From Scholarly Exegesis to Instagram’s Spotlight: The Discursive Representation of Women’s Subordination in Hadith

Muhammmad Zain, Dinan Kiasati, Mahbub Ghozali, Saifuddin Zuhri Qudsy

Abstract


The use of social media to convey religious texts does not necessarily mean that there is a contextualization of the understanding of the religious context according to contemporary reasoning. This study argues that hadiths concerning women’s subordination have generated more textual and discriminatory interpretations when represented on social media, especially Instagram. Employing critical discourse analysis (CDA) and a representational framework, this study examines three main points: (a) the hadith representation of women in classical literature, (b) the form of subordinate representation of women on Instagram, (c) the consequent identity formation of women through hadith interpretations on Instagram discourses. This study reveals that social media functions as a double-edged sword in contemporary Islamic discourse. It ostensibly provides opportunities for progressive reinterpretations of religious texts, but, on the other hand, the findings indicate it has paradoxically become a powerful ideological weapon to maintain the status quo of patriarchal norms through subordination towards women. Consequently, the reductive portrayals of women’s roles on Instagram still exist even though modern reality has significantly changed compared to 15 centuries ago when the Prophet Muhammad lived. Through discursive framing and algorithmic amplification, Instagram increasingly contributes to the legitimization of discrimination against women across both the private and public spheres.

Keywords


Islamic gender studies, Women subordination, Hadith, Social media, Instagram.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21043/qijis.v12i2.22977

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