This project is concerned with Indonesian Muslims’ religious life as it is embedded in the everyday uses of social media and communication technologies. It is particularly concerned with Muslims’ uses of social media to position themselves within the field of Indonesian Islam and to imagine their place within the broader Islamic world. The project understands social media as a contested space where different ideologies and visions, informed by offline geographies and geopolitics, can collide. It puts emphasis on the visual representation of piety and examines how class positions, gender orders and multiple possibilities of being public and private are reflected in these online expressions. Moreover, the project discusses a variety of social media practices and asks whether today’s extensive religious uses of social media reinforce class differences among Indonesian Muslims, and hence one can speak of an Islamic digital divide, or whether one can also spot trends that point in the opposite direction. Furthermore, the project engages with analytical challenges that concern the categorization of Indonesian Muslims in scholarly as well as public discourses. It seeks to question established categories and the ways they have been used so far in light of the growing popularity of Islamic socialities that have a strong online component and that display a remarkable ideological diversity. The project has a particular interest in Hadhrami preachers who regularly use social media in order to be able to compete with a growing number of celebrity preachers that emphasize media-savviness over classic Islamic education and noble trans-regional genealogies that Hadhrami preachers possess. In this climate of competition, the project is concerned with the role of Hadhramis’ diasporic identity in constructing authority, not only in Indonesia’s religious, but also in its political field, in which Indonesians of Hadhrami descent occupy leading positions. It asks in which circumstances and constellations diasporic identity is emphasized, downplayed or omitted, and when religious and political authority is combined, disentangled or kept apart from the beginning. This research interest evolves into bigger questions about the entanglements between the religious and the political spheres, and asks about the consequences of contemporary socio-religious dynamics for how Islam and politics is intertwined in Indonesia today.  

Finanzierung:
Erstmittel