Barthesian Semiotics of Digital Hijrah Narratives: Celebrity Piety and Spiritual Transformation on YouTube
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15575/kt.v7i2.53950Keywords:
Barthesian semiotics, celebrity piety, digital dakwah, hijrah, YouTubeAbstract
Purpose: This study examines how celebrity hijrah narratives on YouTube construct meanings of spiritual transformation and shape public understandings of Islamic piety in contemporary Indonesia. Although hijrah has been widely studied as a form of Islamic identity formation, digital dakwah, and religious media practice, limited attention has been given to how celebrity hijrah testimonies produce ideological meanings through layered verbal, visual, and symbolic signs. Methodology: This study employs a qualitative approach within a constructivist paradigm using Roland Barthes’s semiotic framework. The data were drawn from a Kasisolusi YouTube podcast episode featuring Uki Kautsar, former guitarist of NOAH, who underwent hijrah and left the music industry. The analysis focused on verbal dialogue, non-verbal expressions, and visual elements, which were examined through three levels of signification: denotation, connotation, and myth. Findings: The findings show that Uki Kautsar’s hijrah narrative constructs spiritual transformation as a multidimensional process involving theological inquiry, emotional struggle, family support, social accountability, economic uncertainty, moral boundary-making, and the reorientation of worldly skills toward religiously acceptable purposes. Denotatively, the narrative presents a personal journey of leaving the music industry. Connotatively, it conveys sincerity, sacrifice, intellectual humility, moral consistency, and social support. Mythologically, it naturalizes hijrah as an ideal model of contemporary Muslim identity marked by moral firmness, visible transformation, and communal validation. Implication: This study shows that digital hijrah narratives can function as accessible religious resources for young Muslims, while also requiring more nuanced digital religious communication to avoid narrow standards of piety and performative religiosity. Originality: This study contributes to digital religion scholarship by extending Barthesian semiotics to the analysis of celebrity hijrah narratives on YouTube, showing how personal testimony, visual performance, digital authority, and mythological meanings interact to construct Islamic piety in the digital public sphere.
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