The crisis of religious authority : education, information and technology

![CDATA[The challenge to religious authority in Islam has grown out of its bruising encounter with the West from the beginning of the nineteenth century and from the first stirrings of secularisation through military and educational reform. Historians of modern Islam are familiar with this account of the origins of reformist movements. In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with a different order of change: the growth of a global Islamic diaspora, the impact of educational reform on a new generation of Muslims growing up in a Western consumer culture, the rapid advance of information technology and the emerging culture of individualism among Muslim youth. These macro-social changes necessarily represent a challenge to traditional forms of religious knowledge and constitute a crisis of authority. This religious crisis has a clear parallel with religious individualism, the rise of a religious market place and new spirituality in Europe and USA. There are, nevertheless, significant differences in the contemporary transformations of Christianity and Islam that are, in part, a function of their different organisational structures and doctrines of authority to which e need to attend. However, it is the parallels rather than the cultural differences that are striking, pointing as they do to common social processes.]]