This article traces the usage of scholarly categories in online public discourses in Indonesia and Malaysia. I make two main arguments: First, digital dissemination and discussion of such categories accelerate and distort the reductions that are part of scholarly work. Second, these reductions in online debates contribute to a homogenization of positions on Islam on the level of actors as well as the level of arguments. Muslim authority on matters of creed has become more monopolized by a small group of scholars since the mid-2000s, and a broad spectrum of positions has become concentrated into a few homogenized group identities. This homogenization is driven by the increased use of new media, especially the internet. One effect of this is that more extreme positions on Islamic interpretations have become acceptable in the public spheres in Southeast Asia.

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Commentators have mainly viewed the Ahmadiyya debate in Indonesia either as a controversy over heterodoxy or as an episode raising questions about the human rights of ‘religious minorities’. Instead, I suggest viewing these debates as a field of normative questions of secularism in which the claims of religious are renegotiated in response to the fragmentation of religious and political authority brought on by a diversification of the use of media and a loss of trust in the Indonesian post-Suharto democracy, and between normative questions of secularism.

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