This paper presents work in progress that analyzes the use of Google Maps and Reviews by Muslims (and some non-Muslims) in the Persian Gulf to search for, rate, and review mosques and other Muslim houses of worship. Focusing on mosques in four capital cities – Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City, and Riyadh – it uses Google Maps’ review recommendations to identify five mosques in each city, examining the ratings and reviews posted for each. The analysis shows how reviews braid together religious users’ spiritual goal of finding a location for prayer with the community goal of providing guidance to fellow believers; and with religious and non-religious users’ reflections on visiting these mosques as tourists. Although the practice of mosque reviewing comes out of the broader online practice of rating restaurants and other service providers, the paper argues that mosque reviews form both a communal space of shared belief as well as a space that reflects and amplifies the importance of ‘mosque tourism’ as a pious and cultural practice (Kessler 2015). More broadly, it sheds light on broader trends in Gulf Muslim religious life-worlds, and how they take shape across a continuum of online and offline experiences. It thus contributes to our understanding of contemporary Islam, with a focus on the Arab Middle East.
Conceptually, this project draws on lived religions and digital religion approaches, as well as from scholarship on review websites and apps. Lived religion focuses on the experiences of ordinary people – a ground-up approach to understanding religious belief, practice, and identity (McGuire 2008, Nyhagen 2017). Digital religion, a sub-field, examines these experiences in the context of believers’ engagement with websites, social media, and apps (Innerhofer et al 2021, Campbell and Tsuria 2021). It also draws on scholarship on map-based rating and reviewing platforms (Salehi-Esfahani and Kang 2019, Want and Li 2019, Kersting et al. 2019); in the Persian Gulf as elsewhere, these platforms have become important sources for information on businesses, products, and services – as well as sites of worship. Finally, it draws from scholarship on what Kessler terms “mosque tourism”, recognizing the centrality of Islamic houses of worship as destination sites for halal tourism and cultural tourism in Muslim-majority and -plurality locations, due to their combination of religious, spiritual, cultural, educational, and interactive elements (ibid). In this work, it builds upon scholarship focused on reviews and ratings of United States mosques (Stanton 2024), extending it beyond a North American, Muslim-minority context to the heart of the Muslim world – a heart characterized by considerable ethnic, belief, and praxis diversity given the multi-national populations of most Persian Gulf states.
Methodologically, this is a qualitative research project that takes a case study approach, located at the intersection of Islamic studies and Middle East studies. The sampling practice follows that of an imagined typical user searching for highly-rated Muslim houses of worship in selected Gulf capital cities, allowing Google Reviews’ algorithm to guide the results. The analysis of ratings and reviews for the top five mosques from those search results uses content analysis modified by grounded theory – an approach that “grounds” theoretical principles in the data collected, via an iterative feedback loop in which each round of data collection is used to refine the analysis and vice versa. It follows Halaweh in applying this approach to social media research, and in considering “data collection” to extend beyond posts and accounts or sites to the choice of platforms (Halaweh 2018). In doing so, it offers insights based on the specific findings and applicable to the four cities surveyed as well as their national contexts; it also aspires to illuminate broader global trends.
Bibliography
Campbell, Heidi and Ruth Tsuria. 2021. Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.
Halaweh, Mohanad. “Integrating social media and grounded theory in a research methodology: a possible road map.” 2018. Business Information Review 35 (4), 157-164.
Innerhofer, Elisa, Giulia Isetti, Harald Pechlaner, and Michael De Rachewiltz, eds. 2021. Religion in the Age of Digitalization: From New Media to Spiritual Machines. New York: Routledge.
Kessler, Kristel. 2015. “Conceptualizing Mosque Tourism: A Central Feature of Islamic and Religious Tourism”. Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 3 (2), 11-32.
McGuire, Meredith. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nyhagen, Line. 2017. “The lived religion approach in the sociology of religion and its implications for secular feminist analyses of religion.” Social Compass 64 (4), 495-511.
Stanton, Andrea. 2024. “’Best Mosques Near Me’: American Muslims and Online Mosque-Finding”. Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture 13, 269-292.
This paper analyzes the use of Google Reviews in the Persian Gulf to search for, rate, and review mosques and other Muslim houses of worship. Focusing on mosques in four cities – Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City, and Riyadh – it uses Google review recommendations to identify five mosques in each city, examining the posted ratings and reviews. The analysis shows how reviews braid together religious users’ goals of finding a location for prayer and of providing guidance to fellow believers; and with religious and non-religious users’ reflections on visiting these mosques as tourists. it argues that reviews form a communal space of shared belief as well as a space that reflects and amplifies the importance of ‘mosque tourism’ as a pious and cultural practice. More broadly, it sheds light on broader trends in Gulf Muslim religious life-worlds, and how they take shape across a continuum of online and offline experiences.