Book review

The question of religious authority in Islam, commonly referred to as “who speaks for Islam,” has been receiving more attention and added visibility in recent years due to a variety of factors, including the fact that more diasporic Muslim communities are intermingling with the fabric of new societies and, thus, contributing to accelerating processes of cross-cultural inoculation and cross-intellectual fertilization. Additionally, there is the fast growing, and swiftly expanding, new realm of digitalization of religion in the age of cyberspace, which opens the door for new voices to be heard in the field of ijtihad (re-interpretation of Islamic religious scriptures). This means inviting a plethora of new views and readings of Islamic religious texts, some of which are coming from outside traditional religious establishments,1 which opens the floodgates for an amalgamation of both positive effects and negative consequences as indicated in some of the scholarly publications on this topic.2