This paper discusses the rising phenomenon of skepticism among imams, taking as its case studies former Islamic scholars from Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and Iraq. It shares their journeys into skepticism, discussing their arguments against organized religion in general and Islam in particular. This paper will also examine what impact, if any, would this trend have on the efforts to reform Islamic thought. The revolution in information technology and social media in the last two decades have had rippling effects on all aspects of life in the Arab world. Given the critical role religion plays in society, Islam has not escaped the effects of these seismic shifts. Social media has rendered attempts to censor questioning the faith all but obsolete, even in the most repressive countries. The threat of violence that had for decades quieted skeptics appears to have lost its power among many challengers. Severe punishment for skepticism is common in most of the Arab states. The Egyptian parliament, for instance, passed a law to ban atheism in December of 2017. Yet despite the risks, many laymen and scholars alike assert their right to choose their spirituality or to reject religion altogether. State and independent religious scholars claim that this phenomenon is a reaction to the actions of extremists, such as the Islamic State or Muslim Brotherhood However, this argument assumes that skeptics lack of knowledge of 'true' Islam, which does not account for the increase of skepticism among imams and scholars of Islamic thought who had preached to thousands of fellow Muslims prior to their abandonment of Islam. This is not a new phenomenon. One famous Saudi intellectual, Abdullah al-Qusaimi (1907-1996), was a Wahhabi theologian before becoming the godfather of atheism in the Arab world. The advance of information technology, however, is amplifying such voices and enabling unprecedented levels of debates and interactions.

This paper explores the political, social, and cultural contexts of an emerging trend in global Arab communities and the role of the media in addressing it. The last decade has witnessed a shocking surge of apostates (especially since the Arab uprisings of 2010), despite the fact that many Arabs consider publicly disclosing this type of apostasy taboo and many states criminalize it. As part of a movement to normalize public apostasy, apostates’ appearance on television talks shows stirs controversy about their right to be citizens. The notion of im/politeness constitutes one of the tests for inclusion during these heated debates. Drawing from research on apostasy, im/politeness, citizenship, television genre theory, and hypermedia space, this cultural study explores how notions of im/politeness inform negotiations of citizenship on talk shows. I analyze a corpus of over 100 talk show broadcasts, created and consumed by a transnational Arab community, and the hypermedia space that commented on these broadcasts. I conclude that notions of im/politeness affect the way media itself operates when linked to divisive issues like public apostasy. This study, which addresses the intersection of communication studies, cultural studies, and socio-linguistics, makes the following contributions: it extends the literature on im/politeness in the media to poorly researched cultures and critical topics like minority rights in a much needed effort to globalize the field and link it to current debates in cultural and communications studies; it offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role of im/politeness within issues like apostasy that divide societies deeply through the study of hypermedia space and its various participants; it demonstrates the continuing importance of ‘old’ media through hypermedia space, in fact responding to Kraidy’s and Mourad’s (2010: 13) call for “theoretically informed, empirically based studies that explore the social and political implications of hypermedia space in concrete contexts”; it demonstrates that only concerted efforts among socio-linguistics, communications and cultural studies will ensure a deeper understanding of the links among im/politeness, media, and public identity, as well as their relationship to cleavages in contemporary societies.

Orthodox Jewish apostasy blogging of the 21st century was a reform-minded, medial phenomenon that was part of the new media challenge to rabbinic authority culminating in the so-called “Internet asifa” of 2012, a large demonstration of anti-Internet rabbis and their followers in Citi Field in Queens, NY. But apostasy blogs, such as Unpious.com, also chronicled an identity transformation for those bloggers who first staged their apostasy virtually and later, in real life. I argue that Jewish doubt blogging, which took place largely anonymously, had its roots in maskilic (Jewish enlightenment) autobiography in Germany and Eastern Europe of the 19th century. In my analysis, I compare the fate of Jewish apostasy bloggers with that of the likewise anonymous, maskilic autobiographers of the past and show how both movements were composed of traditionally-educated, secularizing Jews who used personal narrative to create a literature of subversion that overturned the accepted norms of Orthodox communities.