Practising Islam through social media in Indonesia

In recent years, one of the most significant shifts in the field of Islam in Indonesia is the increasing reliance of Muslims on social media when practising their faith. To a certain extent, media practices have become indistinguishable from religious practices and, most importantly, Muslims themselves often perceive their online activities as part of their pious endeavours to improve their religiosity. Social media are particularly relevant in this regard because they, perhaps like no other media, are deeply embedded in users’ everyday lives (Horst 2012; Miller et al. 2016). The articles assembled in this special issue represent intriguing examples of how social media, the religious, and the everyday intersect. They are also at the forefront of latest developments in the study of media and religion, and Islam in particular, that stress practice in concrete social environments over doctrine, content analysis or mere reception (Gershon 2010; Postill 2010). In other words, within the anthropology of Islam, Islam has become increasingly understood as a set of practices that can be explored, asserted and questioned (Bowen 2012), and media studies have also discovered the agency of users. To what extent these theoretical shifts were inspired by the introduction of new or social media is open to debate, yet it seems obvious that this conjuncture of new approaches in studies of Islam and new media provide a useful analytical orientation to examine the latest dynamics of Islam in Indonesia.

That this field appears so dynamic today, can of course not only be attributed to the introduction of new communication technologies and new media. Indonesia has undergone significant social and political changes in the last decades, comprising the rise of a Muslim middle class that started to ‘consume’ Islam (Fealy 2008; Jones 2012) and the opening up of its political system after the fall of Suharto in 1998. This is another conjuncture that we can discern, not in theory but on the ground, namely that these social and political developments coincided with the transformation of Indonesia's media landscape, particularly with the introduction of the Internet in the late 1990s. Whereas I want to refrain from establishing a causal link here, one cannot deny that the Internet, and later social media, have contributed to far-reaching developments in Indonesia, such as the pluralisation of communication channels, making it difficult for political players to (re)establish a condition of discursive hegemony (by that I do not argue that hegemonic discourses do not exist in Indonesia, especially in the realm of religion). At the same time, it would be inadequate to portray the context in which Islam is practised through social media in today's Indonesia as a realm of unconditional opportunities and freedoms, or as solely inspired by a spirit of tolerance and democracy. A closer look at the articles of this special issue would not justify such a view. However, what one can note is that the constraints Muslims find in expressing their religiosity online are mostly negotiated in the field of Islam itself, with the number of players that are involved in the discussions having certainly increased. What this special issue thus attests to is the contemporary assemblage of a politically dynamic, economically (unequally) developing, and (also unequally) media-savvy Indonesia that allows for a variety of Islamic practices online which often reflect the novel ways in which Muslims express their religion (see also Barendregt 2012; Slama 2017b).¹

Given the largely enthusiastic embrace of social media in Indonesia, particularly among the country's middle classes, it does not come as a surprise that in urban settings Islamic practices and socialities that are connected to social media usage are gaining in popularity. In her contribution to this special issue, Dayana Lengauer examines the formation of two Islamic socialities in Bandung, Indonesia's techno-capital and centre of higher learning. In the case of Great Muslimah, a group that is centred around a young Indonesian woman who skilfully expresses her religious experiences through various media, she traces the shifts from one medium to another, for example from blogging to Facebook to LINE chat groups, analysing how community formation and the construction of a pious Islamic self takes place through a complex set of online and offline interventions. The second ethnographic case study in her article is Pejuang Subuh (Morning Fighters), a group that particularly emphasises the Islamic sociality of the morning prayer at mosques. Lengauer shows how this group uses a variety of (social) media to spread their messages and identifies WhatsApp as the key platform for the actual practice of the morning prayer, as members receive special guidance on WhatsApp that makes them into regular Morning Fighters.

The interrelations between the uses of a particular messaging app and a particular Islamic practice play an even stronger role in Eva Nisa's article which focuses on an Indonesian Qur’an reading movement that extensively uses WhatsApp to connect its members. ODOJ members oblige themselves to read ‘one day one juz’, i.e. one section (juz’) of the Qur’an, each day. Yet they do not pursue this endeavour alone, as members are assembled in WhatsApp groups of 30 people. Since the Qur’an has thirty sections, and if every member of the group reads the section that was assigned to him or her, the group as a whole will complete reading the Qur’an every day, which is of particular value in Islam. Moreover, every member of the group will complete reading the Qur’an every month. Nisa also shows how the group members motivate each other in reading the assigned chapters and how ODOJ developed a system of rewards for reading the chapters, receiving up to five stars for completing one's section early to only one star for finishing late in the evening. Yet Nisa not only focuses on organisation and practice, but also traces the sociological-cum-ideological roots of ODOJ which she finds in the Tarbiyah movement that is strongly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and became a political force in post-Suharto Indonesia under the name of the Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera or PKS). Like its political counterpart, ODOJ does not restrict itself to online activism, but also organises offline gatherings that are centred on Qur’an reading activities. Despite the importance of WhatsApp for ODOJ, and similar to the cases described by Lengauer, we thus encounter here a complex dynamic of online-offline practices as well.

Whereas the (online) Islamic practices and socialities discussed by Nisa and Lengauer have their origin in Java (particularly the cities of Jakarta and Bandung), Wahyuddin Halim introduces us to a more peripheral place that is nevertheless perfectly connected to Indonesia's capital – not least due to the deployment of social media. His focus is on As’adiyah, South Sulawesi's biggest Islamic organisation that was founded in Sengkang and runs a vast network of schools in the region and also in other places in Indonesia where people from South Sulawesi have settled. Examining how a variety of media, and social media specifically, are utilised by As’adiyah and how access is restricted for the boarding school students, Halim pays attention to the role of As’adiyah preachers. He shows how representatives of the younger generation of preachers use social media to gain popularity within the As’adiyah network, and how some of them have even managed to transcend the network and became well known preachers at the national level. Moreover, Halim points to the differences in how older and younger preachers approach social media and analyses what this means for the internal hierarchy among As’adiyah preachers. He also makes clear that despite a certain cautiousness among some representatives of As’adiyah, its leadership displays a relatively open attitude towards practising Islam through social media.

Further exploring the phenomenon of Islamic preachers, the contribution of Hew Wai Weng is concerned with the media practices of Felix Siauw, one of the most popular preachers in Indonesia today. Felix Siauw is a follower of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), the Indonesian branch of Hizbut Tahrir, an Islamist transnational organisation that intends to unite the Islamic world under a global caliphate.² Hew analyses in detail the textual and visual dakwah (proselytisation) of Felix Siauw which is aimed at young middle-class Indonesians that are theologically poorly educated. As Hew shows, the preacher works with visual images and memes as well as with simple textual messages that are appealing to an urban middle-class audience that is just discovering its religiosity. This is a segment of society, as already indicated by Lengauer and Nisa, in which online socialities and religious practices go hand in hand and are not seen as contradictory. Preachers like Felix Siauw have understood that very well and, as Hew shows, have not only accommodated their preaching style to social media but also their attempts to expand their businesses, such as selling Islamic clothes and books. Felix Siauw is thus a representative of Indonesia's Islamic preacher economy that has evolved in tandem with the introduction of electronic media in Indonesia (see also Hoesterey 2016; Slama 2017a).

Whereas the articles discussed so far mainly deal with cases where social media are appreciated as enabling platforms of new forms of piety, Fatimah Husein and Martin Slama look at the downside of these phenomena, since social media generate not only heightened Islamic piety and enthusiasm but also serious concerns and anxieties. Their article is particularly concerned with the concept of riyā’ that refers to the practice of showing off one's piety and has a firm place in Islamic theology that warns of committing riyā’ as a sinful behaviour. Husein and Slama reveal how riyā’ became a topic in the context of new forms of online piety, especially with regard to Qur’an reading groups on messaging apps as well as Islamic charities that extensively use social media to garner support and document their activities. They also indicate how Indonesian Muslims reinterpret riyā’ in the context of their respective environments and how these interpretations differ from those of Islamic scholars in the past and present. Their article points at the ambivalences and anxieties that are often associated with Islamic practices – a topic that seems to gain new relevance for Indonesian Muslims that increasingly practice Islam through social media.

This short introduction to the articles that are assembled in this special issue can only highlight certain aspects of the work presented here. However, I have tried to make clear that religious life in Indonesia today, and especially among urban-based middle-class Muslims, is intrinsically and irreversibly entangled with the everyday uses of social media. Forming Islamic socialities, reading the Qur’an, running charities and donating, following particular preachers and preaching itself have all become practices that more or less connect to the platforms and communication channels of today's social media. These shifts in Islamic practice have, of course, consequences for how Islam is developing in Indonesia, and the articles in this special issue provide important insights into the possibilities and also the constraints in which the actors of this field are embedded, pointing at transformations in how Islamic authority as well as gender and economic relations are constructed. Given the relevance of these topics and the continuing popularity of digital ways of being pious in Indonesia, it will not sound too prophetic to state that practising Islam through social media represents a field of enquiry that will remain with us in the years to come.

Acknowledgements

Some of the articles of this special issue were initially presented at the workshop ‘Social Media and Islamic Practice in Southeast Asia’ which took place in April 2016, in Vienna, Austria. The workshop was an initiative of the Austrian Science Fund project ‘Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia’ [FWF P26645-G22], which is directed by Martin Slama at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Notes

1 For this variety of Islamic expressions on social media in Southeast Asia, see also the collection of blog-like essays, ‘Piety, Celebrity, Sociality’ on the website of the American Ethnological Society that I co-edited with Carla Jones (Slama and Jones 2017), and to which most of the authors of this special issue also contributed.

2 In July 2017, HTI was banned by the Indonesian government, which so far does not seem to have greatly diminished the popularity of Felix Siauw.