The art of dakwah: Social media, visual persuasion and the Islamist propagation of Felix Siauw

Felix Siauw, a popular if controversial Chinese Muslim preacher, is well known for his affiliation with the transnational Islamist movement, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), as well as for his extensive use of social media and visual aesthetics. As of September 2017, he had more than four million followers on Facebook, two million followers on Twitter, one million followers on Instagram and 20,000 subscribers on YouTube, making him one of the leading social media preachers in Indonesia today. Based on online research, offline participation and face-to-face interviews with Felix Siauw and his dakwah (proselytisation) team members in 2016 and 2017, this article highlights (a) the intersection between online activities and offline events in contemporary Islamic preaching; (b) multiple forms of oral, textual and visual expressions of on-offline dakwah; and (c) the politics and poetics of dakwah. In brief, it illustrates how online and visual dakwah are complementing rather than replacing offline and textual dakwah. I examine how and under what conditions Felix Siauw creatively uses social media and visual images to propagate HTI ideology among young Indonesian Muslims. His dakwah approach is entertaining yet conservative, casual but dogmatic, and personal if political. His preaching attempts to reconcile these contradictions, which represents a strategy to normalise religious radicalism and to attract a broader audience.