By Nauval El Ghifari
Extremism in the Age of Short Form Content
Over the past decade, online extremism has not disappeared so much as it has changed form. Earlier expressions were concentrated on closed forums and ideological websites; contemporary ones increasingly surface within mainstream social media. What has shifted is not the presence of extremist content but the formats through which it circulates, formats that have become less recognisably political and more culturally embedded. TikTok is a case in point. Unlike platforms organised around text or debate, TikTok operates through short audiovisual fragments, sound reuse, and trend driven imitation. Users engage not by arguing positions but by mimicking formats, recycling audio, and aligning themselves with aesthetic cues. Ideological intent, in this environment, recedes into the background while affect and familiarity do most of the work.
Nasheed as Jihadi Cultural Artifact
Nasheed broadly refers to Islamic devotional songs used across Muslim societies. While most function as expressions of faith or moral reflection, a smaller subset has been appropriated within jihadi cultural production. This piece examines two such nasheeds circulating on Indonesian language TikTok. The first is attributed to a vocalist affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and contains themes of armed defiance against military forces. The second references a well known battle in Afghanistan in December 2001 and centres on themes of endurance and allegiance to militant figures. Rather than tracing ideological persuasion, this analysis asks how emotionally charged audio circulates and settles into the background of everyday digital life.
Algorithmic Circulation and Emotional Clustering
TikTok’s algorithmic architecture organises content into personalised streams where entertainment, religious expression, and commentary become increasingly clustered. Users who engage with certain themes encounter related material more frequently, blurring the boundary between the ordinary and the political. Algorithmic recommendation ensures that sounds are reused, formats imitated, and emotional cues carried well beyond their original contexts. What spreads, in other words, is not necessarily doctrine but atmosphere: fragments of jihadi culture that travel across the platform even in the absence of any deliberate ideological intent.
Militant Defiance as Meme Audio
Indonesian TikTok videos using the AQAP affiliated nasheed do not frame it as ideological content. Creators pair the audio not with narrative sequences or explanatory visuals but with playful imagery: cartoon figures in balaclavas, short video game clips, and meme scenarios that stage confrontation as a joke. A recurring pattern involves mock acts of bravery, such as “facing” ghosts or imagined threats, while the nasheed lingers in the background. In these settings, the song does not lead the story but shapes the mood.
The comment sections reinforce this pattern. Commenters relate the audio to their own leisure activities rather than unpacking its content. Some note that they play the same video game while listening to the nasheed. Others respond with brief affirmations or jokes. Elsewhere, individual users ask who the figures referenced in the song are, suggesting curiosity more than commitment. The audio’s militant background is neither concealed nor examined. It simply fades as the sound is absorbed into meme formats and gaming culture. What occurs here is a process of contextual stripping: the nasheed’s original meaning is gradually separated from its emotional charge through repeated reuse in trivial settings.
Reverence Through Aesthetic Framing
Videos using the second nasheed circulate through an altogether different emotional register. Creators pair the audio with carefully composed visuals: montages of conflict imagery, stylised portraits, flag symbols, and slow motion edits designed to linger rather than amuse. Some accounts present the nasheed alongside imagery marked by visual calm and solemnity. Others combine it with national and militant symbols, while a smaller number frame it explicitly as a song for warriors, placing it within a moral narrative of struggle.
The comment sections reveal responses that occupy a grey zone between awareness and attraction. What matters here is that knowing the nasheed’s violent origins does not push the listener away; instead, that awareness sits comfortably alongside emotional absorption. Some commenters simply signal recognition without elaborating further. Scepticism also surfaces, with individual users expressing discomfort at the possible association with political violence. None of this amounts to a neat radicalisation pipeline. What is visible, rather, is an emotional environment where defiance and reverence begin to feel ordinary rather than alien. The causal process at work is not ideological recruitment but affective normalisation: repeated exposure to militant aesthetics lowers the threshold at which such content registers as exceptional.
Conditioning, Not Conversion
The two case studies point in different directions but arrive at a shared conclusion. Videos using the first nasheed absorb militant audio into humour and gaming culture, softening its origins through playful reuse. Videos featuring the second nasheed rely on solemn aesthetics and a slower pace that evoke reverence rather than irony. In both cases, however, nasheed travels easily across TikTok through imitation and sound reuse, and while the emotional tone sticks, the ideological content need not.
The core issue is not conversion but conditioning. TikTok allows nasheed to circulate as background sound that retains its emotional charge long after its historical context has been forgotten. Repeated exposure normalises certain moods, symbols, and postures associated with jihadi culture. In Indonesia, where TikTok is deeply woven into youth digital life, such exposure unfolds in spaces rarely recognised as political. Counter radicalisation strategies centred on content takedowns risk missing these quieter processes of emotional socialisation. Addressing radicalisation at earlier stages requires closer attention to patterns of repetition through which extremist symbols gradually become familiar, not only in Indonesia but wherever algorithmic circulation shapes what users encounter long before ideology becomes relevant.
Nauval El Ghifari is a Master of Science student in Strategic Studies and a Graduate Student Research Assistant at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is an alumnus of the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism (UNOCT) Young Leaders Programme for the Online Prevention and Countering of Violent Extremism (PCVE) in Southeast Asia.