This article is about Islam in SecondLife-esque settings. It starts with a short anecdote about a Muslim woman attending a virtual Jewish synagogue to see what Jewish prayer was really like since in her own life there was no way she could ever experience that. The middle chunk is devoted to Doha, a conference of some sort regarding virtual reality and Islam that is being held in Qatar. The last anecdote shared is when doing some research for Doha that two researcher called Eureka and Nilsson went onto an Islamic sim of some kind and started some conversations. In the middle of the very hostile conversation the researchers realized that the Muslim men had mistaken their questions about “ijtihad”, a process of internal spiritual struggle, with questions about “jihad” and were being hostile since they felt that these were just other Westerners who knew nothing of Islam beyond the word jihad.
Now what does this have to say about sacred space and time? Well the Muslim women in the first anecdote does bring up an interesting problem. In a physical Jewish temple there certainly would not be a Muslim women just sitting in listening, or there would be no-one sitting in listening without being active participants themselves. Now does this deviation from the model of the traditional synagogue make the virtual synagogue less sacred in addition to the problems presented by its virtual nature? Why is it ok for an outsider to come in and essentially gawk virtually but physically it would verboten?
While the misunderstanding anecdote is interesting it is more related to textuality. It also demonstrates a huge problem in Islamic, Western understanding, the vocabulary can be really hard. With text-based communication though it is easier to look up words and ideas while you communicate, but then again on the other hand the text nature leads to text-messaging like spelling which could obscure meaning even more when dealing with unfamiliar concept.
