Plural paths to faith: matching preaching modalities with society’s multifaceted religious needs

This study examines how urban Muslim religious leaders (kyai) adapt da’wah and teaching to digital media, mapping the types of online da’wah that emerge in the context of the mediatization of Islam. Drawing on media and religion studies, the study investigates how religious authority is renegotiated through digital practices in urban public spaces. A multi-sited descriptive-comparative qualitative design in Bandung, Cirebon, and Bogor combines systematic observation of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok content, metadata documentation, and semi-structured audience interviews. The findings identify six typologies of digital da’wah that reflect the interplay between scholarly authority, local religious culture, and platform-driven logics. Mediatization reconfigures traditional authority into a more relational, contextual, and distributed form. A key tension is balancing media visibility with theological depth and ethical responsibility, leading to the proposal of a hybrid model that combines digital agility with scholarly exemplarity and moral integrity. This study demonstrates how kyai construct authority, authenticity, and engagement through live broadcasts, social networks, and podcasts, resulting in an institutional, charismatic, and interactive mode of teaching shaped by urban factors such as education, social class, and access to technology. A limitation is the small, purposefully selected interview sample, which limits generalizability but still reveals patterns of audience interpretation and platform use.