Muslim Televangelists in the Making: Conversion Narratives and the Construction of Religious Authority

Abstract The rapid proliferation of TV channels in Indonesia in the 1990s provided crucial opportunities for a new type of Muslim preacher to rise to national fame: relatively young men lacking substantial formal religious schooling but able to project charm on screen. Four of these young televangelists became true megastars, topping the national charts in the first decade of the twentieth century. Since they became nationally famous at a young age, without the conventional markers of authoritative knowledge of Islam, the question is, what kind of justification did they use to establish their authority as preachers? Analyzing the rise of four young preachers who achieved nationwide stardom in that period, Abdullah Gymnastiar, Arifin Ilham, Jeffri Al‐Bukhari, and Yusuf Mansur, this article shows that conversion narratives play a key role in building social acceptance of their status as preachers. These narratives take various forms with differing themes but all work to compensate for a lack of traditional markers of religious authority. Besides informally authorizing the transformation of these laymen into credible religious preachers, their narratives of miraculous spiritual transformation also shaped the specific themes of their evangelicalism. This article shows how transformation narratives authorize the four top television preachers of the first decade of the twentieth century, and demonstrate the power of those narratives to recast even youthful deviance into an asset in the youth religion market when woven into a story of divinely empowered personal change.