violence, whose members are ideologues opposed to western interests. But from the perspective of a fourteen hundred year old world civilization, Muslim networks are something else. They represent the ways in which the Muslim umma, the Arabic word for community, came into being in the 7th century and spread globally as a transnational network of citizens of a virtual Muslim nation. Linked through nodes of a net that spanned large parts of the known world, Muslims were thus able to hold on to differences in terms of race, ethnicity and culture even as they strategically linked themselves with coreligionists for the purposes of trade, travel, pilgrimage, proselytization, colonization, migration. From its beginnings, this religiously defined nation was marked by movement and fluidity. These networks drew in members with shared interests from disparate, far-flung regions whether to perform the annual pilgrimage (hajj), or to promote mystical effervescence as in Sufi brotherhoods, or to seek commercial gain, as in trade guilds, or to exchange ideas as itinerant cleric-scholars.

During the 1990s the Internet became part of daily life in many parts of the world. While access in Africa and Asia remains limited for economic and political reasons, grassroots organizations are learning how to exploit the democratizing potential of e-connectivity and to circumvent attempts to centralize control. In Malaysia, for example, networks oppositional to the government have established a tiered system of distribution so that elites with computer access download materials on to hard copies which are then widely distributed into rural areas where they can be read aloud to groups of illiterate people. Virtual communities are becoming the norm, even if hotly contested, with technophiles and neo-Luddites debating whether they are the harbingers of a brave new world or the end of fully human life.

We presume that the information revolution emerges out of technological developments and organizational patterns long in place throughout the world. What is different is speed, scope and directness of communication. The Internet emphasizes communicative process over administrative structure, interaction over fixity, and it thus provides a lens through which community formation in the past may be analyzed and the present may be theorized, but its impact needs to be differentiated, and assessed from several perspectives.

Telepresence is a new form of association, and as such, it compels a reconsideration of the meaning of community: What is community when participants do not share place but can communicate as if they did? If shared place is not a necessary condition, is the notion of community as embodied contact a romantic projection of an idealized past? Sociologists since the 19th century have been worrying about the impact of technology on community, as though it possessed a solid, immutable core. But a century later, communities survive if in less solid but no less real forms.

The challenge for Muslim cybernauts is the same as for other communitarian netizens: how to define place and community in new ways that do not oppose virtual and real but rather see them as complementary? Can social networking in the space of flows of the Information superhighway provide an alternate context within which to build communities as small as a kinship group, or as large as a nation?

The Internet seems to empower individuals who would not otherwise have a public voice to express and present their opinions to strangers. However divergent from the norm, an individual can insist on her unorthodox position. A debate that could be closed in real space by the assertion of dominance by a majority remains open in virtual space. Heteroglossia and contestation replace the ideological closure of other forms of telecommunication such as newspapers, television, radio and even telephone. Dissension that might be quashed in an environment where hegemonic discourse held sway today simmers on beyond presumed endings. The horizontalization of relationships on the Net challenges traditional hierarchies. This democratizing aspect of the Net has clear ramifications for people living under authoritarian rule in many post-colonial Muslim states.