Glocal muslim subjectivities and urban publics: transnational mobility, narrative ethics, and heritage gaze in contemporary Indonesian fiction
Keywords:
Hijrah, Urban Sufism, Glocal Muslim Subjectivity, Narrative Ethics, Heritage GazeAbstract
Purpose
This article examines how contemporary Indonesian popular Islamic fiction narrates urban millennial spirituality by forming “glocal” Muslim subjectivities in modern urban publics. This research asks how protagonists cultivate piety, negotiate Islamic norms across borders, and transform heritage-looking into ethical judgment. This analysis is organized through three intersecting axes: self-fashioning of piety, transnationality/ glocalization, and knowledge-pilgrimage/tourist gaze.
Design/methodology/approach
This study employs qualitative comparative close reading of three best-selling novels, 99 Cahaya di Langit Eropa (2011), Api Tauhid (2014), and Pulang (2015). Using comparative close reading, this article traces how ritual timing, embodied visibility, temporal discipline, mentor and communal mediation, and moments of ethical decision become narrative mechanisms through which piety is made legible. This analysis situates these mechanisms within study on public Islam, hijrah, urban Sufism, and critical heritage and tourism studies to show how popular fiction translates religious practice, mobility, and heritage-looking into forms of urban Muslim subjectivity.
Findings
This novels present piety as active practice, not inherited identity. Self-fashioning appears through micro-ritual adaptation, reputational ethics, exemplary endurance, and belated moral return. Transnational routes across Europe, Middle East, and East Asia produce glocal norm-translation through boundary work over time, consumption, speech, and visibility. Pilgrimage and heritage gazes direct attention to traces, archives, and memory-sites, turning affect (awe, shame, and longing) into ethical choice. This article proposes a cross-genre typology of urban millennial spirituality: heritage illumination, archival endurance, and moral homecoming.
Originality/value
This article connects narratology, mobility studies, and heritage studies to show how popular fiction scripts ethical techniques for inhabiting contemporary Indonesian public Islam.
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