Introduction: Online Publics in Muslim Southeast Asia

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue 'Online Publics in Muslim Southeast Asia: In Between Religious Politics and Popular Pious Practices' by discussing prominent approaches in the study of media and the public sphere in light of the specific history of digital media's rise in Muslim Southeast Asia. It focuses on earlier and current expressions of mobile and Islamic modernity as well as on changing moralities and forms of Islamic authority. Referencing the other contributions to this special issue, it particularly emphasizes the (discursive and visual) contestations and social dramas that take place in the region's media spaces providing for a variety of Islamic forms, practices, and socialities that can best be grasped, the authors argue, by considering politics, the pious, and the popular not as separate, but as mutually constitutive domains.