The Digital Transformation of Arabic Islamic Scholarship in Nigeria: Epistemic, Linguistic, and Social Implications

The widespread adoption of digital technologies by Nigerian Arabic Islamic scholars, including online fatwa platforms, digital manuscript repositories, social media religious discourse, and AI-assisted text analysis, is transforming the production, circulation, and authority structures of Arabic Islamic knowledge in ways that carry profound epistemic, linguistic, and social implications that have not been theorised in the literature. This study investigates the digital transformation of Arabic Islamic scholarship in Nigeria, examining how digital technologies are reshaping the linguistic norms, epistemic standards, authority relations, and social functions of Arabic scholarly production across traditional and reformist scholarly networks. Drawing on a three-year multi-sited ethnographic study of digital scholarly practice across eight Arabic Islamic scholarly communities in Kano, Lagos, Abuja, Maiduguri, and Sokoto, the research combines digital ethnography, interview-based knowledge genealogy methods, and digital text analysis of Arabic scholarly production across platforms. The theoretical framework integrates critical platform studies, Islamic epistemology, and sociolinguistics of digital registers to construct an interdisciplinary analytical architecture. The study produces original theoretical contributions to the understanding of how Islamic scholarly authority adapts to digital mediation, how Arabic classical register norms are modified in digital Islamic discourse, and how digital access is reconfiguring the geography of Arabic Islamic knowledge production in Nigeria. Keywords: Digital Islamic scholarship, Arabic, epistemic transformation, Nigeria, digital religion.