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Accepted Paper:
Muslim Dating Apps: Homogenising the Religious Halal/Haram Dichotomy
Farah Hasan
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
This paper expends how Muslim males negotiate, articulate and reaffirm their religious identity during partner selection on Islamically connotated dating apps. Providing a normative framework, these apps become religious authorities that disconnect and homogenise morality from cultural distinctions.
Paper long abstract:
Apps are able to exert influence in many people’s lives as they are ready to use with a touch of a fingertip. Recently, apps have been developed that possess a religious connotation and assist Muslims in their partner selection in a novel way. This paper will describe how such Islamically connotated dating apps shape the religious identity amongst Muslims. It will be revealed how Muslims males negotiate their religious identity by ethnographically examining the male users’ interaction on these smartphone apps. Such apps with their discursive logic draw from Islam’s textual repertoire and discursive traditions leading them to become a type of religious authority as the app’s framework guides users though their normative Islamic selection criteria. However, the apps also steer users into a doctrinal homogeneity that focuses on religious normativity. In the sense, it is argued that heterogenic approaches on how to define the dichotomy between halal and haram are disregarded and homogenised in online spaces.