Dr. Daniel Kinitz

The journal al-Manār represented one of the most important periodicals within the Islamicate world in the first half of the 20th century. Edited by Muḥammad Rašīd Riḍā (1865–1935), the journal covered the shifts and upheavals within Muslim societies, at the same time publicly constructing the social meaning of the new phenomena. This included the abolition of the Islamic caliphate (1924) as well as the subsequent attempts by political and civil actors to reorganise the Islamicate world. Being one of the first major Arab periodicals, al-Manār itself represents an institutional shift towards a modern public sphere, and shows how new social and religious topics and their forms of representation could be experimented with.
One can assume that al-Manār, by representing a forum of public communication, adapted itself and its readers to the social transformations by re-inventing Islamic concepts, at the same time drawing boundaries between religion and non-religion. Due to its geographically wide distribution, al-Manār therefore forms an object of study, providing indications to general developments within Islamic thought. While al-Manār has been examined in several respects, there seem to be no studies that exploit the opportunities of the digital humanities. With the help of techniques from computational linguistics and text mining, the texts can be filtered and keywords, term frequencies and co-occurrences can subsequently be derived. The use of XML mark-ups and database technologies means that the results can also be examined in relation to other elements (persons/authors, dates, regions etc.).
Preliminary findings suggest that some concepts, with which contemporary Islamic thought reflected the difference between Islam and non-Islam, played no role at the beginning of the 20th century – most notably the concept al-ʿalmānīya (secularism/secularity). The embeddedness of terms and concepts coupled with religion and non-religion can provide information not only about how Islam was relocated within an emerging public sphere, but can also serve to challenge the concept of religion shaped by its European and Christian origins.