Islam in the TED Style: Postsecular Storytelling about Religion in Digital Media. Book Review: Mamalipurath J. (2024) TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract

The publication is a review of Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath’s book TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media. It examines how Islam is represented in the format of TED talks and how Muslim speakers construct narratives of faith for a predominantly secular, liberal audience. The author of the book develops a postsecular conceptual framework and introduces the notions of postsecular storytelling and the postsecular influencer. He also demonstrates how the structure and ideology of the TED platform shape the discursive strategies available to religious actors. This book is of interest to sociologists and media scholars for several reasons. The monograph expands the theoretical toolkit of the sociology of religion. It shows that digital religious communication can be conceptualized as a negotiated interaction between religious and secular discourses, rather than merely as the adaptation of religion to media environments. It shows how media platforms configure regimes of legitimation for religious authority and offers analytical categories for describing new types of public religious leaders. The approaches proposed in the book can be productively applied to Russian empirical material, raising new questions in the study of Islam and revealing that the dominant secular framework does not exhaust the complexity of digital religious publicity.