Hungry for Knowledge: Affective Experience in the Quranic Learning Practices Among Young Salafi Women in Indonesia

The Qur’an is holy symbol among Muslims. Learning (and teaching) the Qur’an is then considered as pietistic activities that yield abundant rewards from God and bring the learners to a higher level of spirituality. With non-Arabic-speaking context, the Qur’anic learning practices among Indonesian youth, however, are not always a facile trajectory, instead filling with struggles and emotional ambivalence. The research explores the experience of Salafi young women in participating in the Qur’anic learning practices provided by Salafi-based educational institutions. Salafi itself is a transnational fundamentalist movement that endeavours to bring the purest version of Islam by strictly following the Qur’an and Sunna based on the model of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The research focuses on Yayasan Mar’atun Shalihah (Mar’atun Shalihah Foundation, YMS), a female Salafi-based educational institution in the West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. This institution organises non-formal education programs such as tahsinul (perfecting) Qur’an recitation, Arabic training, and Islamic boarding school for young women. During my intensive four-months ethnographic fieldwork, I found that these practices relate not only to cognitive abilities through which young women transform themselves as a competent and knowledgeable subject – thus enhancing their public roles in the community and critically engage with Islamic discourses around them. But they also involve emotional attachment to the material learned, other members of school, and the institution. This emotion emergent in learning practices is also amplified through their affective experience outside the context of education. Drawing upon work of Anna Gade (2004), I argue that the latter point is important component representing “an affective motivational mechanism” that ground voluntary ongoing engagement and long-term religious transformation of the self and community.