Performing the Global

It is now widely accepted that a key feature of life in our era is the deepening engagement of the local with the global. Ulrich Beck has defined globalization as:

The consequences of these mutually implicating principles, and the social and political transformations they might bring about, have been well examined in the context of cultural, economic and technological flows between sites in the developed world. Less attention has been paid to global circuits of exchange outside the West. Some notable exceptions have highlighted interconnections between countries of the global South and increasingly intense inter-Asia cultural flows (see, for example, Iwabuchi et al. 2004; Chen and Chua 2007; Chen 2010; Goh 2015). Cultural flows exceed and move beyond economic and political relationships, resulting in cultural traffic that can often be found moving in many different directions simultaneously (cf. Ahmed and Donnan 1994). To fully grasp the power of globalization to collapse the polarities and transform culture at the local or national level, we need to look beyond the economic, financial and material aspects to the imaginative and less tangible dimensions of social reality. Novel ideas and meanings can also transform local cultural sensibilities and give rise to an expanded consciousness – what we now understand, after Manfred Steger, as the ‘global imaginary’ (Steger 2008). Images and symbols of the global that can promote this new consciousness increasingly appear in the public domain, in particular, but not exclusively, in the urban, mediatized and consumption-oriented spaces we recognize as sites of modernity. Alongside these visual cues, certain performative practices have the power to create an imagined connection with the global. These imaginaries, as Steger asserts, acquire solidity – a sense of the ‘real’– through the (re)construction of social space and the repetitive performance of certain communal qualities (Steger 2008, p. 7). How this awareness of the global is generated in specific contexts and sites of cultural activity still remains to be discovered.

The Square, the Mob … and ‘Love for the Prophet’

Late afternoon, 6 October 2012. Some of my long-time Islamist acquaintances had just picked me up at Lawan Pedang Street in suburban Shah Alam. Unrest had been in the air for weeks, with general elections upcoming, and many anticipating the opposition – Islamists among their ranks – having a real chance of overthrowing the ruling National Coalition for the first time. But little of this commotion is evident on this sultry afternoon, with young Malay couples and their children flocking to Shah Alam's centrally located Freedom Square, playing with toy guns, balloons and soap bubbles.

That evening, Shah Alam would be the stage for, what some Islamist friends had enthusiastically referred to as, the ‘world's first ever Islamist flash mob,’ with plans to ‘occupy’ the square and make their voices heard. The flash mob was carefully orchestrated by Munsyid Malaysia, a professional organization established only a year before with the intention of collectively promoting Islamist performing arts to a larger national audience.

INTRODUCTION: MOBILE RELIGIOSITIES

Modernity, while occurring at a global scale, is multiple in character. It is often lacking the central master-narratives formerly associated with the term modernity. In this contribution, I consider one reading of modernity by focusing on the ways young Southeast Asian Muslims “make themselves modern” in creatively adapting and appropriating mobile communication tools and practices in their everyday lives.

Indonesia, the country referred to in this study, is not only a country that recently has begun to engage with its own mobile modernities, but being home to the largest Muslim population within a single nation, such a mobile modernity increasingly has come to be defined in Islamic terms. The ways mobile technology, and in its aftermath ideas on modernity, is domesticated and deliberated within religious circles has been little studied to date, although recently Katz (2006) has given a brief survey of it. Earlier, Rheingold (1999) touched upon the topic when explaining the Amish's somewhat ambiguous attitude towards new technology and their constant negotiation of its use, including what he calls “their secret affair with the cell phone”. Occasional mention has been made of novel “mobile rituals” such as the SMS Puja service (The Tribune, 5 September 2003), whereby an operator forwards a SMS prayer to Mumbai temples where it may be recited for its senders. Popular media have similarly signalled new forms of public devotion finding its expression in, for example, the popularity of mobile icons of Lord Ganesh in Indian society (Das 2003) or the text gospel described by Ellwood-Clayton (2003) for the Philippines. Most of these practices, once successful, will soon be picked up by adherents of other world religions or by commercial companies addressing religious audiences. But those practices or tools, as will be shown below, are not necessarily easily transposable from one belief to the other. This may be due to local peculiarities but also to religious taboos and restrictions.

In this aspect, mobile communication studies have hardly focused on everyday mobile practices in Muslim societies, let alone the Muslim societies of Southeast Asia. Largely influenced by the political climate, external observers have often been quick to associate mobile religiosity in a Muslim context with extreme practices ranging from SMS divorces by Malaysian Muslims or cell phones being used as detonators by Thai Muslim separatists.