Middle-Class Islamist Women’s Activism on Social Media:

Abstract

This article critically discusses tweets content hashtag #Womenneedkhilafah which is mostly followed by Indonesia’s middle-class Muslimah. A qualitative method with Foucauldian discourse analysis is applied in this study to analyse tweets expressing Islamist women’s activism published on the hashtag #Womenneedkhilafah. The findings have revealed that the hashtag #womenneedkhilafah is cons­tructed through the knowledge-power relations of Hizbut Tah­rir Indonesia’s Islamist ideology by a literal-textual theological argument which is oriented to propagate Islamism and to create an independent Islamic state or caliphate. The manifest­tation of the power-knowledge relation is by limiting women’s role, mobility, and authority over their bodies. HTI has res­tricted women’s role to become household caretakers, parti­cularly to educate their children to prepare a new and stronger generation of HTI.