Martin Slama

A subtle economy of time: Social media and the transformation of Indonesia's Islamic preacher economy

Abstract The article is concerned with the latest developments in Indonesias Islamic field. Its focus is on the role of social media in exchange relationships between Islamic preachers and their constituency. The article first discusses economic exchanges between preachers and their followers, and then it concentrates on social exchanges and how they are mediated today. Empirically, the article delivers insight into the concerns of mostly female Indonesian middle‐class Muslims and shows how preachers have to adjust to the needs of their followers who are regularly online. Theoretically, the article offers a rereading of Pierre Bourdieus classic work on forms of capital and their conversion. It emphasizes the temporal dimension of capital accumulation and conversion and explores the temporalities of online exchanges that have become constitutive of preacher–follower relationships. In doing so, it shows how Indonesias Islamic preacher economy is currently transformed by these online exchanges, resulting in preacher–follower relationships that are characterized by dialogic constructions of Islamic authority. Being part of Indonesias Islamic field, these changes in the Islamic preacher economy point to a broader trend in Indonesias Islamic field toward greater sensitivity to the needs and worries of Indonesian middle‐class Muslims.

Translocal Networks and Globalisation within Indonesia: Exploring the Hadhrami Diaspora from the Archipelago’s North-East

This article contributes to the study of diasporic aspects of today’s Eastern Indonesia by emphasizing its long history of translocal connections, as well as the multiplicity and acceleration of contemporary flows. It focuses on the Hadhrami diaspora, i.e., Indonesians of Arabic descent whose ancestors migrated from the Hadhramaut (located in today’s Republic of Yemen) to almost all parts of the archipelago. Today, Hadhramis in north-eastern Indonesia, the region this article concentrates on, form distinct communities and maintain translocal networks. There already in colonial times, Hadhramis institutionalised their networks through an Islamic organisation called Al-Khairaat. The article investigates how the translocal networks in north-eastern Indonesia have developed, especially during the New Order and afterwards, when Hadhramis from the region increasingly incorporated Java, especially Jakarta, into their networks. Reconsidering post-Suharto transformations that are part of a globalisation within Indonesia, the article concludes that their networks connect now the north-eastern periphery and Indonesia’s centre more intensively than ever. And, as a consequence of this expansion, Hadhramis from north-eastern Indonesia were able to enter national elite circles in Jakarta.

Practising Islam through social media in Indonesia

In recent years, one of themost 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), andmedia 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 newmedia 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).

Online piety and its discontent: revisiting Islamic anxieties on Indonesian social media

ABSTRACT In today’s digital age, many Indonesian Muslims utilise social media, such as Facebook, WhatsApp and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to express their piety. However, their religious online practices are not devoid of ambiguities, discontents and tensions. The article focuses on these specific consequences of being digitally pious in Indonesia. It examines how riyā’, an established concept in Islamic theology that refers to showing off one’s piety, has gained new relevance in the context of contemporary uses of social media for religious purposes. The article particularly discusses online Qur’an reading groups (ODOJ) and sedekah (charity) activities that utilise social media, and asks how Muslims deal with the problem of riyā’, which is strongly discouraged in Islamic theology, and with the discontent and anxieties it generates. At the same time, it reveals that the responses to the challenge that riyā’ poses vary greatly and that Indonesian Muslims have found different ways to overcome it.

‘Coming Down to the Shop’: Trajectories of Hadhrami Women into Indonesian Public Realms

This article is concerned with the trajectories of Indonesian women of Hadhrami-Arab descent into public realms. It enquires how their agency has developed out of a particular diasporic tradition that has brought a gender order to colonial Indonesia characterised by a rigid division of public and domestic domains. In Indonesia, Hadhrami concepts of the public and domestic encountered local and governmental gender regimes and experienced considerable transformations in recent decades. The article shows how Hadhrami women coped with this dynamic and manifold field of gender relations and examines the expansion of their agency into Indonesian public realms paying particular attention to their economic activities, their public roles as skilled employees and professionals, and their engagement in the womens wings of Hadhrami-Islamic organisations. The article concludes that their deployment of particular Islamic discourses stressing piousness through the construction of a gendered hierarchy in the domestic but not in the public sphere underpins their agency in todays Indonesia which witnesses a general trend towards the appearance of self-consciously pious Muslim women.

Papua as an Islamic Frontier: Preaching in ‘the Jungle’ and the Multiplicity of Spatio-Temporal Hierarchisations

This contribution attempts to examine accounts of Papua that perceive the territory as a frontier where borders of nation states, civilising missions, predatory capitalism and violent conflicts converge, and to which images of the stone-age, the primitive, the uncivilised, etc. are so persistently attached. The anthropology of Indonesia has generated particularly rich accounts of frontier regions including valuable theorisations of the concept (e.g. Li 1999; Rutherford 2003; Tsing 2005). This chapter engages with these approaches by understanding Papua not only as a frontier in the sense that has been discussed in the literature so far, but also by exploring decentred, non-Western perspectives. Whereas Engseng Ho (2004) in a seminal piece investigated ‘empire through diasporic eyes’ and revealed fascinating historic parallels between European colonial empires in the Indian Ocean and the current global empire of the United States, this chapter takes a diasporic perspective on the Papuan frontier –the diasporic eyes belonging to Muslims with a particular trans-regional history. Such as in the case described by Ho (2004), the diaspora in question is formed by Muslims of Arab descent originating from the Hadhramaut, a south-eastern territory of today’s Republic of Yemen, who have crossed the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian archipelago since medieval times (Freitag and Clarence-Smith 1997; Jonge and Kaptain 2002; Ho 2006). Boosted by the opening of the Suez Canal and the advent of steam shipping, their migration to Indonesia reached its height from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the 20th century. It substantially decreased after Indonesia’s independence due to nationalistic policies and economic uncertainties in the early post-colonial period. Today, Hadhramis form distinct communities in Indonesia and are particularly engaged in trade and Islamic proselytising not only in the country’s centres but also on its peripheries (Slama 2011), including Papua.