God in Binary: Sacred Space in a Digital World

“Other worlds exist beyond the stars—
More tests of love are still to come.” ¹

“People have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.”

I shall confess from the get-go that I am a fairly reluctant entrant into the world of DH. I have spent much of my life wondering how “the internet” works and where all our data actually goes when we save it on various drives and clouds. I have felt - like many others, I’m sure - that I simply don’t have the gene (or genius?) that makes one “tech savvy”. How ironic for an educator who claims that learning is for all to hold such views about themselves! This realization compelled me to take my first tentative steps into the Digital Humanities and apply for the Praxis Program. It Is here that, for the first time, the wonderful folks at the Scholar’s Lab held my hand and nudged me forward into a fledgling friendship with Git and HTML and other such monsters lurking behind my computer screen. Mike and Sulley were right, it seems: this laughter is so much more generative than terror! I now live in a world where curly brackets actually have meaning and a novice like me can dream of creating beautiful web pages.

Now that the Djinn of digital discomfort does not loom so large, however, I wonder more and more about the space technology occupies in our quotidian routines. Many passing thoughts from the last two decades have suddenly resurfaced. Chief among them is the relationship between virtual space and our religious and spiritual lives. I think back to the first time I was gifted a digital Qur’an. It was a palm-sized device with a backlit screen, a few small buttons for navigation, and the entirety of God’s word in Arabic (with Urdu translation!). A small speaker at the back allowed one to hear pre-recorded recitations of individual chapters. Ten-year-old Amna had never seen such a wonder! What soon followed the amazement, however, was utter confusion about the ethical rules of handling such a device. Was I required to make the necessary ablutions one does before touching a physical copy of the Qur’an? Could I leave it on the floor or place it near my feet? If the device was not charged, or the display screen got damaged, would it still have religious value? How would one dispose of such a thing?

With the advent of smartphones, the demarcation of sacred space is even more complex. The phone doesn’t care if you download the Pentateuch, the New Yorker, or a Judith McNaught novel; nor is it bothered by a Liberty Mutual advert interrupting hymns in a YouTube video – is the chant ‘Liberty, Liberty, Liberty’ really all that different from that of ‘Allahu, Allahu, Allahu’? People are getting married over WhatsApp video calls, but somehow one cannot perform the Ban -Yatra over Zoom.

When I shared the first draft of this post with Brandon, his response further knotted my thread of questions by raising the issue of augmented reality: “What would happen if you took a physical copy of the text and made some sort of second, intermediate space? A digital experience that supported, expanded, or complicated the sacred text that remained intact on the table in front of you?” I’ve since been daydreaming about all the different possibilities. Imagine holding your phone up to verse 22 of Surah Maryam (that describes the birth of Jesus) and seeing Caravaggio’s “Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence.” Or seeing a model of Babri Masjid when your camera points at Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. They could be instances of inter-religious dialogue or of mass moral outrage!

It’s been weeks since Brandon’s questions, and I still have no adequate answer. What’s clear, however, is that virtual space is not merely an extension of the physical, nor does it follow the same rules. Is it the Realm of the Malakūt made visible? Am I simply experiencing Durkheimian anomie? Who knows? What I can say with certainty is that, for the religious mind, each interaction with the digital world demands that we reconfigure our notions of sacrality – and our relationship with it – in this new dimension of existence.

(This blogpost is (hopefully) the first in a series that explores my anxieties, suggestions for intervention, and tangential ruminations about the interaction of DH and digital space with religious modes of thought.)