Sharing semangat taqwa: social media and digital Islamic socialities in Bandung

ABSTRACT

Bandung is home to numerous groups or so called komunitas who effectively seize emerging social spaces evolving from the interplay between urban and technological development and the increased use of social media in all spheres of everyday life, including religious practice. Based on ethnographic online and offline research among Muslim groups, this article enquires into contemporary expressions of piety (taqwa) and the formation of pious Muslims selves across online and offline spheres of interaction. As part of daily practice, social media become sites of digital Islamic socialities that distinguish these Muslim groups from other Islamic movements or religious associations. Beyond the purpose of communication, social media enhance forms of affective awareness and exchange required for the integration of multiple and transient relations. Building on insights from anthropological research on the Internet and the use of digital technologies in Indonesia and beyond, this article shows how social media affect the experience and understandings of personal commitment and social engagement that define contemporary Muslim subjectivities. Embedded in the cyberurban space of Bandung, emerging (digital) Islamic socialities offer new orientations and models of sharing the ‘zeal of piety’ (semangat taqwa) that are appealing and easily adopted by a young generation of pious Muslims.

KEYWORDS:

• Bandung
• Islamic practice
• komunitas
• online and offline socialities
• social media

Introduction

The expression of Islamic piety in a ‘rapidly modernizing and urbanizing society’ (Fealy and White 2008: 4) has gained momentum in the technopolitan city of Bandung – the third largest city of Indonesia with an estimated 2.7 million inhabitants and numerous Muslim groups active on social media.¹ This article is concerned with the interplay between emerging online and offline socialities and the uses of digital technology – predominantly mobile devices and social media – in the development of Muslim subjectivities among leaders and members of so-called komunitas. Komunitas (lit. ‘community’) refers to forms of sociality closely related to the urban infrastructures as well as politico-religious movements in Bandung since the second half of the 20th century. Apart from ‘Indonesians’ high level of engagement in associational life’ (Lussier and Fish 2012: 80), which is particularly pronounced among university students (van Bruinessen 2013), Bandung is also home to numerous youth groups engaged in the city’s creative industries (Cohen 2015; Kim 2017). These two strands – that of religious activity and creative culture – intertwine in the genesis of Bandung’s komunitas, which continue to shape the city’s image as an educational, technology and innovation hub. Bandung’s komunitas are based on networked communication and collaboration (gotong-royong), which today are increasingly supported by the use of social media and urban policies. Not bound to a particular locale (e.g. university campus, neighbourhood, or mosque) or formal structure and membership (e.g. formal student organisations), komunitas are home-grown social formations that emerge at the intersections of higher education, religious and social concern, and technological development.² Hence, as I will argue, Bandung’s komunitas and their activities thrive on the premises of emerging online and offline socialities.

Alluding to Anderson’s (2006: 37) observation that ‘print-capitalism […] made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’, I develop the argument here that, in the context of Bandung, social media have become engines that fuel community formation in thoroughly new ways. Yet, as I will show in the following cases, these new social formations differ from the larger and less intimate ‘imagined communities’, as defined by Anderson (2006), as well as from closely knit and locally bound community associations and religious groups elsewhere in Indonesia.³ Different from most of these groups, Bandung’s komunitas present inherently heterogeneous social entities that traverse online and offline realms. By sustaining sentiments of personal commitment as well as social concern, social media become entangled in processes of personal transformation and the making of religious selves. At the centre of these transformations lies a particular nexus of offline and online activities closely related to (new) forms of religious practice – specifically online da’wah (Islamic proselytisation). Navigating different social media in the course of their daily activities, komunitas become a social docking station and an emotional charging spot offering new orientations for their members and models of sharing the ‘zeal of piety’ (semangat taqwa).

Empirically, this article builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Bandung over a period of six months in 2015 and 2016. I followed the online and offline activities of seven different komunitas (two of which I shall refer to in the following analysis), took part in various smaller and larger events, and actively participated in what are deemed mundane social media activities such as WhatsApp conversations or ‘liking’, commenting, and sharing posts on Facebook, Instagram, and so forth. Complementary to this ethnographic approach of offline and online participant observation I also led a number of semi-structured interviews and informal conversations to enquire into the social media activities of my interlocutors. In the course of fieldwork, I found that the latter were deeply embedded in the daily realities of users. Similar to the empirically inspired concept of ‘cyberurban space’ introduced by Lim (2015), there were no sharp boundaries between online and offline sites of interaction.⁴ Even more so, Bandung’s komunitas both traversed and connected sites of offline engagement and online activity. Following participants throughout the course of their daily lives, partly enabled by social media, allowed me to enquire into their experience of connectivity and quality of multiple and fluid social relations as they become venues of various forms of religious expression. In the context of Muslim groups, experiences deriving from these emerging digital cultures contribute to what Barendregt (2012: 213) describes as visions of a Muslim modernity and an Indonesian information society.

After discussing several mid-range concepts guiding my exploration of (digital) Islamic socialities in Bandung, I will briefly describe the historical background and political-cum-religious context of the multiple online and offline socialities observed across various platforms. This is where the contemporary religiosities and expressions of piety that are also the subject here take centre stage. This is followed by an account of two komunitas in Bandung, and their online and offline activities and sites of engagement. I focus particularly on the inspirations and motivations of these young Muslims in contributing to programmes of self-development, and to processes of social transformation that gained momentum over the past years in urban, economically developed centres all over the country (Barendregt 2012; Rudnyckyj 2010). As I will show, these motivations are grounded in their uses of digital technologies and social media to reach out, connect and integrate the Muslim community. My concluding discussion will be on how social media inform the social realities and religious life of Muslim groups, and how reconfigurations of religiosity and online Islamic practices contribute to the ongoing transformation of Muslim selves.

An anthropological study of digital socialities

Anthropological perspectives on digital media have opened analyses for the study of social relations as they become manifest within and across different online and offline spheres of social interaction. While recognising that digitally mediated communication is just as ‘culturally inflected’ (Miller and Horst 2012: 12) as face-to-face forms of interaction, anthropologists continue to favour substantial engagement with locality-based realities, and thus with local traditions and contexts. Such studies often point to the intricate relations between the virtual and the real, the online and the offline, the abstract and the material, the global and the local, which Boellstorff (2012: 40) defines as the ‘indexical relationships that constantly co-constitute both the virtual and actual’ and which lie at the core of digital anthropology. Developing a theory of indexicality, Boellstorff (2012: 52) sets the focus of ethnographic analysis on those practices and relations ‘that move within virtual contexts but also across the gap between virtual and actual’. This implies that an anthropology of the digital is essentially concerned with the complex fields of multiple and shifting social relationships that traverse various platforms and contexts, and which form the focus of this study as well.

As anthropologists have been eager to understand people as constituted through social relationships (Miller 2016) and have investigated social activity to understand the role of media, and particularly social media, in the context of everyday materialities (Pink et al. 2016: 106), the concept of sociality has moved to the centre of social media research (Madianou and Miller 2011; Postill 2011). At the same time, the concepts of community and network society have lost most of their popularity in early studies of the Internet mainly due to their bounded, unitary, or homogenous connotations (Postill and Pink 2012; Pink et al. 2016) that fail to capture the multiple and fluid qualities of social relationships across online and offline spheres of interaction. Sociality as a mid-range concept that is close to empirical evidence (Amit 2015) enables the exploration of a much broader spectrum of ethnographic detail. It opens analysis for the quality of social relations (Pink et al. 2016: 107) and thus allows the researcher ‘to attend to both “community” type feel-good-ness and the shifting and more transient encounters and co-routes through the Internet and offline’ (Postill and Pink 2012: 127). As I will argue in the case of Bandung, komunitas are formed and sustained through multiple and transient online and offline forms of sociality that expand beyond traditional notions of the community. Less attached to particular physical places (e.g. the neighbourhood) or a formal form of membership, komunitas spread across the city by making use of social media to maintain their daily activities and relations. In this case, the concept of sociality becomes a useful research tool that also allows me to focus on the quality of these relations and explore the differences and continuities between online and offline forms of engagement as they become embedded in the dynamic lives of young and tech-savvy Muslims in Bandung.

One way to approach what users experience and do with social media is to enquire into their media ideologies, i.e. their ideas and beliefs about ‘how a medium communicates and structures communication’ (Gershon 2010: 18). As Gershon observes in her study among US students, ‘what people think about the media they use will shape the way they use media’ (Gershon 2010: 3; emphasis mine). Consequently, media ideologies develop along with ‘idioms of practice’ which, according to Gershon (2010: 6), are the agreements that people make on how to use a certain medium in the course of daily interaction. Media ideologies and idioms of practice are thus constitutive of online multiple socialities, just as other field-bound practices are implicated in the constitution of social groups (Postill and Pink 2012: 132). They become indicative of processes in which norms and shared values become contested, negotiated, and redefined. Moreover, media ideologies, as Gershon (2010: 5) asserts, develop where a plethora of media or means of communication exists. The interdependence of different media in the context of personal connections and genres of communication is reflected in the concept of polymedia originally introduced by Madianou and Miller (2011). As Miller (2016: 1) points out, ‘differences in platforms are exploited to express distinctions’. Attending to the concept of polymedia, or the plurality of media and their significance in creating distinction, I am also interested in the reasons why users involved in komunitas choose one medium over the other in their communication and daily interaction.⁵

Local particularities, including media ideologies and idioms of practice, emerge always in relation to local infrastructures and, at least partly, in response to localised perceptions of global trends. In the case of Indonesia, the digital not only spurs aspirations of international connections (such as to various religious and social movements) and universal awareness (as in the attendance to Islamic values) but also fuels home-grown mistrust and anxieties with regard to Western cultural influences (Barendregt 2010; Hill and Sen 1997; Lim 2011). Consequently, as Barendregt (2012: 210) points out, ‘information technology has been instrumental in revitalizing religion and making it ready for the twenty-first century’. This revitalisation started as early as the 1970s at major university campuses in metropolitan areas, including Bandung as the centre of technology and technical studies.⁶ Today, almost half a century later, Bandung displays a number of changes in its urban, economic, social, and political infrastructures with komunitas occupying centre stage as extended sites of multiple socialities and of configurations of pious Muslim selves. In the following, I move my focus on Bandung as the major site of emerging Islamic socialities.

Social media in Bandung: an ethnographic account

Situating my research in Bandung – a city of vivid campus life and advanced education in the sphere of technology and telecommunications – and, hence, among young and tech-savvy Muslim groups requires a brief explanation on a few contextual issues. Indonesia’s rapidly growing middle classes, concentrated mainly in the urban areas of the archipelago (Jones 2010), are among ‘the most fervent users of new and mobile media’ (Barendregt 2012: 212). Through their active engagement in social media, members of the well educated urban Muslim middle classes become more visible, penetrating public spheres that are now both online and offline, and taking position on social, political, and religious matters. Knowledge, critical thinking and communication are regarded as central to their modern subjectivities (Millie 2013). As Eickelman and Anderson (2003: 14) have argued, the proliferation of new media reconfigures social life in contemporary Muslim societies in ways which result in both the fragmentation of (religious) authority and in ‘the emergence of new public spheres in which religious norms, practices, and values play a significant and sustained role’. Since independence, Muslim progressive thinkers in Indonesia have envisioned these public spheres as the stage of ‘enlightened, active citizens, capable of exercising their rights within a democratic, liberal framework’ (Millie 2013: 275).

Metropolitan areas are deemed the home and origin of such ‘enlightened’ citizens. Yet, while cosmopolitan cities like Jakarta appear at the forefront of popular, largely imported consumer trends (Barendregt 2012: 208), Bandung, the city that is largely regarded as the ‘trendsetter of technology’ (Lim 2002: 80), is home to a different, considerably more home-grown movement that seeks to unite Islamic values with elements of modernity, including science and rational thought (Amir 2009: 79–80; Kersten 2015: 75). In the 1970s and 1980s, at the dawn of the digital age, a number of Muslim intellectuals, among them Imaduddin Abdulrahim former university lecturer at the technical university Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) and founder of the Salman movement (Hefner 1993), paved the way for da’wah (Islamic proselytisation) activities among university students.⁷ This da’wah movement and the infrastructure provided by the later established Lembaga Dakwah Kampus (Campus Proselytisation Institution) formed the seedbed for the activities of a broader network of campus-based associations inspired by various international movements, the Muslim Brotherhood among others. During the final years of Suharto’s regime, ITB represented the centre of the Tarbiya (education) movement which became particularly appealing to those newly urbanised students who placed an emphasis on personal transformation and exemplary conduct (Kersten 2015: 76).⁸ Today, the majority of universities in Bandung are endowed with a campus mosque and a body of students responsible for da’wah activities on campus. Well educated and highly motivated young Muslims who operate in these premises reaffirm what earlier generations of Muslim intellectuals would say, namely that ‘Islamic teachings are not contradictory to the spirit of modern knowledge’ (Amir 2009: 85). They felt that modern knowledge, as well as professional skills and qualifications, would only reach their maximum potential if coupled with Islamic values and deployed for the benefit of the Muslim community. As Rudnyckyj (2009: 95) demonstrates for the proponents of a spiritual reform (reformasi spiritual) in the economic sphere, ‘in Islam there is no separation between religious and economic ethics and thus being a disciplined worker, a successful entrepreneur, and a good manager is equivalent to being a good Muslim’. And indeed former university graduates now become young entrepreneurs who invest in both practical skills and religious piety.

As Barendregt (2012: 214) has pointed out, there are two ways of studying the fusion of Islam with modern technologies. One way would be to focus on how digital media have been shaped to meet Islamic practices and cultures. Another way would be to look at how Islamic practices have been extended and transformed by new technologies. This research takes the second direction, as it investigates how emerging online and offline socialities and spheres of interaction shape Bandung’s komunitas and their participation in visions of Indonesia’s Islamic information society.

Since the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, Indonesia has experienced an intensification of Islamic practices and discourses (van Bruinessen 2013; Fealy and White 2008; Hasan 2009; Hefner 2005). This coincided with the rise of new technologies, which gave young Muslims ever more opportunities to reach out, connect, search, and find. Next to more standardised forms of da’wah in the form of public Islamic lectures, online da’wah gained increased popularity among tech-savvy Muslim urbanites. As da’wah is generally perceived as a form of syiar – a sign or an effort to make something known or, as some of my interlocutors would say, to ‘share’ (English in original) – online da’wah relates to a much larger continuum of activities and contents that inspire, motivate, and lead users on their way to Allah. Both textual and visually animating, online da’wah includes postings of ayat (Qur’anic verses) and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammed); it further includes personal experiences and forms of more private counselling (nasehat), or showing positive examples, broadcasting information on future events, and so forth. This plurality of practices reflects both the diversity of digital media and their uses and the popular urge, also pointed out by Barendregt (2012: 214), to ‘constantly remind Muslims using (modern information) technology of Allah’s greatness and to encourage them to abide by his laws’.

As the Internet and social media are accessed mainly via mobile phones (Barendregt 2012: 207), Islamic practices like online da’wah have been built into the rhythms of Muslims’ daily lives (Slama 2017). Next to the popularity of Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp and LINE, both instant messaging mobile applications, have become the most commonly used social media in Bandung, and probably in Indonesia, today. Particularly attractive for the growing number of users are their features of instant one-to-one and group messaging. These affordances place active conversation and sociality before matters of profile, in contrast to what one can observe on Facebook. Among young middle-class Muslims in Bandung, being socially active appears vital to their daily activities. Moreover, while Facebook seems to become ever more person-centred or what people in Bandung would call individualistis, WhatsApp or LINE seem to echo common offline modes of sociality.

Next to da’wah practices, the formation of and participation in komunitas is another important aspect of social life in Bandung. These formations are rather loose groups characterised by multiple, open-end socialities and more egalitarian structures with a background in the local music and fashion industries of the city in the 1990s (Cohen 2015; Kim 2017). Today, contributing to Bandung’s image of a creative city, komunitas rely on modern technologies to interconnect and promote their products and services among young tech-savvy urbanites.⁹ Having an entrepreneurial and activist background himself, Bandung’s current mayor Ridwan Kamil is particularly supportive of these social formations.¹⁰ Prior to his political career, Kang Emil (as his followers call him) was leader of Bandung’s Creative City Forum (BCCF) – a platform that gathers different komunitas to contribute to the city’s urban, social and economic infrastructures that emerged, to a certain extent, in response to the promotion of urban creative economies by the national government and international actors (Cohen 2015).¹¹ Assessing BCCF’s own views on ‘creativity’, Cohen (2015: 34) observes that the forum’s ‘focus on youth and public space was strongly articulated […] and became part of the understanding of the creative economy of Bandung’.

According to official estimations, there are currently more than 5,000 komunitas in Bandung. While not all of them place Islam as the focus of their activities, a solid amount of Islamic ethics and values, next to the spirit of transformation and change (perubahan), accompanies their public online and offline presence. Particularly young and educated middle-class urbanites – predominantly university students, graduates, young entrepreneurs, and community leaders – are eager to saturate their online and offline activities with expressions of Islamic piety (taqwa). Hence, taqwa is not limited to moments of worship, guided by individual attitudes of sincerity and humility in front of Allah (Bowen 2012: 47), but extends towards the community. In the context of memorising the Qur’an, Gade (2004: 74) explains this disposition through the ‘technology of the community’, or the adoption of particular attitudes for the sake of the religious community. To maintain a subjectivity of social engagement, a person is required to adopt what Gade (2004: 74) calls an ‘affective attention’ and a continual management of emotions in the course of social interaction and in what Hoesterey (2016: 17) describes as ‘affective relationships of exchange’. Each leader of komunitas with whom I spoke in Bandung tapped into these affective endeavours to reach out, connect and spread what he or she calls semangat taqwa. This zeal of piety takes form in mostly expressive sentiments and dispositions rooted in daily socialities supported not only by the technical affordances but even more so by the complementary space that digital media offer for Muslim users. The use of social media amplifies their ability to recreate and establish shared spaces of collaboration, mutual support and personal development in ways which other popular media, such as Islamic magazines or TV shows, have been unable to do. These spaces are filled with pious practices and affective expressions of contemporary Islamic subjectivities and modes of social life among Bandung’s young middle-class Muslims.

Komunitas: socialities and social media uses

In Bandung, leaders of komunitas describe their activities on social media as an aspect of their overall concern for society. They make an effort to share their knowledge, personal experience, and skills with a larger group of people, often using social media, online videos, or personal blogs. By their practical knowledge and personal experience, they claim new forms of religious authority which they use to raise religious awareness among their followers. One such leader is Febrianti Almeera, a young university graduate and author of Be a great Muslimah: syar’i, berprestasi, menginspirasi (2013) (Be a great Muslimah: conforming to the shariah, achieving, inspiring).¹² Pepew, as her friends call her, was a popular ‘young kid’ at university who ‘had it all’, only to realise that something ‘inside’ was missing – an experience that many students in Bandung encounter on their way to adulthood. On her search for the meaning of life and God she started writing a blog which, to her surprise, was read by hundreds of users who could identify themselves with her story. The act of blogging made her personal experience public, and yet, as studies on prior uses of the Internet show (Hine 2015), it did not provide a platform for a more personal sharing and exchange. By blogging, Pepew could not establish any substantial relationship with her readers who, for her, were a largely anonymous public. Thus, after one year of blogging, she decided to initiate an offline gathering among her blog followers. This event marked the beginning of the komunitas Great Muslimah, which is now popular among young and tech-savvy Muslim women all over Bandung and beyond (Lengauer 2017). In order to balance the lack of face-to-face acquaintances and close forms of sharing particularly among new followers who join her komunitas, Pepew continues to organise regular small group meetings, next to her monthly outreach events. By doing this, she creates an offline space of more intimate socialising – a space, where women can meet in person, share their stories, and join a more familiar sphere of interaction, and, as I will show below, develop shared idioms of practice and related media ideologies that inform their online and offline socialities. These offline meetings are important in endorsing Great Muslimah’s most important goal, which is to create a supportive environment for women to grow and to know Allah: an exercise of self-improvement implied in Febrianti’s concept of muslimah hijrah.¹³ Building on her previous experience of ‘being in the dark’ (berada di kegelapan) to being aware that life is a journey leading to Allah, Pepew asserts that ‘every person needs support’ (setiap orang membutuhkan suport).¹⁴ This komunitas became her and other women’s ‘new family’ (keluarga baru) – a place where all women received (sisterly) appreciation, encouragement, and motivation. Eventually, this supportive environment encompassed both online and offline spheres of communication. A selective and a well directed use of social media, corresponding to shared practices and experience, was decisive in this process.

Ever since the inception of Great Muslimah, Pepew has organised and supported different shows and events to inspire young women on their path to Allah. Today, she is a frequently invited speaker at Islamic lectures, on TV shows, radio, and other public events. Although regularly called ustadzah (lit. ‘female Islamic preacher’), Pepew deliberately declines this title and encourages the audiences to call her simply ‘Pepew’, or ‘sister’ (English in original) to appear more accessible to young Muslimah ‘so that [they] are not afraid to find out about God’ (English in original). Her use of more egalitarian idioms rather than local terms of religious authority or kinship makes her more approachable to the younger generations who are her target audience.¹⁵ Moreover, it signals closer and less formal relationships reminiscent of sisterly love and concern, even in those cases when the audience barely know each other.¹⁶ Speaking the language of the young, urban middle classes involves only a moderate presence in Facebook, which, like her aforementioned blog, appeared to be less personal and interactive compared to the newly established offline relationships of exchange. As Pepew affirmed, referring to her media ideology, Facebook could not replicate the intimacy of the family as envisioned for her komunitas. Thus, instead of daily postings on Facebook, Pepew started a LINE group which allowed her to stay in touch with followers throughout the day and share more intimate group socialities. As each member could equally post to any other member in this group, this social media platform accommodated the Great Muslimah vision of family-like relations and sustained the intimacy which these young women have imbued into their online conversations. As a young woman confided in me on Facebook Messenger: ‘This community has been like family for me. We always support and encourage each other’.¹⁷ This emulation of family-like intimacy is essential to the space which Great Muslimah offers for young women to progress on their path to Allah. Social media, like LINE, sustained a sociality that was characteristic to visions of a muslimah hijrah in the technopolitan city of Bandung. Through shared idioms of practice developed in the course of online and offline interactions and in response to media ideologies rooted in the daily experience with diverse social media, Febrianti and her followers carve an online space for their group socialities that allows a sense of affective proximity and mutual support in personal growth.

Pepew did not fully neglect other channels of communication, like the aforementioned TV shows or publications. Choosing to publish a second book and so to again address the broader publics, for example, corresponds with the image of Bandung as home of creative talents and with the growing popularity of Islamic books among university students in Indonesia (Allen 2015).¹⁸ While such forms of one-to-many communication would promote Pepew and her komunitas among an anonymous public, social media like LINE are used to sustain intimate socialities and reach the goal of muslimah hijrah.

Personal change and the technology of the community

Another komunitas that implants comradeship and social responsibility among its Muslim members is Pejuang Subuh (‘Dawn Fighters’). It began in 2011 with the endeavour of three young Muslims in Jakarta attempting to promote the performance of shalat subuh, the obligatory prayer before dawn, by the congregation at the mosque. This was intended to change the routine of Muslim urbanites who would perform this prayer alone and at home instead of as a group and at the mosque. Today, the komunitas has grown with chapters mostly in larger cities throughout Java, including Bandung as a ‘trans-centre’ of its activities partly because of the city’s strong connections and short distance to Jakarta.¹⁹

As well as their web presence, including their own official homepage, leaders of Pejuang Subuh use various social media to support a great number of activities. As an active member shared with me in an interview during one of Pejuang Subuh’s monthly outreach events in Bandung, each social media platform serves a particular purpose, including Facebook for promotional activities, Twitter for the recruitment of members, or WhatsApp for the education of ‘mentor’ (English in original) and mujahid subuh (‘dawn combatant’) as well as for maintaining online support groups.²⁰ As he confirmed, ‘for the purpose of da’wah, the benefit of social media is very big’ (dari sisi da’wah manfaatnya sangat besar).²¹ This is in part due to the earlier described flexibility of online da’wah and to the variety of media ideologies that exists among members of Pejuang Subuh.

As my interlocutors explained, daily postings on Facebook and Twitter serve Pejuang Subuh’s nationwide ‘branding’ and ‘positioning’ (English in original) within the broad spectrum of different religious communities. Unlike their Internet presence on various websites, on social media leaders can regularly post and share da’wah messages and other information with an Islamic content to an almost unlimited number of active followers. For Pejuang Subuh, Facebook offers a way to reach out to users who ceaselessly check their Facebook accounts. Yet, while Facebook has long been considered a social networking site that brings together people from different backgrounds (Miller 2012, 2016), as my interlocutors asserted, communication on that platform is largely perceived as one-way (satu arah), positioning it closer to other broadcasting media such as newspapers and radio. Ensuing from Pejuang Subuh’s idioms of practice, to become active on social media requires more than just reading the latest posts and clicking on ‘like’. This opinion follows, to a certain degree, the logic of recent criticism on the political implications of social media in what is labelled social media activism (Lim 2013). According to my interlocutors, by actively commenting, users show their interest in Pejuang Subuh’s activities. They are then invited to register via a short message to a local mentor, who will then establish a direct contact with them through WhatsApp.

The mentor and his WhatsApp group are key to the channelling of online interest and motivation into forms of active participation. Having created an online group, the mentor caters to the needs of members throughout the day, by distributing information, reminding them of upcoming events and group activities, and offering advice for those at the beginning of their personal transformation.²² Online, group members follow daily routines of kajian (‘Islamic classes’) led by other ‘advanced’ members who are considered ‘as competent as an ustadz’ within their WhatsApp group.²³ There, they share knowledge, pose questions, receive answers, and gain daily inspiration. Offline, the same small group would regularly gather for prayers at the local mosque. As Pejuang Subuh grew and groups spread all over the city, the employment of social media like WhatsApp made it easier for leaders to maintain a steady contact and close group socialities with members – an activity that they classified as consistent with their Islamic ideals. Reflecting a similar media ideology to that of Great Muslimah, WhatsApp was used to revive social relations or, as a leader describes, ‘menghidupkan silaturahim’.²⁴ The use of particular social media could nurture socialities and enrich social relations that form the supportive environment for pious Muslims to grow.

While ‘populating mosques’ was the triggering idea behind Pejuang Subuh, in practice this meant educating and training young Muslims to be consistent in their Islamic practices. Inspired by the visions of Pejuang Subuh and willing to change old habits, young Muslim men and women reconfigure their gadgets to connect with a mentor and attend to the activities of a local small group. Active participation entails logging in and staying connected via social media often up to three hours a day, as in the case of online kajian. While men are expected to perform their dawn prayer at the mosque, it is considered more appropriate for women to pray at home. Both groups are required to report back after prayer via online messaging to the local mentor, so that they may eventually qualify to be a mujahid or mujahidah subuh. For men, this usually entails sending a short message directly from the mosque. This from of reporting also ensures credibility since mobile messaging applications now allow them to send their exact coordinates on the city map. After 40 consecutive days of practice and online and offline engagement, a member is eligible to be a mujahid subuh.²⁵ Being consistent in their faith and religious practice should help members to become more successful in other spheres of their life. A member of Pejuang Subuh reports about his experiences in Zakat (2015), a magazine available online and published by the National Agency for Alms (Badan Amil Zakat Nasional):

I joined @PejuangSubuh around 2013. At that time, I plunged into loose relationships, started messing about and doing things that I’m embarrassed to mention. Its peak was when I intended to convert to another religion. Once, when I was hanging out at a friend’s house, I saw a lecture by Ust. Felix Siauw on YouTube. This is where I found out about the community @PejuangSubuh. Through @PejuangSubuh I got used to praying in the morning at the mosque, on time and with the congregation. After two years of following Pejuang Subuh, my life became easy, my studies and work smooth.²⁶

In addition to encouraging consistency in Islamic practices, the second goal of Pejuang Subuh is to instruct members in social commitment in order to contribute to what they broadly define as gerakan sosial (‘social movement’). This is realised through collaboration with other institutions in the course of strong social networking activities. Members of Pejuang Subuh, at the time of my research, volunteered in a group called Pengasuh Anak Yatim (‘Caretakers of orphans’) to support local orphanages by distributing lunch boxes and books, including the Qur’an, and organising outdoor events for orphans. This group cooperates closely with the Orphanage Foundation Al Hilal (Yayasan Pondok Yatim Al Hilal) in Bandung. Following a popular saying of the Prophet Muhammad that implies that a person who cares for orphans is closer to heaven, the group relates their activities to their personal pursuit of piety. Moreover, being willing to help is considered a central characteristic of an Islamic leader. This benevolent disposition is manifested in all activities, which clearly affects members’ choice and use of different social media. Again, Facebook is used mainly to broadcast group activities, i.e. by posting photographs of the orphans at play or reading the Qur’an. Individual members sometimes share group posts and reply to comments or questions, much in line with Pejuang Subuh’s idioms of practice. But, they refrain from using Facebook for anything that would signal a form of self-promotion. The group defines a true leader as someone who gains followers through his or her benefit to others, rather than ‘fame’.²⁷ This is exemplary for what Miller (2016: 22) regards as the ‘re-entry of morality’ in understanding the contemporary use of social media, and this is the point where media ideologies become so relevant.²⁸

The Pejuang Subuh example indicates that an elaborate use of social media that focuses on the maintenance of social relations and a subjectivity of continuous engagement can become a transformative force in the lives of young and tech-savvy Muslims in Bandung today. Unlike religious transformations that have been happening in Bandung since the beginning of the da’wah movement on campus and in mosques from the 1970s onwards, and the introduction of political parties with Islamist agendas after the fall of the Suharto regime, the use of social media has supported the formation of komunitas that were initially detached from physical locales and later, as in the case of Pejuang Subuh, sought to ‘re-populate’ mosques.²⁹ While da’wah used to be the practice of newly Islamised circles in particular locales, today it permeates the daily realities of Muslim users from very different backgrounds. While some of the transformations that members of small groups associated with Pejuang Subuh experience today, i.e. a deep social concern and religious commitment as well as the experience of comradeship, resemble and thus signal continuities with earlier Islamic movements in Bandung, social media appear to have complicated both the spatial and experiential configurations of personal engagement. Family-like small groups in neighbourhoods and university campuses 20 years ago now spread beyond spatial limitations, while still upholding close relationships. Increasingly becoming part of everyday life, even invitations for prayer before dawn in the congregation at the mosque become more amenable to the tech-savvy youth who otherwise would not engage with a religious organisation. Even more so, komunitas’ characteristics increasingly merge with those ideals that have garnished the image of Bandung in the past decade, i.e. innovative, supportive, and decidedly diverse.

Facebook, despite its declining popularity among members of different Muslim groups, continues to be the main site for broadcasting online da’wah. Yet, in order to educate and shape young Muslim selves, internal communication is moved to platforms like WhatsApp that allow for more interactive forms of exchange and extend the room for experimenting with different forms of leadership (as in the case of mentors). Pejuang Subuh’s visions concerning Muslim leadership shape the ways they use different social media and thus greatly affect their media ideologies. Different idioms of practice allow them to elaborately navigate different platforms for their well designed purposes. A focused use of social media, shifting between different sites of interaction, upholds users’ subjectivity of religious commitment and continuous social engagement, which eventually leads to the enhancement of piety as a change of mind-set starting from oneself and reaching out to society at large.

In early 2015, Pejuang Subuh’s branding activities were complimented by the production of a popular two-part short film entitled Cinta subuh (‘Dawn love’), which featured prominently on their YouTube channel. They made the film in collaboration with WANT Production – a group of young Islamic short-film producers and actors who mainly use social media to promote their films.³⁰ In Indonesia, film Islami is an increasingly popular medium to communicate Islamic values and to articulate pious Muslim identities close to the daily experiences and anxieties of the urban middle classes (Heryanto 2014; Hoesterey and Clark 2012; Izharuddin 2015, 2017; Schmidt 2012). In line with this trend, Cinta subuh tells the story of Angga who takes up the practice of praying before dawn to retain his relationship with his girlfriend, a devoted Muslimah herself. Within a short time, after the first part was broadcast in January 2015, the film became popular among social media users who liked, shared, commented, and impatiently anticipated the second part. The happy end of this series showed (professionally) successful Angga gaining the respect of his girlfriend’s father – a respected ustadz – and taking her for his wife. After the great social media success of this film, which motivated users to take up their early morning prayer activities and join local prayer groups and communities, WANT Production decided to continue this form of online da’wah by announcing an Islamic short-film series entitled Ramadhan cantik (‘Beautiful Ramadhan’). Regular postings during the month of Ramadhan showing one series per day animated Facebook users to join online reflections on Islamic values, inspiring them, in a rather subtle and modest way, to maintain their daily fasting activities, good spirits (semangat), and, most of all, sincere intentions (niat yang ikhlas). While the series starring the three main male characters appeared animating, amusing, and encouraging, those series that projected the lives of the three main female characters took a more dramatic and educational course. Different genres were dissected along gender lines, and yet combined in one medium reaching out and reflecting the variety of young, urban, middle-class Muslims' anxieties. As a commentator shares in his personal blog, ‘the content [of the series] unwraps teachings of Islam’ (Kamtiyono 2015). He felt ‘entertained’ (menghibur) and ‘moved’ (menggugah) by these short-film series, ‘because all stories carried a message of self-improvement’ (Kamtiyono 2015). His experience culminates in his personal confession:

Actually, there is some offline happening that accompanied me during this Ramadhan. I felt there is a big change, which I cannot deliver here. The serial Ramadhan Cantik Web Series can become something of a witness/conductor on my way towards change.

Similar to Pepew’s blog, social media here are said to play a vital role in the subjective experience of personal transformation. Indeed, as part of social interaction they appear to transmit the dispositions and sensibilities that are an essential element of pious Muslim subjectivities today. More than a mundane form of communication, komunitas build on the capacities of social media to sustain multiple socialities and raise socially and religiously aware Muslims to share semangat taqwa. As a Pejuang Subuh leader in Bandung asserts ‘the purpose of our social message is not only for members, but for all; […] what we search for is awareness’.³¹

Discussing Muslim transformations

In Indonesia, the introduction of digital technologies and social media unsettled forces of broad participation in the formation of various komunitas and the proliferation of Muslim socialities. While social media allow Muslim users to shape their subjectivities ‘in profoundly new ways’, to refer back to Anderson’s (2006) concept of ‘imagined communities’, they also enable them to embrace those forms of affective social exchange that display continuities with local forms of sociality and the urban, religious realities they inhabit. The subjectivities moulded in this context are decidedly inspired by the model of the economically and politically successful and yet socially concerned Muslim leader who ideally embodies virtues of creativity and discipline at the same time (Gade 2010; Nisa 2012). But, unlike classic forms of religious leadership, leaders of komunitas define themselves by their social relations first and foremost, and consequently, by their social commitment. In the age of digital media, social commitment requires continuous and attentive engagement with different social media to maintain multiple and shifting online and offline socialities and retain a sense of connection across the thresholds of cyberurban space. While most social media offer similar features, ranging from one-to-one to group forms of communication, in everyday practice Muslim users have worked out detailed ways of employing each one of them. While they interpret some platforms as one-way tools for proselytisation, they understand others as means to foster active participation and engagement. These distinctions reflect their attitudes concerning the ideal characteristics of a Muslim leader, who ought primarily to be a mediator between Allah and the religious community. Komunitas in Bandung effectively become the site, both online and offline, where young Muslim urbanites can experiment with such ideals, defining the parameters for social interaction within and across various platforms.

As part of social interaction, social media too is infused with sentiments and dispositions, which makes it important to enquire into the media ideologies of users. Both Great Muslimah and Pejuang Subuh developed their media ideologies and idioms of practice against the background of contemporary urban and technological developments and proselytisation movements that have shaped religious life in Bandung since the end of the Suharto regime. While Great Muslimah configure their social media use to replicate the qualities of sociality and personal sharing in offline, family-like settings, Pejuang Subuh design their online communication to discipline their members to become leaders and extend their religious awareness and social concern. For both groups, the ultimate purpose of their online, but also offline activities, is to share the zeal of piety, which they consider an act of extending the self to the community. Personal proximity and affective relationships of exchange (Hoesterey 2016) nurtured in the socialities of komunitas are key in this process. While leaders of komunitas experiment with kinship idioms to shape their relations to members, they harness social media to create rooms for dialogue, mutual engagement, and personal feedback, allowing a certain level of intimacy, but also a sense of discipline and control. Social media mechanisms of simultaneous connection and disconnection allow members to retain a certain degree of autonomy while keeping the freedom to reconnect to the group at any time of the day. In this sense, komunitas become a social docking station and an emotional charging spot for those young Muslims who find themselves on their journey to Allah.

While all young Muslim users whom I followed in Bandung had their own idioms of practice, all of them pursue the same overarching goal, i.e. to promote an Islam that is universal, practical, easily accessible, and empowering. It almost goes without saying that these characteristics of Islam are reinforced through shared perceptions of social media. Practical understandings of Islam are closely knit to media ideologies and corresponding idioms of practice. In the age of digital technologies, sharing semangat taqwa becomes a key task of Muslim leaders, and educating pious Muslim selves is increasingly sought and achieved through extensive use of social media.

In the technopolitan city of Bandung, the formation of komunitas and the proliferation of Islamic practices and socialities across cyberurban space signal processes of mixed social and religious transformations that embrace evolving forms of (Islamic) leadership based less on formal (religious) education or an academic title, but on the ability to connect to, to share with, and to invest in the larger online and offline publics. Such leaders gain their authority on a personal and relational level. They are ‘mentors’, ‘sisters’ or ‘brothers’, who become personal counsellors, motivators, and inspiring models for young middle-class urbanites. They master the online spheres of new information and communication technologies, encourage the reinterpretation of Islamic practices in the light of digital media, and attract other social media users who are eager to share, participate, and invest in the production of mutual spaces of dialogue. Once followers, social media users become participants in groups of like-minded, well informed, and self-motivated Muslims who are moved by their immediate surroundings. Together, they create new forms of fellowship sustained through shared online and offline socialities and arenas of social engagement that aim towards social change. Hence, more than a simple extension of existing offline socialities, social media also bear visions of a pious Muslim society, acting in the light of Islamic concepts and values and promoting online and offline forms of interaction. Komunitas become the practical applications of such visions in which social media are considered a form of interaction that upholds both Islamic socialities and Islamic subjectivities of continuous engagement, shaped by affective channels of sharing what members call semangat taqwa.

Acknowledgements

I am gratefully indebted to the project leader and my doctoral advisor, Martin Slama, who consistently encouraged me to pursue this research. I am also thankful to my friend and ‘sister’ Karina Azzahra who never doubted my endeavours and regularly acted as a mediator between me and the groups which I studied in Bandung. This research would not have been successful without her passionate support. I am also grateful to all komunitas who openly spoke about their social media use and who invited me to follow their activities offline and online. Last but not least, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that greatly contributed to improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dayana Lengauer is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on social media, religious practice, and (digital) forms of sociality in Bandung, Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by the Austrian Science Fund project ‘Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia’ [FWF 26645-G22], based at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Notes

1 Technopolitan here relates to the term ‘technopolis’. British science journalist Calder (1969: 22) defined technopolis as ‘a society not only shaped but continuously modified in drastic ways by scientific and technical novelty’. Later it became a theoretical paradigm for regional technology-based development (see Smilor et al. 1988). Inspired by Silicon Valley and neighbouring, technologically advanced Singapore, Bandung’s current mayor Ridwan Kamil regularly uses this term to denote his endeavours to transform Bandung into a technology focused city.

2 The Indonesian term komunitas is used here instead of its direct translation ‘community’ for analytical and empirical reasons. Analytically, it seeks to distance itself from classical definitions of physically bound communities or emotionally laden ‘imagined communities’. Empirically, it attempts to capture contemporary socialities in shared interactional and field-specific contexts across online and offline spheres of encounter.

3 Lussier and Fish (2012) view Indonesians’ high level of associational commitment in neighbourhood associations and religious groups as decisive for the state’s democratisation process. Bandung’s komunitas differ as they are neither bound to a particular locale or religious organisation nor explicitly engaged in political activism. Their networked structure and multiple and transient relations, online and offline, require an analytical tool different from ‘community’. For anthropological critique on the use of the concept of community as a unit of analysis for what can be described as ‘fields of complex processes through which sociality is sought, rejected, argued over, realized, interpreted, exploited or enforced’ see Amit and Rapport (2002: 14).

4 The term ‘cyberurban’ was coined by Lim (2015: 118) to describe ‘the fluid and complex spatial landscape we live in, with its blurred boundaries between cyber and physical space’.

5 For Indonesian youth, Slama (2010: 316) showed how in the early 2000s Internet chatting became ‘a tool to deal with emotions as well as a site to enact particular feelings or to circumvent others’.

6 The Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and the School of Telecommunications (SST Telkom), owned by Telkom Indonesia, are both regarded as the educational centres of technology in Indonesia (Lim 2002).

7 Salman is the name of the first campus mosque that opened in Bandung in 1972. Imaduddin Abdulrahim was part of the founding committee and later introduced three-day training programmes for Muslim student activists, called Latihan Mujahid Dakwah (Training of Preaching Combatants). This da'wah movement, rooted in the early endeavours of Muslim intellectuals to spread a purified version of Islamic faith, did not object to the use of science, technology, or rational thought. Rather, the movement viewed Islam as ‘a complete way of life’ (Kersten 2015: 75).

8 In 1998, Tarbiya activists established KAMMI (Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Muslim Indonesia or Muslim students’ action committee), a student organisation closely associated with the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which was also established by former Tarbiya activists and is the political party of the Indonesian version of the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, KAMMI is still active on campuses across Indonesia (van Bruinessen 2013: 40).

9 Today, Bandung is part of the Southeast Asian Creative Cities Network (SEACCN) introduced in Chiang Mai (Thailand) in 2014.

10 Ridwan Kamil’s activist background as an academic and young entrepreneur appealed to a number of komunitas that supported him during the 2013 elections. Among the political parties that also supported Ridwan Kamil was PKS – a party closely related to the Tarbiya movement of the early 1990s when Ridwan Kamil studied architecture at ITB (1990–1995). Social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) played a vital role in the campaign designed by komunitas to support their candidate. The success of their campaign has been presented as an example for a bottom-up approach towards politics and the formation of political opinion (Herdiansah et al. 2014).

11 Kang is a Sundanese term that is used for addressing an older and respected person, similar to the Sundanese Aa (‘older brother’).

12 Syar’i in the book title is of Arabic origin and can be translated as ‘consistent with Islamic religious law or shariah’. In Indonesia, this term is often used in relation to women’s visual appearances and ways of clothing (Jones 2010). The tagline ‘syar’i, berprestasi, menginspirasi’ indicates the reasoning behind the concept of ‘great Muslimah’, which links religious devotion to private success and public benefit (see also Rinaldo 2013).

13 Febrianti applies the concept of hijrah, which refers to the journey of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622CE, to multiple contemporary topics and a neo-liberal sense of personal growth (Lengauer 2017).

14 Personal communication, 1 May 2015. All interviews, conversations and published sources that were in Indonesian have been translated here by the author.

15 In Indonesia, generally, older siblings are due the respect of their younger siblings. Local kinship terms often imply familial hierarchies. This is the case, for example, with Bandung’s most celebrated Islamic preacher Kiai Haji Abdullah Gymnastiar, who is affectionately called Aa Gym, or ‘elder brother’ Gym (see also Hoesterey 2016). Compared to local idioms of practice, such as the use of the Sundanese term teteh or its abbreviation teh to address an elderly female sibling, the use of the English ‘sister’ signals a distancing from local hierarchies and an appropriation of more egalitarian models of relationship and friendship.

16 Despite her encouragements, new followers particularly continue to call Febrianti, Teh Pepew.

17 English in original; personal communication via Facebook Messenger, 23 May 2015.

18 Reflecting on the Islamic Book Fair in Jakarta in 2015, Allen (2015) asserts that ‘the bestselling books are practical ones on how to live life as a devout Muslim – apparently bought by recent converts or these “returning” to the tenets of the Islamic faith’.

19 Bandung was considered a ‘trans-centre’ (English in original), since it represents a point of transmission for ideas and activities originally developed in Pejuang Subuh’s central premises in Jakarta and dispersed via Bandung to other towns and cities across Java.

20 Once enrolled, a member is considered a pejuang subuh. After following a specifically designed programme of daily prayer before dawn at the mosque for a period of 40 successive days (for women, prayer is performed at home for 30 consecutive days with interruption permitted only during their menstrual period), a member is eligible to become a ‘mentor’ and a mujahid subuh (for women, mujahidah subuh). Higher levels of performance and consistence (istiqamah) in Islamic practice are stressed by the use of terms of foreign origin (i.e. mujahid being of Arabic origin), which brings notions of hierarchy back into Pejuang Subuh’s idioms of practice.

21 Personal communication, 28 May 2015.

22 For Pejuang Subuh, personal change involves the cultivation of discipline and consistency, as well as vitality, commitment, and social responsibility. Next to its spiritual good, members are assured of the great bodily and mental benefits of the performance of the prayer before dawn as a central exercise of every good Muslim.

23 Usually, an ustadz or ustadzah would have received some formal education in Islam and Arabic language. With the rise of new media and the fragmentation of authority, however, formal education is no longer a prerequisite to becoming publicly acknowledged as an ustadz or ustadzah.

24 The term denotes the maintenance of friendly relations based on mutual appreciation.

25 Forty days is said to be a special number in Islam, as in the case of the Prophet Muhamad who fasted for 40 days in the cave of Hira. For Pejuang Subuh it takes 40 days to instill a habit (kebiasaan) (personal communication, 28 May 2015).

26 Felix Siauw is a popular Islamic preacher of Chinese descent in Indonesia and supporter of the transnational Islamist group Hizbut Tahrir (see also Hew 2014 and Hew 2018 in this special issue). Siauw’s personal story of conversion to Islam became a source of inspiration for many young Muslims on- and off-campus, including members of Pejuang Subuh. Their idea of 40 days of training to be a mujahid subuh is also inspired by Siauw’s book (2012), How to master your habits.

27 Being ‘beneficial to the universe’ (bermanfaat bagi semesta) is also central to the journey of a great Muslimah to Allah (personal communication, 1 May 2015). Pepew drew her motivation from a popular saying of the Prophet: ‘The best among you is the one who is most beneficial to others’ (sebaik-baik manusia diantaramu adalah yang paling banyak manfaat bagi orang lain).

28 See also Husein and Slama (2018) in this special issue.

29 To ‘populate the mosque’ at dawn was the founding idea of Pejuang Subuh. Today, they continue this endeavour in their programmes to renovate and ‘revive’ mosques in the suburbs and poor neighbourhoods. Also Pepew, in searching for a venue for her komunitas’ monthly events, prefers those halls or mosques that are ‘not too busy’ (tidak terlalu ramai) (personal communication, 5 August 2017).

30 Islamic film has become another creative genre that has invaded both social media and the activities of Muslim groups, like KOPFI Bandung (Komunitas Pecinta Film Islami or Komunitas of Islamic Film Lovers in Bandung).

31 Personal communication, 28 May 2015.