Dzikir in Digital Space: A Sufi Reading of Devotional Practice on Indonesian Social Media

Abstract

This article examines how Sufi dzikir [remembrance of God] is reorganized when it moves onto Indonesian social media and interprets that reorganization through the ethical vocabulary of tasawuf akhlaqi [ethical Sufism] rather than through media theory alone. Using a netnographic approach, the study observed twelve livestreams and short-form devotional posts from January to June 2026 across three established Sufi actors: the Idrisiyyah order of Tasikmalaya, Lora Taufiq, and Rumi Centre Indonesia. The analysis also examined comment interactions and account-level follower and cumulative-like counts. Three findings emerge. First, within this corpus, content format appears more consistently associated with patterns of devotional participation than platform brand alone, with livestreamed ritual and short-form devotional content producing distinct interactional patterns. Second, comment feeds reveal a digitally specific mode of translocal participation in which distant viewers mark their location and invoke the shaykh’s madad [spiritual assistance] as a form of rabitah [spiritual connection to the master] across distance. Third, the actor whose teaching is most critical of popularity holds the largest following of the three, highlighting a tension between sincerity and ostentatious display, and between truthfulness and falsehood. The study argues that digital devotion places outward visibility and inward sincerity within the same frame without allowing the platform itself to resolve their relationship. Its contribution lies in combining a typology of devotional form with an internal ethical reading drawn from the Sufi tradition and in questioning the assumption that platform-native creator styles necessarily attract the largest religious audiences online.