Introduction

In this day and age, digitally connected young people organize their religious activities and collective responses via new media technologies. As new media become part of our everyday lives, personal matters are widely surfaced and circulated on social media platforms and, to some extent, interlinked with everyday politics. Social media presence is more than just producing and consuming entertaining content and sharing mundane daily activities or personal thoughts; it also contributes to collective thinking and action shifts. Everyday politics and digital civic engagement in Brunei Darussalam cover themes framed around society's experiences and interests (Highfield 2016), such as racism (Black Twitter, Black Lives Matter, Asian Lives Matter) and feminism (women's rights and protections).

The growing online Muslim communities further explicate the digitalization of religious practices and the emergence of new religious landscapes. Examples of this development include the formation of the E-Ummah or Cyber Ummah community (Khamis 2018). Youth use these “alternative” spaces of engagement not only to share personal stories but also to police other Muslim bodies or trigger new religious movements and everyday activism on various concerns. Discourses on halal consumption and shariah-compliant lifestyles have also entered the social mediascapes. The politicization of the halal lifestyle comes from two fronts: the first, at the institutional level (top-bottom), focusing on halal production and consumption, market and trading, and certification and standards (Bergeaud-Blackler, Fischer, and Lever 2015; Yakin and Christians 2021); the second, relating to the more banal everyday politics surrounding halal or shariah-compliant lifestyle of individual Muslims and grassroots organizations. While cognizant of the intertwining state and non-state constructions of halal practices and their shaping of the halal lifestyle in society, this chapter examines Bruneian Malay Muslims’ social media practices and shariah-complaint discourses at the micro-scale, everyday level. Their social media engagements can provide academics and relevant stakeholders with a deeper understanding of how they uphold socio-religious practices in relation to the dominant narratives at the state level.

I elucidate the everyday life, practices and concerns of the Malays and how they contribute to the emerging halal lifestyle in the country. This is done by drawing from several qualitative research projects I conducted between 2016 and 2022 on young people's use and engagement through social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Reddit.