CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING DIGITAL RELIGIOUS IDENTITY: A FOCUS ON MUSLIM WOMEN

Abstract

This article examines how Muslim women construct, negotiate, and perform their religious identities in digital environments by synthesising four major theoretical traditions: religious identity theory, social identity theory, digital religion studies, and digital ethnography. Despite increasing scholarly attention to digital Islam, research on Muslim women’s online religiosity remains conceptually fragmented. This study offers an integrated theoretical framework that explains digital religious identity across three analytical levels personal meaning-making, collective belonging, and digital mediation and four core mechanisms: symbolic articulation of faith, social positioning and boundary-making, platform-shaped identity, and embodied performative practice. The proposed conceptual model demonstrates that digital religious identity is a dynamic, relational, and technologically mediated process shaped by the interaction of individual agency, communal expectations, and platform infrastructures. A unified SWOT analysis further clarifies the strengths, limitations, and complementarities of each theoretical tradition, revealing the potential for developing a coherent meta-theoretical foundation for future research. This study contributes to the field of digital religion by offering a comprehensive conceptual lens for understanding Muslim women’s digital self-representation and outlining directions for interdisciplinary and intersectional research on contemporary online religious expression.