Any major university in the United states may have more computer literate individuals than several states of the Nigerian Federation. This disparity between computerskilled and computer-challenged highlights the depth of the digital divide. Literacy as a source of empowerment has shifted from the print to the computer medium. There is the lingering danger that cyberspace will solidify the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

However, this gap cannot merely be reduced to economic difference and financial access to Internet technology. Certainly, what appear to be cultural reasons for the digital divide are often due to differences in economic opportunity. But while it is difficult to distinguish whether economic or cultural factors are more salient in explaining the digital divide, the different levels of interaction between religious traditions and technological changes raise several crucial questions: how will a computer revolution shape the changes within religious doctrine, and how do religious traditions affect people's ability to adapt to such a revolution?

Examining how technology has affected doctrine and gender in Islam will illuminate a key example of the interplay between technology and religion. By exploring the effect of the Internet on the internal logic of Islam, as well as the enlarged global influence Islam must play when digital barriers are broken, we hope to highlight the possibilities for a dual reformation.

Information to Reformation

The impact of the first industrial revolution on western Christianity undoubtedly led to the momentous movement of the Christian Reformation. Will the impact of the new revolution of information lead to a comparable Islamic Reformation? In the 20th century Westerners have debated whether the Protestant Reformation was the mother of capitalism in Europe or whether the Christian Reformation was itself a child of earlier phases of the capitalist revolution. Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism advances the view that the Protestant Reformation was the mother of capitalism rather than a child of economic change. Other thinkers, however, have identified pre-Reformation technological inventions as part of the preparation for both the birth of Protestantism and modernday capitalism.

Francis Robinson, professor of history at the University of London, has placed the printing press at the center of the Protestant movement and within the Catholic counter-offensive. He writes, "Print lay at the heart of that great challenge to religious authority, the Protestant Reformation; Lutheranism was the child of the printed book. Print lay at the heart of the Catholic counter-offensive, whether it meant harnessing the press for the work of Jesuits and the office of Propaganda, or controlling the press through the machinery of the Papal Index and the Papal Imprimatur." The question here is whether the Internet and cyberspace and the third industrial revolution will do to Islam what the first industrial revolution did for Christianity.

In some respects the Christian Reformation was a return to the biblical roots of Christianity. Likewise, the information revolution may help Islam realize some of its earliest aims more effectively. The first casualty of the information revolution, however, may be national sovereignty, which will shrink in the wake of the Internet and cyberspace. The printed word played a major role in the construction of nationhood and in reinforcing national consciousness. Computer communication, on the other hand, is contributing to the breakdown of nationhood and may play a role in the construction of trans-ethnic communities.

While the first industrial revolution of capitalist production and the Christian reformation became allied to the new forces of nationalism in the Western world, the third industrial revolution and any Islamic reformation will be increasingly hostile to the insularity of the state. Islam and the information revolution will be allies in breaking down the barriers of competing national sovereignties. The new technology will give Islam a chance to realize its original aim of transnational universalism. The Internet could become the Islamic super-highway.

Many Muslims have already risen to this challenge of the new information age with Islamic resource guides on the Internet, Cyber Muslim Guides, the Islamic Information and News Network and web servers with Islamic material. As Childers writes, contrary to some assumptions that "modern communications would engender a new and generally Western-oriented cosmopolitanism, they are predominantly spreading the idea of a freedom that is translated by the receivers as endogenous freedom including freedom to rejoin one's real kinship (whether larger or smaller) and to re-examine the validity of one's own ancient social values." Thus, the Internet may have the effect of rekindling community.

The Ballot Enters the Harem

But there is one fundamental area where Islam and the new information revolution have yet to converge: the relationship between men and women. Will the new information technology fundamentally alter gender relations?

The Muslim world has traditionally vacillated between two doctrines on this issue. One doctrine has been to treat genders as separate but equal. Genders co-exist in homes; separation of genders is inevitably moderated by family ties. This is qualitatively different from the separation of races and ethnicities. The gender doctrine of "separate but equal" could survive the new information revolution.

Under the new technology the computerized hijab is at hand: women can more easily stay at home while continuing to participate in a computerized workplace. This possibility is amply demonstrated by a woman from the British Asian community in her response to a BBC radio presenter who expressed concern that the computer can, in fact, enhance the isolation of women. The woman commented, "Well, if they're just stuck at home then why not use the Internet to get connectivity with people across the world... the Internet can also provide an access for women to possibly start providing their own services-- maybe hobbies that they're interested in or business that they have a keen eye on." By gradually abolishing the distinction between home and the workplace, Internet technology may give women the opportunity to integrate themselves into the economic and political global community.

But many Muslim societies treat women as "separate and unequal." Aspects of that perspective are rooted in a view of the Shari'a that dictates that women inherit half of what men inherit and that, in certain circumstances, holds the testimony of women in court to be worth less than that of men. Such Muslim societies have assumed that there were two different doors of knowledge, one for each gender. Many Muslim societies had assumed that there were branches of knowledge that were not fit for women and children under 16. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan has carried this theory of two tiers of gender knowledge to its extreme.