Chase the Hereafter, the World Will Follow: Defining an Ideal Future Among Young Salafi Women in Indonesia

Salafi is a transnational fundamentalist movement(s) 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 – that have had a profound impact on the Indonesia’s public since 1980s. Its teachings are promulgated through various educational spaces, ranging from formal to non-formal systems that mainly target young people. Building on Arjun Appadurai’s notion (2013) on “capacity to aspire” as a “navigational capacity”, this paper analyses how Salafi-based education shapes a specific social imaginary of imagined futures. It focuses on the educational experience of young Salafi women in Bima, West Nusa Tenggara. Based on an intensive four-months ethnographic fieldwork, I found that the school ideology (in this case, drawing upon Salafi teachings) and other aspects of educational experience such as material learned and social interaction between the practitioners, including ‘emergent emotional feature’ work to narrow and specify the range of what they see as an “ideal success" that is increasingly framed within the lens of a possible synergy between spiritual and material progress – on which Lara Deeb (2006) labels as “an enchanted modern”. This idea is then articulated through their career aspiration to become a teacher. These young women believe that this type of work would grant them continuous rewards from God that likely secure them in the afterlife and at the same time also bring about “material prosperity” in this world.