Abstract
The article examines the TikTok accounts of selected tahfiz (Muslim religious) schools in Malaysia and considers the roles and meanings attributed to children in them. Tahfiz accounts present children in two ways: as subjects who are “acted upon” (taught skills in Quranic recitation), and as “natural” subjects who appear in candid videos of mundane tahfiz life. These contrasting representations resemble those in child influencer accounts Abidin studied, which feature a calibrated oscillation between performances of skill (“anchor”) and performances of behind-the-scenes authenticity (“filler”). But the specific qualities of tahfiz “anchor” content, emphasizing moral improvement, also bear the trace of influencer accounts associated with the hijrah movement, which advocates for strict adherence to Islamic codes and practices as a preferred way of living ethically in the present. The article employs “anchor” and “filler” as analytical tools to understand the new vernaculars emerging at the intersection of these two variants of the influencer genre.
Introduction
Tahfiz schools are Islamic religious schools that specialize in Quranic recitation, sometimes called madrasah or pondok. In Malaysia, tahfiz education dates back to the arrival of Islam, but its formalization took place in 1966, when the country’s first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman established Quranic education at the National Mosque. Hamzah et al. (2024) chronicle the development of government-sponsored tahfiz education between 1966 and 1984, and the proliferation of private tahfiz education from 1981 onwards. Such private institutions increased significantly in the late 2010s, as did the number of students studying in tahfiz schools (Hamzah et al., 2024).
The proliferation of tahfiz institutions coincided with the increasing uptake of TikTok in the country. TikTok launched in Malaysia in 2017 and its user base grew to number 1.77 million people by 2020. By 2024, it had grown to 28.68 million users (Digital Business Lab, 2024). In the 2022 general election, TikTok was regarded as having played an important role in the unexpected success of the Malaysian Islamic Party, Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) (Jalli, 2024; Lim, 2024). Jalli has studied the role TikTok affordances and platform vernaculars play in campaigns for social justice in Malaysia (Jalli, 2025). But the role that Tiktok has played in Islamic communication initiated by non-party institutions, such as tahfiz schools, remains to be examined.
A study of tahfiz-Tok is relevant to this Special Issue because it draws attention to how children are being leveraged in a particular variant of the influencer genre that pertains to a moral project broadly defined as the hijrah movement. This movement advocates for strict adherence to Islamic codes and practices including prayer, fasting and Quranic recitation and adherence to Muslim dress code as a preferred way of living ethically in the present (Beta, 2019; Hew, 2024; Saefullah, 2017). While Muslim influencers in the region have been widely studied (Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018; Beta, 2019; Hew, 2024), the representation of children in such influencer accounts has not. In this article, we examine tahfiz-Tok’s platform vernaculars: “genres of communication [that] emerge from the affordances of particular social media platforms and the ways they are appropriated and performed in practice” (Gibbs et al., 2015, p. 257). Our analysis is informed by scholarship on two variants of the influencer genre: Child/family influencers and hijrah influencers.
Tahfiz-Tok and the influencer genre
To be an influencer is to perform a particular kind of microcelebrity: Fame attained by way of various forms of labor to garner online attention among a niche audience (Senft, 2008). Influencers are unique for they aim to monetize their labor by applying special strategies for attaining and maintaining visibility in online spaces (Abidin, 2017). Authenticity or relatability is a key feature of influencer fame; visibility derives from performances of accessibility and appearance of ordinariness (Abidin, 2016). Online influencer stages are not ones that hold the celebrity aloft, but rather, spaces in which the famous engage in choreographed alternations of frontstage extraordinariness and backstage ordinariness (Abidin, 2017).
Abidin (2023) shows how this frontstage and backstage to-ing and fro-ing manifests in influencer performances involving children, such as family influencer and mum-child influencer accounts, noting how content on these accounts can be categorized as either “anchor” or “filler.” Anchor content involves higher end production and performances that showcase (singing, comedic acting) or impart (tutorials) certain skills. Filler content displays amateur production techniques and gives a sense of behind-the-scenes everyday-ness, akin to the “blooper” genre. The latter category drives engagement by inducing in viewers a sense of gaining a privileged glimpse of the real lives of the famous. Abidin describes such performances as “calibrated amateurism” (Abidin, 2023, p. 8).
Tahfiz-Tok accounts qualify as influencer accounts because they involve the strategic production and circulation of content designed to garner and monetize attention (Bani et al., 2017), although they are not exclusively linked to individual micro-celebrities. Many of the tahfiz-Tok accounts we identified for this study are linked to schools, and some are linked to Islamic teachers, whether male ustaz or female ustazah. Content is often made and managed by school representatives who never appear before the camera. They employ images of the pupils to articulate key messages designed to grab attention.
Scholarship on hijrah influencers in Indonesia reveal vernaculars that diverge from the alternating anchor/filler strategy on child or family influencer accounts. Beta (2019) shows how social media religious influencers enlist young women in politics by performing their proximity to pop culture trends. Similarly, Hew (2024) shows how conservative preacher Felix Siauw employs pop culture references in his sermons and social media posts to craft a mode of address that is alluring to young urbanites. In both Beta’s and Hew’s studies, hijrah influencers do not employ calibrated amateurism to lure audiences with a glimpse of the backstage. Rather, they strive to demonstrate their proximity to pop culture as a way of garnering attention and enlisting young people in hijrah politics and collective actions. In this article, we examine the vernaculars of tahfiz-Tok and compare them to those identified by other scholars of both child/family and hijrah influencer accounts.
Methodology
The sample for this study was derived from a search using the #tahfiz hashtag on TikTok. We selected ten accounts with the highest number of followers, whose content was primarily focused on tahfiz content, and that featured children in their videos. All accounts were public, but to safeguard the privacy of the account holders, school administrators and pupils we have anonymized the accounts. To manage the risk that they could be identified through use of the search function, we have refrained from directly quoting from posts and comments. The majority of accounts (n = 6) were operated by the schools, and several of them (n = 4) were operated by religious teachers (Table 1). We then selected the 20 most-liked videos from each account for thematic analysis, and undertook two levels of coding. First, we coded the videos by subject matter. Four kinds of videos (not mutually exclusive) resulted from this first level of coding: Children performing Quranic recitation, inspirational stories of moral transformation, modes of disciplining students, and candid glimpses of everyday tahfiz life. These results are represented in the table below. For the second level of coding, we adopted Abidin’s concepts of “anchor” and “filler” to understand how videos within these four categories qualify as “frontstage” (professionally produced and showcase particular skills or talents) or “backstage” (amateurishly produced and candid) performances (Abidin, 2017, 2023).
Type of Accounts, Numbers of Followers and Top Posts by Type.
Note. Table by the authors.
Anchor: Quranic recitals and inspirational content
The primary purpose for many of the accounts we examine below is to fundraise; six of them state in their bios that they are open to receiving infaq (donations) and three directly list their bank and donation details. The accounts strive to demonstrate the effectiveness of each school in cultivating young Muslim children in the skill of Quranic recitals. The prowess of each child is shown by the number of verses that can be recited by heart combined with beautiful chanting voices. Schools that were especially proud of this feature children in high-quality videos (filmed using high quality video and audio equipment) either engaging in prayer recital performances or participating in Quranic recital competitions. Following Abidin (2017), such videos are aptly referred to as “anchor” content: “the primary content for which these Influencers are known . . . produced with more care and effort, utilizing higher end equipment such as moving image recorders, audio mixers, lighting, and props” (p. 4). On tahfiz-Tok, videos featuring pupils reciting the Quran are heavily edited with heavy use of filters, transition effects, and multi-font captions with effects. Leveraging the audio affordances of TikTok, these videos often make use of trending sounds from Islamic religious content to boost its exposure in the algorithm. The larger TikTok accounts often make use of more professional equipment when filming, with higher video and audio quality, use of tripods to steady the camera, and multi-camera usage.
Four of the accounts in our sample identify the importance of attaining skills in Quranic recitation by positioning it as an end point in a journey of moral transformation. For example, in a series of videos one school account chronicles the journey of a 10-year-old child, who first struggled to adapt to the school environment, but in just 4 months attained the ability to recite 30 verses by heart. The videos went viral, and prompted many congratulatory comments, including those that expressed astonishment and praised Allah for gifting this child the ability to attain these skills in such a short space of time. One such commenter received more than 14,000 likes, and many others requested information about how they can donate to the school, or enroll their own children, showing how anchor content is monetizable.
Filler: discipline and everyday life in tahfiz schools
A large proportion of videos from the bigger schools within our sample was made up of anchor content, but teacher and smaller school accounts were dominated by videos produced with less polish, and focused on daily life in tahfiz schools. These minimally edited, amateurish videos resemble the “filler” videos identified by Abidin (2017):
secondary content for which these Influencers are known and complement the mainstay of their output by giving followers a highly contextualized snapshot of their everyday lives. Such performances are intentionally framed to convey the aesthetic of an amateur, such that the production comes across as being raw, unfiltered, spontaneous, and more intimate. (p. 4)
Filler videos on tahfiz-Tok feature candid shots of students, impromptu dialogues or interviews with students, or parodies of tahfiz school activities based on TikTok trends (most notably the “POV” trend). They also feature videos about tahfiz disciplinary practices, such as use of rotan (whipping canes made of rattan) as punishment for students. Notably, it is this type of filler content that elicits the most engagement, especially from former students who wax nostalgic at these practices, and comment that they are heartened that they continue to be practiced.
Conclusion
The selected repertoire paints a picture of tahfiz schools as institutions responsible for setting Muslim children on a pathway to moral improvement, by imparting skills at Quranic recitation and also through disciplinary measures. But they also present tahfiz schools as places where children relax and have fun in videos in which the children appear “relatable.” Notably, the accounts qualify as influencer accounts insofar as they involve the strategic production and circulation of content on social media platforms, with the aim of garnering attention that can be monetized. Our interest here is in how the vernaculars that emerge from this strategic production and circulation compare to those identified by other scholars of child/ family and hijrah influencer accounts.
Our findings show that tahfiz-Tok appropriates strategies of the child and family influencer accounts by alternating between polished and amateurish modes of production. But unlike in Abidin’s (2017) study, these contrasting forms are not discernible through a focus on any one tahfiz-Tok account. School accounts are disproportionately devoted to polished videos that showcase skills at Quranic recitation, whereas teacher accounts contain more amateurish videos that provide a glimpse of everyday school life and relatability. In addition, there is no clear separation of the performing subject and the natural subject into the respective anchor and filler categories. In fact, the most enthusiastically commented upon filler videos present children as those that needed to be acted upon, specifically corporally punished, in order to become a good Muslim. These popular filler videos can be considered elements of a tahfiz-Tok vernacular that arises from its position at the intersection of the child/family and hijrah variants of the genre. Even behind the scenes of tahfiz-Tok, children are presented as laboring to, or failing to (and being corporally punished as a result), perform Quranic recitation, echoing Beta’s (2019) observation that hijrah involves a process of becoming that is insistently every day.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.