Islam on the Internet: The Jinn and the Objectification of Islam

Abstract: This paper is an ontological investigation of discourses about the jinn, or spirits, on an Internet information portal site and a chat room. These Web discourses relate to what some anthropologists have termed the Great and Little Traditions of Islam, but with greater disparity than could ever be identified in “real world,” Muslim-majority settings. Great and Little Web jinn discourses may best be understood as existing in dialectical tension with the ongoing process of the “objectification” of Islam in diaspora Islamic communities. Considered against ethnographic research on the jinn specifically and Islam more broadly, jinn stories on the Internet both reflect and may shape Islamic religious practice today.