The Threat of Insta-Preachers
Week 3: Religion and Commerce
The “rise of rock star clerics” on Indonesian social media is a subject of ongoing debate (Carolina 2019). In recent years, Indonesian Muslims have gained a growing presence on social media platforms, such as Instagram, where they promote a “hijrah lifestyle”, modeling to their audiences the everyday religious practices, from dress to food, that they deem proper (Carolina 2019). The hijrah movement has an offline presence as well through its annual HijrahFest, a large gathering in Jakarta during which attendees “explore a Muslim-themed trade show featuring modest fashion and halal cosmetics; get free tattoo removal services; and attend Quranic studies guided by the hijrah community’s top preachers” (Carolina 2019).
The “insta-preacher” holds significant sway over younger Muslim populations and has therefore been the source of anxiety (Carolina 2019). These popular figures must project a form of moderate piety, a “fine line between conservatism and extremism” (Carolina 2019). They must avoid language that could signal fundamentalism and trigger ever present fears of extremism. The threat of extremism appears particularly insidious given the uncontrolled and pervasive character of social media platforms. The danger that seems to lurk behind the rise of religious social media is challenged by those who view these social platforms as safer to the more mainstream mass media. One woman who started a female-only Quranic WhatsApp group reports that she prefers that her children watch YouTube instead of television because “there are less and less quality things to watch on TV nowadays, even the ads have bad influence on kids” (Carolina 2019).
An ambivalence toward Indonesia’s Islamic social media is implicit in Carolina’s (2019) account of the movement. The use of emerging platforms to broadcast religious messages to targeted audiences may appear counterintuitive, drawing on technologies often associated with self-absorption to convey messages of pious living. The success of the movement, however, indicates that for its audiences there is not an overwhelming contradiction. For many, social media appears to be the logical vehicle for the modeling of religious ideals.
Carla Jones (2010), writing about the Indonesian context, argues that the ambiguity of pious consumption is highly gendered. Women are uniquely tasked with performing conspicuous piety, while they simultaneously draw criticism and call their piety into question by this very act. Jones (2010, p. 624) describes that “the accusation of pursuing piety for fashionable reasons is explicitly feminized, making women bearers of heavier semiotic burdens than male subjects.” I am curious about the ways in which the criticism of the rise of Islamic social media is gendered. To what extent are women seen to be particularly susceptible to its dual threats of endorsing vanity and promoting extremism, and what can attending to gendered aspects of the phenomenon tell us about the interconnections between these supposed threats?
Sources:
Carolina, J. (2019) “Indonesia’s Muslim youth find new heroes in Instagram preachers”, GlobalPost, March 29. Available from https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-03-29/indonesia-s-muslim-youth-find-new-heroes-instagram-preachers.
Jones, C. 2010. Materializing piety: Gendered anxieties about faithful consumption in contemporary urban Indonesia. American Ethnologist 37 (4): 617-637.
Contributed by JennySilver on 03/02/2020
