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Drawing on the contributions presented in the special issue "God's Influencers: How Social Media Users Shape Religion and Pious Self-Fashioning", this introduction explores resonances and dissonances between the six articles: First, I reconsider the online/offline connection in relation to the religious actors examined. Then, I articulate a post techno-utopian vision of religion online, identifying digital media as a social space where inequalities, prejudices and power structures offline can be both reinforced and challenged. Third, I shed light on the subjective turn in the way online religious actors understand and impart "authenticity", a heatedly debated concept in the context of both religion and social media. Fourth, I present some of the communicative strategies that the religious social media users examined in this special issue employ. And, finally, I conclude by sketching future research directions in the study of how social media users shape religion and pious self-fashioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of Shii communities in Europe is increasingly felt, especially as they establish independent religious and social infrastructures. Supporters of different Shii–Islamist political parties have established transnational links connecting diasporic communities with their countries of origin. These links have shaped and been shaped by religious, political and social dynamics in the Middle East. This article examines how lamentation poetry performed in Shii ritual gatherings is used to articulate political dissent among diasporic communities. The lachrymal expressions and descriptions that characterize Shii lamentation poetry have the ritualistic function of metaphorically identifying participants with Imam Husayn and his cause. Organizers of these gatherings, however, use lamentation poetry to narrate and give meaning to geopolitical developments in the Middle East, especially since the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003. This article constitutes the first attempt to examine the political contextualization of Shii lamentation poetry, embedded within the political discourses of two Shii Islamist parties, the al-Wefaq Movement in Bahrain and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Unlike other studies on Shii ritual practices, it is informed by a multi-sited ethnographic study of female-only and male-dominated ritual spaces in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Lebanon, Iraq and Bahrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]