As migrants from a Muslim-majority country working in non-Muslim territories, Indonesian maids and nannies in Hong Kong or Singapore radicalize for different reasons than either Indonesian helpers in the Middle East or converts to jihad in the West.

Based on IPAC’s monitoring of social media since mid-2015, as well as our interviews with several dozen Indonesian migrant workers and Muslim leaders in Hong Kong, these workers seem to have started out as nominal or non-devout Muslims and then undergone a rapid religious transformation while living abroad.

For some, the difficulties of a migrant’s life — principally dislocation and isolation — inspired a spiritual rebirth. They experienced a double form of alienation, from both home and religion. Some said that they had felt humiliated, for example, cooking pork for non-Muslim employers. “Could you imagine having to touch pork while wearing a niqab?” one of them told me, referring to the full-face veil.

Migrant workers in East Asia have more freedom to congregate during their days off and to own and use mobile phones than their counterparts in the Middle East. On Sundays, public parks and overpasses in Hong Kong are packed with small groups of Indonesian workers, who sing, play cards, practice martial arts or join Islamic study circles known as pengajian.

Of the more than 200 Indonesian associations in Hong Kong listed by the Indonesian consulate in 2016, more than half were pengajian. Yet these groups almost never promote radical ideology; in most radicalization cases that IPAC has studied, the workers’ first exposure to Islamist extremism occurred through social media. Some women joined mainstream pengajian in the early stages of their religious awakening, but later became dissatisfied with them and, like Ayu, turned to the internet or social media for what seemed to them to be a purer form of Islam.

Jihadi sites like voa-islam.com and kiblat.net appear at the top of result lists when one searches for “Islamic news” on Google in Indonesian. Their narratives — prophesizing an Islamic Armageddon in Syria and the like — are then spread by social media. Encrypted chat apps, particularly Telegram, serve as support groups for new recruits.

“I was online 24 hours every day, the Wi-Fi was so good,” Firda, an Indonesian maid who worked in Singapore, told me in April. “At first I used it to watch movies, but after a while I felt empty. I had a decent job and money, my boss was nice to me, but I felt dry spiritually.”