Detoxing from Digital Crowd: How Muslim Gen Z Self-Directed Islamic Communication to Navigate Identity Crisis

Abstract

Situated within Islamic communication and the psychology of da'wah, this study examines how Muslim Generation Z students experience identity crisis in the environment of social media and how self-directed Islamic communication functions to recover an authentic sense of self. The inquiry is significant because digital comparison increasingly destabilizes the identities of young Muslims, while research on da'wah has concentrated on outward preaching directed toward audiences and has largely neglected da'wah that is turned inward. Employing hermeneutic phenomenology in the tradition of Heidegger, the study analyzed in depth interviews with four Muslim undergraduate students, including one negative case, following the procedures of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, through which twenty-two personal experiential themes were integrated into four group experiential themes. The findings disclose a single existential movement in which students fall into the crowd of social media (das Man), confront a disclosive anxiety, withdraw through a deliberate detox, and recover an authentic self through self-directed da'wah comprising prayer, dzikir, personal reading of the Qur'an, and remembered counsel, grounded in tawakkul. The study reframes da'wah fardiyah phenomenologically as an inward existential call, thereby extending scholarship on da'wah, communication, and Islamic counselling