Islamic Emoticons and Religious Authority

This paper builds upon research on the emergence and use of emoticons on transnational, English-language Islamic website forums, starting in the early 2000s. It sets them within the broader history of the emoticon, which emerged around 1980 as a visual compensation for what users considered the visual inadequacy of text-based communication to accurately communicate its sender’s emotional state, and acquired increasingly pictorial elements over time (from a punctuation smiley face to a yellow and then an animated one, for example). It maps the young history of Islamic emoticons, outlining the ways in which this field has been defined (and contested) within online Muslim communities. It focuses first on particular websites’ endorsement of certain emoticons as Islamic (a smiley face with a hijab, e.g.), and then turns to the debates about emoticons that forum users have raised. These debates range from questioning the acceptability of any figural or humanoid depictions as conflicting with the normative Sunni position against figural art in religious contexts, to the acceptability of 'secular' emoticons on self-identified Islamic websites. Unlike the generic smileys of yesteryear, today’s emoticons reflect the personal expression of particular communities – in this case, practicing Muslims. Yet, this paper argues, they do more than reflect: they encourage forum members in the ongoing process of cultivating or disciplining a pious self. They provide visual religious credibility, particularly through pious phrase or Qur’anic verse emoticons (an Arabic-script calligraphic depiction of the greeting “salaam w aleikum”, for example), and particularly for the many Muslims around the contemporary world for whom Arabic is a foreign and often unwieldy language. As a result, this history points to a new arena for the globalization of Islam.