Religious minorities in cyberspace: identity and citizenship among European muslims and Egyptian copts

The study explores how religious minorities can utilize the Internet in handling their hybrid identities and how the different online platforms can reveal the diverse perceptions within the same minority group. The case study qualitative method was adopted. European Muslims and Coptic Christian Egyptians were tackled as major models for analysis s. The study brought different historical and conceptual backgrounds to the discussion and tackled the case of the European Muslims by utilizing the researcher’s observations gleaned from her previous experience as an editor of IslamOnline’s European Muslims page, and by conducting descriptive and thematic analyses of selected websites of different European Muslim entities. The study tackled the case of the Egyptian Coptic Christians through conducting both in-depth interviews and thematic analysis of selected websites and Facebook pages. The study showed how both the European Muslims and the Egyptian Coptic Christians encountered the question regarding the circles of affiliation and how they reacted differently to this question while they were managing their online platforms. Despite the disparity among the online platforms studied regarding the levels of vision and content, the study showed how most of these minorities’ online platforms need to develop their discourses and tools in order to address the offline diverse stances. They also need to play a more prominent role in framing issues of citizenship and integration