© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2021, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX [CIS 14.1–2 (2018) 157–160] Comparative Islamic Studies (print) ISSN 1740-7125 https://doi.org/10.1558/cis.20054 Comparative Islamic Studies (online) ISSN 1743-1638 Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority, by Gary Bunt. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 232pp., Hb. $90,00, ISBN-13: 9781469643151; Ebk. $19.99, ISBN-13: 9781469643175. Reviewed by Henrik Reintoft Christensen, Aarhus University, hc@cas. au.dk Twenty years ago, around the time of Gary Bunt’s first book on Islam and the internet and before the bursting of the dot com bubble, I attended a conference where professor Bunt gave a talk on the subject of his research: Islam and the internet. It was pioneering work, and just as investors in tech companies were in a state of euphoria, so were researchers in the study of religion (and other cultural studies) because of the alluring prom- ises of the virtual. During the first decade of the new millennium, profes- sor Bunt published Virtually Islamic: Computer-Mediated Communication and Cyber-Islamic Environments (2000), Islam in the Digital Age: E-Jihad, Online Fat- was and Cyber Islamic Environments (2003) and iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam (2009). His new book Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments are Transforming Religious Authority follows more or less in the same foot- steps as the previous books examining the impact of Cyber Islamic Envi- ronments (CIEs). Even the period he covers in the book begins right after the time of the previous book and examines the development since 2009. Hashtag Islam consists of an introduction, six chapters, a conclusion, and a very extensive notes section documenting all the cases he references. The main text is 150 pages long and the notes section 50 pages. In the Introduction, Bunt mentions that the book can be read and searched in its e-book format, and part of my comments in this review may very well owe to the fact that I have read the paper version. Focusing on 2009–2017 is in many ways logical and quite suitable because, as the book documents, social media are significant game chang- ers (20) integrating the digital even more into the everyday life of Muslims (and everyone else). One of the virtues of the book is the fact that Bunt now focuses more on media literacy than on access. Although many in the developing world are still offline, a number of technological innovations have reduced the access gap. In relation to authority, it is increasingly interesting to see how the digital media literacy gap is handled. His many cases document that the digitally literate often subverts the traditional Keywords: Islam and the internet, religion and media, religious authority, global Islam, digital religion