The team used netnography, a qualitative method that adapts ethnographic fieldwork to online communities, to observe how Sufi teachings circulate on the platform. Between November 2023 and February 2024, the researchers manually reviewed content from ten influential Sufism-focused TikTok accounts, selected through purposive sampling based on strict engagement thresholds: each account needed at least 10,000 followers, thousands of likes, between 10,000 and 3 million viewers, more than 1,000 shares and at least 100 comments. From these accounts, the team identified the five most-viewed videos each, producing a dataset of 50 videos. They also extracted the five most relevant and shared comments from every video, yielding 250 audience comments that were analysed thematically to understand how viewers interpreted what they watched.

The technical analysis revealed a striking asymmetry between what audiences watch and what they internalise. Philosophical Sufism, or tasawuf falsafi, which explores metaphysical questions about God, existence and the soul through intellectual contemplation and allegorical symbolism, dominated visibility: 58 percent of the most-viewed videos fell into this category, and 69 percent of those centred on the rationalisation of metaphysical matters such as longing for God and the nature of divine closeness. Ethical Sufism, or tasawuf akhlaqi, which emphasises moral behaviour and character development, accounted for the remaining 42 percent. Yet when the researchers examined the comment sections, the deepest personal transformations clustered around ethical content, suggesting that abstract, visually arresting material travels furthest through the platform’s recommendation systems while concrete, practice-oriented messages penetrate more deeply into viewers’ lives.

The authors interpret this split through the Elaboration Likelihood Model, a well-established framework in persuasion psychology that distinguishes between peripheral and central routes of information processing. Philosophical Sufism content, packaged with evocative visuals, music and atmospheric scenes, captures attention through the peripheral route, generating high exposure and shares without necessarily prompting deep cognitive engagement. Ethical Sufism, by contrast, delivers actionable moral guidance that viewers process through the central route, producing stronger interpretation and internalisation. The finding carries a broader implication for digital religion research: what gains prominence on an algorithmic platform does not necessarily correspond to what proves most meaningful for users, pointing to a layered process of religious mediation in which visibility and impact follow different logics.

The content itself draws on a rich multimedia toolkit rooted in Sufi tradition. The videos incorporate background music, instrumental passages, dhikr chants and shalawat, the devotional venerations of the Prophet Muhammad, echoing the classical practice of as-sama, or spiritual listening, through which Sufis have long used music to cultivate closeness to God. Visual elements include illustrations, quotations from canonical figures such as Jalaluddin Rumi and Imam Al-Ghazali, and the expressive gestures and facial expressions of contemporary preachers. Viewers cited four main reasons for engaging with the content: the reputation of the scholarly figure, the topic discussed, the style of delivery and the richness of the media features. Notably, although Indonesian scholars appeared more frequently among the referenced sources, videos featuring internationally recognised figures such as Rumi averaged roughly 2.5 million views compared with about 478,000 for videos featuring local scholars, a fivefold engagement gap that underscores the global pull of the tradition’s most famous names.

The study also mapped the content against the classical Sufi taxonomy of maqamat, the spiritual stages a seeker pursues, and ahwal, the spiritual states received as gifts. Ma’rifah, or experiential knowledge of God, was the most represented stage at 22.6 percent of coded content, followed by mahabbah, deep love, at 16.1 percent and tawakkal, trust in God, at 14.5 percent. Among the states viewers reported encountering, muqarabah, the feeling of closeness to God, dominated at 21.3 percent. Perhaps most telling was what was missing: taubah, or repentance, traditionally regarded as the essential first step of the Sufi path, appeared in only 4.8 percent of the content, while faqr, the ascetic embrace of poverty, was entirely absent. TikTok audiences, the data suggest, are drawn to advanced contemplative themes and skip the foundational, renunciatory stages that classical pedagogy treats as prerequisites.

The effects on viewers were measurable in their own words. Among the 250 analysed comments, 46 percent described increased self-awareness and moral self-improvement, with viewers reporting efforts to manage anger, cultivate patience and seek forgiveness, patterns the researchers link to the classical stage of taubah. Another 16 percent described an uplift in faith, with several commenters saying the algorithm had surfaced Sufi content unexpectedly and that they read the encounter as a divine reminder rather than a deliberate search. A further 26 percent of comments described sharia-oriented changes, including adopting modest dress and prioritising simplicity and health over the pursuit of wealth. The researchers treated these disclosures with unusual ethical care: because religious self-disclosure constitutes sensitive personal data under GDPR-style frameworks, all commenter quotations were rephrased into non-searchable indirect speech and decoupled from the accounts and videos that could identify them, while the ten public-facing creator accounts were cited openly in line with internet research ethics guidelines.

The findings also document a structural shift in how religious authority operates. Traditionally, a salik, or seeker, would study under a murshid, a spiritual mentor within a tariqa, or Sufi order, receiving instruction through direct, closed-door transmission. Knowledge such as ma’rifah was once considered a secret science taught privately in zawiyah, the Sufi lodges. TikTok has effectively democratised this hierarchy: anyone with an internet connection can now access a wide range of Sufi wisdom, and the study argues that religious authority on the platform is increasingly negotiated through visibility, relatability and audience interaction rather than anchored solely in institutional lineage. This decentralisation carries risks the authors acknowledge candidly. Not all circulating content comes from authentic sources, misinterpretation and distortion of traditional teachings are genuine dangers, and self-directed online learning could leave followers with less structured knowledge than previous generations acquired under mentorship.

There is also a sociological dimension to the phenomenon. The researchers frame TikTok-mediated Sufism as a response to what scholars of religion call the spiritual void, the sense of emptiness and alienation that accompanies modern urban life. Contemporary Sufi centres in large cities have already opened their doors to people of all theological backgrounds, offering meditation instruction and cultural events, and the platform extends that inclusivity further, drawing viewers who identify simply as ordinary Muslims with no tariqa affiliation at all. Where seekers once retreated to caves and forests for contemplation, users now create private spiritual moments with earphones and a smartphone, immersing themselves in guided reflection within their own rooms. Sufism, the study concludes, has shifted from an exclusive esoteric practice toward a form of mental therapy and everyday guidance, functioning as an internal navigation system for people who are materially successful yet spiritually restless.

The authors caution that their netnographic design, limited to 50 videos from ten accounts on a single platform, cannot support statistical generalisation, and they recommend comparative studies across Instagram, YouTube and other services, mixed-methods work on user motivations, and critical examination of simplification and commodification in algorithm-driven religious spaces. But the core message stands: TikTok is not merely a pipe through which Sufi teachings flow. Its algorithmic circulation, short-form format and multimodal features actively reshape how those teachings are produced, experienced and legitimised, making the platform a constitutive environment for religious meaning in the digital age. A tradition that once guarded its deepest knowledge behind closed doors has learned to speak in fifteen-second bursts, and millions are listening.

Subject of Research: The mediation and digital spread of Sufi values through TikTok short-form video content

Article Title: Sufi values on TikTok: Social media usage and its implications for the digital spread of Sufism

Article References: Wajdi, F., Fatimah, A. N., Effendi, M. R., & Amaliyah (2026). Sufi values on TikTok: Social media usage and its implications for the digital spread of Sufism. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45518

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45518

Keywords: Sufism, TikTok, digital religion, netnography, social media, Islamic spirituality, religious authority, short-form video, thematic analysis, maqamat and ahwal, ethical Sufism, philosophical Sufism

Techno-salvationism, as the term has been used in scholarship emerging largely from Western theological and posthumanist debates, describes a cultural imaginary in which advanced technologies promise to save humanity from its own limitations. Thinkers such as Hans Moravec, Raymond Kurzweil and Robert Geraci have described visions in which artificial intelligence offers digital immortality, mind uploading or an algorithmic heaven. This literature has been influential, but it rests almost entirely on Euro-American sources, science fiction traditions and transhumanist manifestos. Wang and Campbell argue that this lens, applied uncritically to Japan and China, produces distorted readings of what is actually happening when Buddhist institutions put robots in robes. The local reality, they show, is shaped by demographic crisis, institutional economics and centuries-old ideas about sacred objects, not by dreams of escaping the body.

The study’s method is distinctive. Rather than conducting surveys or interviewing temple staff, the researchers performed a visual discourse analysis of publicly available YouTube videos featuring three of the most prominent Buddhist robots in East Asia: Mindar, the android preacher at Kyoto’s Kodaiji Temple; Pepper, the SoftBank humanoid that has been deployed in Japanese funerary rituals; and Xian’er, the cartoon-like robot monk created at Longquan Monastery outside Beijing. Drawing on the visual grammar frameworks developed by Kress and van Leeuwen and the critical multimodal approach of Machin and Mayr, the authors examined how these robots are framed through camera angles, composition, textual overlays and narrators’ voices, and how religious authority is visually constructed around them.

The differences among the three cases are striking. Mindar, modeled on the bodhisattva Kannon and built in collaboration with robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s laboratory, is presented in media coverage as a serious liturgical actor, often framed in reverent compositions that situate the machine inside temple architecture and ritual sequences. Pepper, by contrast, appears in funerary settings as a cheaper substitute for human priests amid Japan’s acute shortage of clergy, a practical response to the declining rural temples and aging population that scholars of Japanese funeral Buddhism have documented for decades. Xian’er, with his childlike, cartoonish design, functions less as a ritual performer than as a communicative mascot, projecting a modern, tech-friendly image of Chinese Buddhism under state oversight. Each robot embodies a different institutional strategy, and none of them, the authors argue, is genuinely oriented toward transcendence.

Instead, the study identifies a pattern it calls succession rather than contestation. In Western accounts of religion and technology, machines often appear as rivals to human clergy, potential replacements that provoke anxiety about authenticity and displacement. In the Japanese and Chinese Buddhist material, however, robots are typically endowed with authority through deliberate clerical investment. Mindar was consecrated and scripted by senior priests; its sermons are drawn from established doctrinal content. Xian’er was developed within the monastery’s own media apparatus, its utterances curated by monastic editors. Pepper’s funerary chanting is authorized by the funeral companies and temples that rent it out. Authority, in other words, does not migrate from humans to machines through some autonomous technological logic. It is lent to machines by existing hierarchies, which position the robots as successors, emissaries or communicative tools embedded within the institution’s own chain of legitimacy.

This finding resonates with a broader literature on digital religion, including Campbell’s foundational work on religious practice in digital media and Philip Chong’s studies of bounded religious automation, which show that AI systems in religious settings are typically fenced in by human oversight. But Wang and Campbell push the argument further by showing how culturally specific histories enable this smooth absorption. Japanese religious culture has long traditions of animate sacred objects, from spirit-filled dolls to the concept of tsukumogami, in which old tools acquire souls. Scholars such as Fabio Rambelli have traced the rich Buddhist materiality of objects in Japan, while Jensen and Blok’s work on techno-animism suggests that attributing agency to machines is not a rupture but a continuity. Meanwhile, pioneering roboticist Masahiro Mori, himself a Buddhist, explicitly framed his philosophy of robotics in religious terms. Against this backdrop, a robot monk is not a category violation but a new entry in an old catalogue of empowered things.

The Chinese case adds a different layer of complexity. Longquan Monastery’s Xian’er emerged from one of China’s most digitally sophisticated religious institutions, which has embraced online Dharma talks, animations and social media to reach a young, urban audience. Wang and Campbell show that in this context, techno-salvationism is inflected by state relations and cultural priorities: the robot’s charm and humor serve outreach and soft publicity rather than ritual substitution. The unevenness across the three cases, the authors emphasize, matters theoretically. Techno-salvationism is not a single global imaginary diffusing outward from Silicon Valley. It takes locally uneven forms, shaped by demographic pressures such as Japan’s clergy shortage, infrastructural disparities between institutions, and divergent cultural priorities about what religion is for.

The implications reach beyond Buddhism. As AI chatbots claiming divine identities multiply, with recent coverage in Nature highlighting Jesus-claiming bots and calls for red lines around religious AI, the study offers a crucial corrective to debates dominated by Western anxieties about deception, autonomy and the singularity. In the East Asian Buddhist material, the central question is not whether machines can save us, but whether institutions can maintain themselves, attract followers and transmit tradition in societies undergoing rapid demographic and technological change. Robots here are instruments of institutional survival. They chant sutras at funerals that human priests can no longer staff cheaply; they draw visitors to temples struggling for relevance; they translate doctrine into forms legible to media-saturated publics. Salvation, in this frame, is less about the soul of the believer than the continuity of the organization.

By demonstrating that succession, not transcendence, is a recurring pattern in mediated representations of Buddhist robots, the study expands the conceptual scope of techno-salvationism itself. It suggests that scholars of digital religion must attend to how different religious cultures configure authority, embodiment and materiality before importing theories built on Western posthumanist assumptions. The android at Kodaiji Temple does not promise to upload anyone to a digital heaven. It promises something quieter: that an ancient tradition, with the help of silicone and servos, will keep speaking. In an era when technology and religion are converging across the globe, that quieter promise may prove the more consequential one, and understanding it requires looking past the spectacle of machine preachers to the institutional hands that guide them. The research, published as a review article on 21 September 2026, is likely to shape future scholarship on AI, authority and religion far beyond the temples where its subjects dwell.

Subject of Research: Techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in mediated representations of Japanese and Chinese Buddhist robots.

Article Title: More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts

Article References: Wang, Y., & Campbell, H. (2026). More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Keywords: techno-salvationism, Buddhist robots, religious authority, digital religion, Mindar, Xian'er, Pepper robot, Japanese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, visual discourse analysis, AI and religion, AI & Society