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

The commentary responds to a 2025 review by Chems-Maarif and colleagues that sought to refine the definition of mindfulness, a concept most secular clinicians trace to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s formulation of paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. While the review has been widely praised for clarifying a notoriously slippery construct, Aldbyani and Al-Harbi argue that its framing risks flattening contemplative traditions outside the Buddhist and secular mainstream. In particular, they contend that Islamic forms of mindful awareness, including practices such as dhikr (remembrance of God), muraqaba (spiritual observation or vigilance), and the attentive concentration cultivated in salah (ritual prayer), cannot be adequately understood when stripped of their ethical, theological, and teleological context.

The technical core of the argument concerns what the authors call framing. In their view, a contemplative experience is never merely a bare cognitive event, such as sustained attention to the breath, that can be extracted from one tradition and transplanted into another without residue. Instead, every contemplative act operates within a web of ethical commitments, metaphysical beliefs about the nature of reality and the divine, and a teleology, that is, an account of the ultimate aim of practice. In secular mindfulness, the stated aim is often stress reduction, emotion regulation, or well-being enhancement. In Islamic contemplative life, by contrast, the ultimate aim is relational and devotional: drawing nearer to God, cultivating God-consciousness known as taqwa, and aligning one’s inner states and outward conduct with divine guidance. The commentary insists that these differing ends are not decorative additions but constitutive features that shape what the practitioner is actually doing when the practice unfolds.

This argument has practical consequences for measurement. Much of the empirical mindfulness literature relies on self-report instruments derived from secular conceptualizations, such as scales measuring attention, awareness, and non-judgmental acceptance. Aldbyani and Al-Harbi point to their own earlier narrative theoretical review, which identified five dimensions of Islamic mindfulness and mapped them against the five facets commonly measured in secular mindfulness research. Their mapping suggests meaningful parallels, for instance between attentional presence in secular models and the concentrated presence cultivated in prayer, but also important divergences where Islamic practice incorporates elements, such as devotional intention and relational awareness of God, that have no direct secular analogue. Related constructs from the consciousness sciences, including nondual awareness, which researchers have recently begun to measure with dedicated instruments, offer one possible bridge for comparing across traditions, yet the authors caution that even these frameworks carry implicit metaphysical assumptions drawn from their originating contexts.

The empirical record cited in the commentary underscores why these conceptual debates matter beyond theory. Studies of Muslim prayer have reported associations between mindful engagement in salah and better mental health outcomes, and electroencephalography research on salah has documented changes in alpha activity linked to autonomic nervous system regulation. Quasi-experimental and randomized studies have examined Islamic spiritual mindfulness among nursing students, breathing-based dhikr therapy for insomnia, and Islamic spiritual breathing exercises for anxiety in hypertensive patients, with generally favorable findings on stress, anxiety, and quality-of-life measures. Research on muraqaba within Islamic psychotherapy and surveys of immigrant and refugee Muslim women have further suggested that faith-embedded contemplative practices function as genuine resources for psychological well-being, not merely as cultural curiosities.

At the same time, the literature reveals persistent barriers. Studies from the United Kingdom and the United States have documented obstacles that Muslim clients face when offered conventional mindfulness-based interventions, including concerns about the Buddhist framing of some programs, uncertainty about religious permissibility, and the absence of culturally and religiously adapted content. Facilitators identified in this research include the demonstrated compatibility between contemplative attention and existing Islamic practice, clinician sensitivity to religious concerns, and the availability of adaptations that explicitly root mindfulness in Islamic vocabulary and ritual life. The commentary argues that definitional debates sit at the root of these barriers: when mainstream science defines mindfulness as though only one lineage of contemplative technique existed, members of other traditions are implicitly asked to bracket their own frameworks in order to benefit from the intervention.

The theological dimension of the argument is perhaps its most distinctive contribution. Aldbyani and Al-Harbi emphasize that in Islamic thought, awareness of the present moment is inseparable from awareness of God’s presence and of moral accountability. The Sufi tradition in particular, with its disciplined practices of remembrance, self-examination, and purification of the heart, has long elaborated a systematic psychology of attention that parallels and sometimes anticipates contemporary concerns with metacognition and self-regulation. Classical and contemporary scholarship on dhikr treats repetitive remembrance not as a mere relaxation technique but as a means of transforming the practitioner’s relationship to desire, distraction, and ultimately the divine. Reading such practices through a purely clinical lens, the authors suggest, yields a distorted picture in which the most important variable, the practitioner’s orientation toward God, is subtracted from the analysis.

The teleological point follows directly. If the purpose of a contemplative practice shapes its phenomenology, then comparing Islamic and secular mindfulness solely on outcome measures such as stress reduction risks a category error. A Muslim practitioner engaged in dhikr is not simply attempting to down-regulate physiological arousal; she is performing an act of worship whose success is defined, in part, by fidelity to a devotional ideal rather than by a score on a well-being questionnaire. This does not mean that empirical research on such practices is invalid, as the growing evidence base attests. It means, rather, that researchers and clinicians should be explicit about the limits of their constructs, and should resist the assumption that secular definitions of mindfulness occupy a neutral, view-from-nowhere position from which all other traditions can be adjudicated.

The commentary also carries a message for cultural humility in psychology and psychiatry. With nearly two billion Muslims worldwide, and with mental health services in many countries serving substantial Muslim populations, the question of how contemplative interventions are defined and adapted is a matter of global clinical significance. The authors, whose earlier work has examined mindfulness among college students in Yemen and Egypt, faith-based coping among displaced Muslim women affected by war, and Islamic perspectives on mindfulness in Black American Muslim communities, frame the present piece as part of a sustained effort to bring Islamic contemplative science into dialogue with mainstream mindfulness research on equal terms. Their work has been supported by Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia.

Ultimately, the commentary issues an invitation rather than a rejection. It does not dispute the value of the definitional refinement project undertaken by Chems-Maarif and colleagues; indeed, it treats that project as an essential step toward scientific clarity. What it demands instead is a definition of mindfulness capacious enough to acknowledge that contemplative experience is always framed, in every tradition, by ethics, theology, and ultimate purpose. For scientists, that means building measures and models that can register these framings rather than averaging them away. For clinicians, it means offering Muslim clients interventions that honor, rather than bypass, the theological architecture within which their practices already live. As mindfulness science matures, the emerging consensus among scholars in this debate appears to be that pluralism in definitions is not a weakness to be engineered away, but a feature of a field finally beginning to see the full landscape of human contemplative life.

Subject of Research: Islamic mindfulness and the ethical, theological, and teleological framing of contemplative experience

Article Title: Islamic Mindfulness and the Ethical, Theological, and Teleological Framing of Contemplative Experience: A Commentary on Chems-Maarif et al. (2025)

Article References: Aldbyani, A., & Al-Harbi, M. F. O. (2026). Islamic Mindfulness and the Ethical, Theological, and Teleological Framing of Contemplative Experience: A Commentary on Chems-Maarif et al. (2025). Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02983-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02983-8

Keywords: Islamic mindfulness, mindfulness definition, dhikr, muraqaba, salah prayer, contemplative science, Muslim mental health, mindfulness-based interventions, Sufism, nondual awareness, religious adaptation, teleology