THE SUPERFICIAL RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDING IN HADITH MEMES: MEDIATIZATION OF HADITH IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0

Mediatization of religion inevitably has changed various aspects of people’s lives, including the method of delivering and learning hadith. Today’s society no longer relies on hadith experts to study hadith, but they learn hadith from the internet instead, through hadith memes, and sites that concerns with hadith studies. This paper aims to explain the mediatization of hadith in cyberspace in the form of hadith memes and the factors to contribute to the emergence of various hadith memes on popular social media networks, which result in the superficial religious understanding of the community towards hadith.
The data collected from online sources related to hadith learning were analyzed descriptively. It was revealed that, on one side, the mediatization of hadith in the
cyberspace has enabled rapid dissemination of information along with its attractive illustration and presentation. However, on the other hand, there is an obvious inclination
that the captions in the meme have disrupted viewers from the essential meaning of the hadith. This paper also finds that the presentation of hadith through memes is a new way
to construct Muslim’s way of thinking. It turns out that behind the memes, there lies some intended messages of a particular ideology adhered by the memes creators. This finding, hence, requires further measures to prevent the community from the trap of the attempt to silence religious understanding by way of mediatization.