Young Muslims and the Digital Fatwaˉ

Having discovered, from the analysis of corpus A, that most of the people asking for a fatwā online are Millennials or Generation Z Muslims, the research was extended to a much larger corpus of fatwā questions (more than 10,000 and more than one million words) asked by alleged young Arab-Muslims in general (corpus B). First, the construction of the corpus is described, then the choice of corpus linguistics as an analysis tool is explained, and finally the results of the discourse analysis conducted on corpus B are detailed. Important findings are obtained from this analysis, which are reviewed in detail. The keyword analysis of the corpus (thematic analysis) confirms that the main concerns of (young) Muslims in the digital age are family and social relationships, as well as personal religious practice. However, the analysis of the wording of questions (use of personal pronouns, interrogative pronouns, negation, verb tenses, etc.) provides more insight. Those who request an online fatwā are mainly male students or well-educated young employees. Hypothetical and abstract questions, which were the norm in the past, give way to very personalized and specific questions, in which the pronoun ‘I’ stands out. The use of negation is more frequent than in natural language. The dominant verbal tense is the present tense.