Paper abstract:

This paper explores the role of social media in the religious lives of Muslim youth in Kyrgyzstan. Social media have become an important source of religious knowledge and contribute to religious expression, experience and identity formation. The Internet has immensely changed the way religion is understood and practiced today and offers new and innovative forms of religious engagement. The youth, who are considered to be ‘digital natives’ or ‘Internet generations’, offer an interesting case to observe these transformations. The first part of the paper deals with the notion of ‘religious engagement’ which has broadened with the increasing communication and technological development and includes engagements in the interconnected online and offline worlds. In the second part, the author presents the results of her recent fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, where the she conducted a survey and in-depth interviews among Muslim youth and religious authorities which was complemented with digital ethnography. The survey focuses on four main topics, such as: (1) the social media usage among Kyrgyzstani youth in general; (2) the social media usage for religious purposes; (3) knowledge of the youth about Islam and (4) their observations of changing tendencies in relation to Islam in the country. This topic lies at the intersection of anthropology, religion and media studies and provides a good opportunity for an interdisciplinary dialogue on digital religion, which, according to Campbell and Altenhofen (2016) studies not only how religion happens online, but also how religious communities ‘have adapted, responded to, and engaged with the digital culture’.