ḤAḌRAMAWT AND INDONESIA: RENEWING OLD CONNECTIONS

The material and discursive processes that make up the assemblage of Indonesian pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt are entangled with a variety of politics and political projects, including those that relate to identity, religious authority, and religious authenticity. As such, the rise of Indonesian pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt cannot be divorced from broader social, political, and economic developments in Indonesia and Yemen over the last three decades. Here I will briefly sketch these developments in both countries, while taking into account convergences between them.

The unification of North Yemen and South Yemen in 1990 resulted in a relatively free political atmosphere in which different Islamic groups sought to secure an ideological niche for themselves amidst intense public contestations over the country's future and its religio-political identity. Despite the unification, many people in most parts of the former South Yemen remained resentful of the northerners. South Yemen's political leaders continued to accuse the north-dominated government of pursuing a systematic economic marginalization of the south. Such grievances led to the 1994 civil war between the northern and the southern armies, which ended in victory for the north and the exile of the leading members of the southern Yemeni—mostly Ḥaḍramī—leadership. Since then, the Yemeni state has remained suspicious of what it perceives as the secessionist tendency of Ḥaḍramawt, especially due to the region's historical transnational links to the Indian Ocean world.

Prior to the unification, the government of North Yemen was actively supporting Salafi groups in their attempt to destabilize socialist South Yemen (Dresch Reference Dresch2000: 142; Haykel Reference Haykel2002: 28–31). Ideologically and financially indebted to Saudi Arabia, many of these groups presented themselves as the bearers of pristine Islam and launched virulent diatribes against “traditionalist” scholars with Sufi orientations, including the Bā ʿAlawī of Ḥaḍramawt. Following the unification, the Yemeni government began supporting Sufi religious establishments in order to balance out the Salafis. It financed the rebuilding of Sufi shrines and institutions in southern Yemen that had been suppressed under the socialist regime. This led to a re-flowering of Sufism in the Ḥaḍramawt valley. Within this context, a young Bā ʿAlawī scholar, Habib ʿUmar bin Ḥafīdh (b. 1962), emerged as a fiery orator who defended the Bā ʿAlawī as the guardians of authentic Islam and revived Sufism and Sufi shrines in Ḥaḍramawt (Knysh Reference Knysh2001).

In Indonesia, throughout the New Order regime (1965–1998), organized political Islam was subjected to state control designed to obstruct it from becoming an opposition to the regime. At the same time, the regime supported the more cultural and spiritual forms of Islam. Such a stance induced a rechanneling of Muslim aspirations to different sectors of society. In the 1970s, Muslim youth and intellectuals began forming active groups among university students, calling fellow students to project Islamic cultural and educational activism (Johns Reference Johns and Esposito1987). Outside of the urban context, pilgrimages to saintly graves increased considerably (Fox Reference Fox, Chambert-Loir and Reid2002; Christomy Reference Christomy2008). Annual pilgrimage to the tombs of the wali songo—the nine saints of Java believed to be the earliest Muslim missionaries in Java—increased between 1988 and 2005 from less than 500,000 to more than 3,500,000 (Quinn Reference Quinn, Fealy and White2008: 64; Slama Reference Slama, Hauser-Schaublin and Harnish2014: 114). The New Order regime created the material infrastructure for the rise of pilgrimage's popularity, including by enlarging and paving roads while refurbishing pilgrimage sites. The rising popularity of pilgrimage compelled the Ministry of Tourism to develop a new brand of tourism: wisata religi (religious tourism). The ministry led the restructuring of the pilgrimage economy, instructing site caretakers on how to properly manage the infrastructure and finances and how to devise pilgrimage tour packages (Slama Reference Slama, Hauser-Schaublin and Harnish2014: 116).

By the early 1990s, there emerged a more liberated atmosphere in which Indonesians began to feel more comfortable with public expressions of Islam. Indonesian bookshops were flooded with translations of Islamic texts. Travel bureaus organizing ḥājj and pilgrimage rapidly proliferated. Another significant development was the spread of Sufi-oriented movements and study-groups (Howell Reference Howell2001). One of the study-groups was a daily gathering in Solo, Central Java, headed by the eminent Bā ʿAlawī scholar Habib Anis al-Habsyi (d. 2006). For more than thirty years, al-Habsyi vigorously taught theological and hagiographical texts written by the Bā ʿAlawī scholars of Ḥaḍramawt. These texts are replete with references to Ḥaḍramawt and its saintly inhabitants. The daily immersion in Bā ʿAlawī religious texts provided the grounds for a special appreciation of Ḥaḍramawt among his students. In 1993, following the unification of Yemen and the Bā ʿAlawī revival in Ḥaḍramawt, al-Habsyi led thirty people, most of them his family and students, on the first Indonesian group pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt. He was able to do so not only because he had been there in the late 1950s, prior to the socialist takeover, but also because he still had a half-brother and cousins living there. Al-Habsyi's family in Ḥaḍramawt made the necessary preparations for the Indonesians' arrival.

Once in Yemen, Al-Habsyi's entourage visited the newly restored Ba ʿAlawī shrines. They also were able to meet living Ba ʿAlawī elders. During one gathering, al-Habsyi requested the elders to appoint someone whom he could invite to Indonesia “to remind Indonesians of the ways of the Bā ʿAlawī ancestors,” and they appointed the aforementioned Habib ʿUmar to the task.

When Habib ʿUmar arrived in Indonesia one month later he was introduced to local scholars and invited to deliver speeches to numerous religious gatherings. Many were enthralled by his eloquence and erudition. After a month in Indonesia he returned to Ḥaḍramawt with forty young Indonesians, of both Ḥaḍramī and non-Ḥaḍramī descent, who were to be educated under his personal care.

These forty students in Yemen became the embryo of Habib ʿUmar's Dār al-Musṭafā academy, founded in 1996. Gradually, more students from Yemen and other Arab countries began to flock to Dār al-Musṭafā, followed by Muslim converts from Western countries. More and more Indonesians studied there, and in 1999 Habib ʿUmar's wife opened an adjoining academy for women, named Dār al-Zahrāʾ. After spending three to four years in Ḥaḍramawt the students returned to their homeland with a renewed proselytizing zeal. They began establishing majelis taklim (Islamic study groups) through which they transmitted what they had learned to the wider public. These students became the primary agents in producing chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt as a spiritually significant place for Indonesian Muslims.

THE EARTHLY ANGELS

Halimah is one among many teachers who succeeded in inducing a desire among Indonesians of non-Ḥaḍramī descent to embark on a pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt. She is an Indonesian of Ḥaḍramī descent, born in West Java in 1979. She studied in several pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) in Java before joining her brother in Ḥaḍramawt in 1999, where she enrolled in the newly established Dār al-Zahrāʾ. After staying in Tarīm for four years, Halimah returned to Indonesia and began teaching in various majelis taklim. Her popularity gradually grew among middle-class Muslim women of Jakarta. Every month, Halimah teaches in forty different majelis taklims, where she recites and elaborates classical texts on jurisprudence and Bā ʿAlawī Sufism.

I first met Halimah in a majelis taklim organized by the association of the wives of Indonesian medical doctors (Ikatan Istri Dokter Indonesia/IIDI). She was dressed completely in black with a burqa covering her face, which was fairly uncommon in Jakarta. Except during particular religious occasions, she sat comfortably among the middle-upper-class women of Jakarta, many of whom did not even cover their hair. I was struck by her confidence. She explained to the women the intricacies of the text she was reading from. Every now and then she would throw in a story or two concerning the saints and scholars of Ḥaḍramawt, acquainting her non-Ḥaḍramī students with her ancestral land.

In 2009, Halimah published her first book, Bidadari Bumi (Earthly angels), an anthology of nine stories of pious Bā ʿAlawī women she had encountered during her stay in Ḥaḍramawt. Two thousand copies were sold within ten days of publication. Those who bought it were mostly her own students, although it remained in stock at the biggest bookstore chain in Indonesia for an extended period, a clear sign that sales were going well. Halimah also uses social media to promote her book and impart her messages. To date, she has more than twelve thousand followers on her Facebook fan page, and more than thirteen thousand on Twitter.

In the book's preface, Halimah explains that she compiled the anthology to reveal the existence of women who personify Islamic ideals of modesty, asceticism, trust-in-God, and other spiritual virtues. She strives to counter the widespread belief that such virtuous personalities exist only in stories from bygone eras. “Yes,” Halimah writes, “they are not women from legendary lands, nor are they angels who dwell in heaven … they are here. On this earth…. They are the earthly angels” (Alaydrus Reference Alaydrus2009: viii). Written in modern literary style for the urban educated public, the book presents the nine Bā ʿAlawī women as paragons of piety and virtue who should be emulated by Indonesian women whatever their genealogies. In this she departs from the established Bā ʿAlawī hagiographical tradition's insistence on the centrality of genealogy (Ho Reference Ho2006; Knysh Reference Knysh1999).

While Engseng Ho and Alexander Knysh have both identified genealogy as a central motif of the Bā ʿAlawī literary tradition, this begs the question of whether such a focus presupposes a historical constancy and downplays the emphatic variability of this particular tradition. For example, Wilson Jacob's Reference Jacob2013 study of the Bā ʿAlawī expansion in nineteenth-century Malabar shows how traditions of the Prophet's life were emphatically deployed by Bā ʿAlawī scholars, who used it as a means to discipline, regulate, and cultivate subjects, resulting in the materialization of gender as a discursive object. Similarly, the case of Halimah points to a shift that is taking place in the emphasis of Bā ʿAlawī ethical discourse toward one concerned less with the notion of exclusive genealogy than with the attainable cultivation of virtues more palatable to the contemporary Indonesian Muslim middle class and their celebration of specific expressions of self-improvement (Hoesterey Reference Hoesterey, Fealy and White2008; Reference Hoesterey2016; Rudnyckjy Reference Rudnyckjy2009; Jones Reference Jones2010).

The stories Halimah imparts are about simple everyday occurrences. One tells of an old lady who fell down as she disembarked a bus and bled excessively, only to “thank God for His persistent bounties” (Alaydrus Reference Alaydrus2009: 63). Another story sketches the life of a saintly lady who throughout her life had only two veils, a pair of sandals, a comb, a mirror, a copy of the Qurʾān, a string of prayer beads, and a praying mat (ibid.: 35). Each page is filled with graphic descriptions of the frugality of life in Ḥaḍramawt and the women's forbearance in living their lives. Halimah does not dwell on biographical details of the women; she is more interested in actualizing Sufi ideals in real spacetime. However, rather than describing deceased individuals, as most hagiographical texts do, Halimah prefers to talk about living women that her readers might actually meet and emulate. In other words, the anthology is a poetic project, which presents Ḥaḍramawt as a foreign and mythic chronotope that stands in marked contrast to the chronotopes of its readers. It is a chronotope made to resonate with the Prophetic past, which will make Ḥaḍramawt a place worthy of visit.

Throughout the book, Halimah contrasts the verdant landscape of Indonesia with the barren yet spiritually nourishing valleys of Ḥaḍramawt. For example, she writes:

For Halimah, the desert and plateaus that surround the Ḥaḍramawt valley have for centuries safeguarded the spiritual life of its inhabitants, nourished by long-established practices of religious devotion. She explained to me,

She thus presents Ḥaḍramawt as one of the last spiritual sanctuaries that remain, to a certain extent, untouched by the rapidly modernizing world. Her explanation points to an explicit denial of coevalness between the modernizing world of Indonesia (or Saudi Arabia) and the purportedly static Ḥaḍramawt. For Halimah, Ḥaḍramawt and its inhabitants are seen as physical survivals of the long-gone Prophetic past, thereby framing it as a pilgrimage destination for every Muslim and not just those with kinship ties there. Experiencing Ḥaḍramawt as the last vestige of a spiritually idealized past is represented as a transformative process.

While most of Halimah's discussion revolves around living people and practices, she does not neglect the dead. But at the same time, she is careful not to talk excessively about them since most of her students and readers are not familiar with the dead saints of Ḥaḍramawt. For example, she writes: “Looking at Zanbal and Furayt from behind the bus window became a steady pastime I could not do without. They are situated in the middle of the town. Not a park, not administrative offices—those two places are graves. Thousands of saints are known to be buried there” (ibid.: 60). Here, Halimah smoothly enters into a succinct description of the graves of Tarīm (Ho Reference Ho2006) before returning to her discussion of the living. I would suggest that her focus on the living as opposed to the dead is a crucial strategy that facilitates the emergence of Ḥaḍramawt as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesians of non-Ḥaḍramī descent, those without genealogical or spiritual ties with those buried in the graves of Tarīm. Living saintly individuals and scholars are presented as the links through which Indonesians of non-Ḥaḍramī descent can form connection to the Bā ʿAlawī ancestors. They are links that can facilitate alignments between the world of the readers and world of mythic religiosity.

In 2005, Halimah was approached by a travel bureau to become a guide for a pilgrimage tour of the Ḥaḍramawt. She agreed to do so, and even helped to distribute the bureau's brochures to her students. To date, she has led five groups. During our conversation she denied that she acted as an advertising agent for the travel bureau. Rather, she sees her role as “stimulating interest for people to love a place filled with the pious.” She told her students that to go to Ḥaḍramawt means to embark on a transformative spiritual journey: “Visiting Ḥaḍramawt is fruitful for those who intend to focus their gaze on the bāṭin. It is a journey of mainly visiting tombs and shrines. Those who only see the ẓāhir will see only dirt and tombstones. But those who can see beyond the materialities can sense that these places are connected to their spirits. It is also a journey of visiting living scholars, who would give advice and teach awrād (formulaic litanies). They visit Ḥaḍramawt seeking a heart-to-heart connection.” Successful pilgrims to Ḥaḍramawt are those able to visualize the time of the Prophet during their visit. They can turn the physical landscapes and practices into indices of a particular past, recognizing that the bāṭin is inherent in the ẓāhir.

The distinction between the bāṭin and the ẓāhir is central to Islam. Ontologically, Islam presupposes that everything that exists has manifest (ẓāhir) and hidden (bāṭin) aspects. While the former pertains to their corporeal existence, the latter relates to their spiritual realities that are hidden from plain view. Such a perspective generates an epistemological distinction between surface meanings that are accessible to all individuals and inner meanings that can only be uncovered by those who have cultivated their inner gaze (baṣīra). In Sufism, the transformative role of a master is precisely to help his or her disciples cultivate their baṣīra and enable them to access the esoteric dimensions of existence. Halimah sees her role as a travel guide as to cultivate the baṣīra of her entourage and help them to experience pilgrimage as a transformative process, a duty that is consistent with the traditional capacity of a Sufi master.

While Halimah's meta-commentary privileges the bāṭin over the ẓāhir, one should not lose sight of the visual significance the foreign Ḥaḍramī landscape has for many Indonesian Muslims. That is, physical landscapes also index religious authenticity, more so in the case of Indonesia, where producers of popular culture consciously assemble visual imageries of the Arabian Desert for Islamic television programs. Popular documentary series, like the highly-rated “Footsteps of the prophets” (Jejak Rasul), trace the sacred history of Islam while reproducing imageries of the Arabian Desert as the cradle of religious authenticity, sincerity, and piety. Desert scenes, complete with images of camel caravans, are consistently reproduced as television stage sets for Islamic musical performances. The plurality of images and related discursive and semiotic representations help to assemble intensified chronotopic interlinkages, suggesting that even the ẓāhir images of barren desert can index piety and authenticity in ways that do not necessarily privilege the bāṭin. Implicit in Halimah's account is therefore the mutually constituting relationship between the ẓāhir and the bāṭin. The barren landscape of Ḥaḍramawt is presented as “developable means” through which “certain kinds of ethical and moral capacities are attained” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005: 148).

In one of the stories, Halimah introduces Hubabah ʿUmayrah, one of the “earthly angels” she met in Ḥaḍramawt. The story begins with how they became acquainted, then continues with a long hagiographic description of ʿUmayrah together with a discussion of her daily life and the Islamic virtues she personifies. The story ends a few years later when Halimah returns to meet the pious woman with a group of Indonesian pilgrims. Whenever Halimah leads a group of pilgrims she always takes them to see the earthly angels she discusses in her book and asks them to bless the pilgrims (Alaydrus Reference Alaydrus2009: 110). The story thus moves from her encounter with something angelic—a living individual whose life resonates with rarely actualized Islamic ideals—to the description of Ḥaḍramawt as a mythic chronotope, and finally to the possibility of establishing alignment between that mythic chronotope and the contrastive chronotopes of her readers through the act of pilgrimage. Such an alignment is portrayed as effecting spiritual transformation of the pilgrims, which makes pilgrimage a transformative process.

Halimah is intricately involved in a poetic project that makes her students want to visit Ḥaḍramawt. She produces a foreign and mythic chronotope of Ḥaḍramawt that resonates with circulating chronotopes of sacred or Prophetic histories as well as mass-mediated representations of the Arabian Desert as a locus of piety, sincerity, and authenticity. In doing so, she frames travel to Ḥaḍramawt as a pilgrimage, a process that can bring about spiritual transformation. As a travel guide, Halimah helps to materialize the textual chronotope as living textures.

FROM MULĀZAMA TO PILGRIMAGE

Muhsin is a native Jakartan, an orang Betawi, as he proudly referred to himself, born in 1966. I met him in his zāwiya, a mosque-like building reserved for holding religious classes and other devotional activities, situated in a cramped, poor urban neighborhood of East Jakarta. Those who come to listen to Muhsin belong to a lower social stratum than Halimah's students belong to. As a boy, he went to the government school in the mornings and studied Islamic sciences with his grandfather in the afternoons. After graduating from primary school he decided to leave government school to focus more on religious learning. A cousin introduced him to the eminent Bā ʿAlawī scholar of Jakarta, Habib Abdurrahman Assegaf (d. 2007), and Muhsin decided to enroll in his madrasa in 1981. In 1990, he married the adopted daughter of another senior Bā ʿAlawī scholar, Habib Abdullah Shami, and from then on lived with him, serving while studying with the scholar until the latter's death in 2000.

From a young age, Muhsin was well-connected with the Bā ʿAlawī scholarly community. This engagement exposed him to various mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt, as he explained using both Indonesian and Arabic. I italicize all Arabic phrases (with the English translation in parentheses) in order to highlight the constant switching between Indonesian (all of which is translated into English) and Arabic:

His discourse, switching between Indonesian and Arabic, is replete with intertextual references to Bā ʿAlawī hagiographical texts, demonstrating his grasp of the Bā ʿAlawī textual tradition. He even quotes verbatim from these texts when he describes Ḥaḍramawt. By keeping the company of a living Bā ʿAlawī scholar for a protracted period—a practice known in Islamic scholarly tradition as mulāzama—Muhsin, who is not himself a Ḥaḍramī, became incorporated into the Bā ʿAlawī intellectual community. Mulāzama comes from the word lāzama, meaning “he kept, confined himself, clave, clung, or held fast, to him,” and refers to “the continuous physical propinquity of a follower to a powerful man” (Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain1994: 118). In the absence of sanguine ties to the saintly individuals buried in Ḥaḍramawt, Muhsin had to forge an alternative means of connection to the Bā ʿAlawī ancestors, one that he maintains through his mastery of the texts that make up Bā ʿAlawī tradition.

Muhsin had been intimately acquainted with Ḥaḍramawt long before he visited there. But the Ḥaḍramawt he knew was not the present-day one, but rather an assemblage of mythic and timeless chronotopes, a poetic product derived from hagiographical texts. Such a chronotopic assemblage mediates his travel experience as a transformative process. Again, Arabic phrases are italicized with their English translations in parentheses:

Muhsin's journey was a cross-chronotopic movement whereby he personally entered the mythic world he knew well. Residing in the rubāṭ, reading texts with scholars, receiving ijāza, acquiring a substantial amount of knowledge in a short period of time, and being seen by the scholars—all of these are standard tropes in Bā ʿAlawī hagiographical texts (Bang Reference Bang2003). When he visited Zanbal, he knew exactly what to recite at different pilgrimage stations (Ho Reference Ho2006: 200–7). In narrating his experience, Muhsin attempts to align the chronotopic account of his journey with other mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt, generating dialogical resonances between them. This requires him to omit occurrences that might upset the emerging dialogical resonances. While his narration strives to establish alignment with past chronotopes, it does not erase the difference of being a non-Bā ʿAlawī. That is, despite his insistence that Ḥaḍramawt is not a foreign place, Muhsin's narration nevertheless re-inscribes present-day Ḥaḍramawt as a quixotic place that stands in opposition to modern Indonesia. After all, he himself had to learn about Ḥaḍramawt before he went there, to develop some degree of familiarity with it.

Muhsin's journey aligns mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt to the spacetime of his travel, allowing them to express themselves symbolically and “to become part of a practice” (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith1991: 216–17). Henri Lefebvre has pointed out the three important aspects of spatiality: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived. He argues that the production of space cannot be reduced to either language or discourse. A space, for Lefebvre, is not a mere text but a texture made up of networks and webs that are expressible through discourse, but it only becomes explicable through embodied actions. Space is not only read, but more importantly, acted. It is determined by what may take place there, and consequently what may not take place there. It is acted through gestural and ritualized movements, perceived through spoken words, and conceived through the dissemination of the written word and of knowledge (ibid.: 224). To employ Lefebvre's terminology: Muhsin's mulāzama enabled him to perceive older mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt, which in turn allowed him to align them to his own travel experience, generating living textures that resonate with, but nevertheless remain different from, the older chronotopes.

Muhsin's journey is also a transformative process in that it enabled him to become a producer rather than just a consumer of mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt. Observe how he aligns older mythic chronotopes with his own personal experience: “Every Friday afternoon, I would go and sit at the Bā ʿAlawī mosque. There is a special pillar there. It is said that when they were building the mosque, the workers stopped for the day. When they returned the next day they found a pillar miraculously erected. Al-ʿAydarūs used to sit by that pillar. Al-Ḥaddād used to pray in that mosque all night long asking God for the ḥāl [Arabic: spiritual state] of al-ʿAydarūs.” Here, Muhsin aligns his own experience of praying at the Bā ʿAlawī mosque with the deeds of al-ʿAydarūs and al-Ḥaddād, thereby generating dialogic resonances. His recollection alludes to a personal spiritual transformation produced in him through the process of repeating the actions of the Bā ʿAlawī ancestors, even though he is not a Bā ʿAlawī. Such a spiritual transformation corresponds to his transformation from being a consumer to being a producer of mythic chronotopes. Another example illustrates this point:

As Muhsin says, he arrived in Yemen following the October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole. His assertion, “Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt is only possible through the invitation of the Bā ʿAlawī pious predecessors,” resonates with the widespread adage that ḥajj is only possible through the invitation of Abraham, which in all likelihood is based on the Qurʾānic verse that opens this article. Note also his explanation of how Habib Ḥasan—one of the most senior Bā ʿAlawī scholars/saints of Ḥaḍramawt—helped to facilitate his smooth entry into Ḥaḍramawt. Habib Ḥasan is thus presented as an intercessor, a synecdoche of the Bā ʿAlawī ancestors whose invitation is necessary to ensure a smooth entry into the valley. What we see here is an alignment between the immediate co(n)text—which was experienced as a constraint—and older mythic chronotopes, which produced a new resonating chronotope without necessarily erasing the discontinuity produced by such constraints.

Today, Muhsin is a successful teacher. What he once heard about Ḥaḍramawt from his teacher he now teaches to his many students. Again, his pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt was a transformative process that allowed this former consumer of mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt to become a first-hand producer. Through the proliferation of study-groups led by people like Muhsin and Halimah, mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt spread to wider publics, inducing more people to visit the valley for pilgrimage. In both their cases, we see how the relationship between the teachers and their students involves a hierarchy “that is reinforced or even created through the [pilgrimage] narrative” (Coleman and Elsner Reference Coleman and Elsner2003: 5). As someone without blood connection to Ḥaḍramawt, Muhsin certainly feels more confident after his visitation to the land of his teachers. His students and friends now recognize him as a non-sayyid authority of the Bā ʿAlawī tradition. His study-groups, in turn, facilitate the durability and circulation of his own pilgrimage narrative. While Halimah is able to speak to wide audiences due to her ability to tap into the publishing industry and the social media, Muhsin's sphere of activity is more limited. Nonetheless, both are involved in a similar poetic project that prepares their students to become the target group for the bourgeoning pilgrimage travel industry.

ASSEMBLING PILGRIMAGE

If Halimah and Muhsin are two among the many involved in generating new desires for pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt among Indonesian of non-Ḥaḍramī descent, Salim makes it possible. This is a challenge, because Hạḍramawt is not the most amenable of places, and lacks much of the infrastructures associated with modern pilgrimage or tourism. An Islamic scholar by training, Salim was born in 1961 in Bondowoso, East Java, to a Bā ʿAlawī scholarly family. He studied in East Java and Jakarta before continuing his education in Mecca in 1981. In 1987 he returned to Indonesia and established a travel bureau selling ḥajj packages.

In 1997, Salim was invited to take a familiarization trip to Yemen courtesy of the Yemenia Airlines, which had just opened a direct route between Jakarta and Sanaa. Following that trip, he began visiting Ḥaḍramawt regularly:

Salim's decision to arrange these pilgrimage trips to Ḥaḍramawt intersected with two industries that boomed in 1990s Indonesia, involving pilgrimages to Mecca and labor migration to the Middle East. Both generated unprecedented movements of people between Indonesia and Arabia. Following President Suharto's ḥājj in 1991, Indonesian pilgrims to Mecca reached record numbers, around two hundred thousand annually during the ḥājj season. Indonesians accounted for nearly 20 percent of all overseas pilgrims (Bianchi Reference Bianchi2004:176). ‘Umrā (minor pilgrimage to Mecca that can be undertaken any time of the year) also gained popularity among middle- and upper-class Indonesian Muslims. Consequently, several Arabian airline companies, including Emirates and Yemenia Airlines, moved to seize this lucrative market and offered flights between Jakarta and Jeddah via their respective capitals at much lower rates than the routes of Saudia and Garuda Indonesia Airlines. These developments presented Salim the opportunity to assemble a pilgrimage package to Ḥaḍramawt. His venture attested to “the possibility of shifts between secular and sacred forms of travel” (Coleman and Elsner Reference Coleman and Elsner2003: 3).

Salim advertised the travel package by distributing brochures in the majelis taklim of his fellow Bā ʿAlawī scholars. Most of his clients came from his own personal network:

Salim then showed me the popular Islamic magazine Mafahim, in which his travel bureau advertises the pilgrimage package to Ḥaḍramawt. The advertisement shows day-by-day itineraries complete with the names of the graves and the saints buried therein. Take, for instance, days three and five:

This advertisement targets a specific audience. The individual names, places, and graves it lists would certainly confound those not familiar with the Bā ʿAlawī history and Sufi tradition. Several saints are mentioned only by their honorific title rather than their actual name, pointing to the role of teachers like Halimah and Muhsin in introducing Ḥaḍramawt and Bā ʿAlawī history to the wider public. The advertisements resonate with the chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt that circulate in the majelis taklim. Note also that Salim's itinerary includes visiting living scholars, facilitating further connection between Indonesian pilgrims of non-Ḥaḍramī descent with living Bā ʿAlawī scholars of Ḥaḍramawt.

Salim charges between $2,000 to $2,500 for a sixteen-day trip to Mecca and Ḥaḍramawt, quite expensive for average Indonesians. He told me that those who do have the means to go are generally happy with the experience and they visit again:

For Salim, the objective of pilgrimage is to connect with dead saints, which in turn generates a transformative experience. His role as a travel agent is to facilitate this transformative process by assembling it into a convenient package accessible to those with the requisite financial means.

In fashioning the trip as pilgrimage, Salim had to make sure that those working with him were on the same page, and so he recruited Indonesian students in Ḥaḍramawt as tour guides:

Observe how Salim consciously partakes in the poetic project by carefully selecting the programs and destinations that resonate with the mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt produced by teachers like Halimah and Muhsin. Programs like watching traditional dance might disrupt the emerging poetic pattern. Salim's role is not only to facilitate travel, but more importantly, to select the proper destinations and programs and structure the itinerary in a form that corresponds to the mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt so as to frame the travel experience as cross-chronotopic movement. It was precisely the notion of pilgrimage as both a poetic project and a transformative process that the Yemeni travel agency could not grasp.

Salim therefore strives to minimize incongruity between texts and textures. Crucial to this is to identify his travel package as a trip to Ḥaḍramawt as opposed to Yemen. Most people I conversed with during my fieldwork described their travel as a pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt, not to Yemen, and that is how agents like Salim market their travel package. Furthermore, he makes sure that the itinerary does not include northern Yemen, especially the developing capital city Sanaa. According to Salim, most Yemenis could not appreciate pilgrimage. While the Yemeni government certainly benefits from the increase in Indonesian pilgrims, it has tried to ensure that they visit Sanaa by discontinuing direct connecting flights between Jakarta and Sanaa-Seiyun, Ḥaḍramawt. Salim describes this as “the politics of tourism,” which forces pilgrims to experience the capital city. But he devised a tactic to dodge the state's imposition by chartering a bus that takes the pilgrims directly from Sanaa airport to Ḥaḍramawt upon their arrival. Such an itinerary is demanding since pilgrims must directly embark on a seven-hour bus trip after a nine-hour flight from Jakarta.

The role of the travel bureau is to assemble the trip as a convenient travel package while nevertheless reinscribing Ḥaḍramawt as a foreign and static but accessible chronotope. This is done by selecting destinations and programs that resonate with the circulating mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt while denying coevalness between Ḥaḍramawt and Indonesia. A carefully structured itinerary helps to materialize such discursive representations into living textures, and structures the journey as a transformative process.

CONSUMING PILGRIMAGE

Abdul Manan (b. 1928) is a Banjari—someone who comes from Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan—who has lived in Solo, Central Java since his youth. In the morning he works in the Batik trade, and in the evening he teaches Qurʾānic recitation to neighborhood children. Manan also frequently attends the majelis taklim of Habib Anis al-Habsyi (d. 2006), the eminent Bā ʿAlawī scholar who organized the first Indonesian group pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt:

Manan has a younger brother, Malik, who works for the national oil company, Pertamina. One day Malik told Manan that they were both going to visit Mecca and Medina for pilgrimage. The overjoyed Manan asked Malik whether it was also possible to visit Ḥaḍramawt on their way. Malik contacted a travel bureau that organizes a combined pilgrimage trip to the Hejaz and Ḥaḍramawt, and a few months later they found themselves in the streets of Tarīm. Manan was in tears as he recounted his journey:

For one week Manan and Malik traveled around the valley with an Indonesian guide, visiting graves and living scholars. For Manan, the pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt meant strengthening his connection to the living and dead Bā ʿAlawī scholars and saints: “I am not a descendant of the Prophet, but I love them. I am not a knowledgeable person, nor am I a pious Muslim, but I love the saints and scholars. I want to be close to them. I do not have the blood of the Prophet. But I want to be connected to them. That's why I learn from them, I pray for them, I recite their litanies, I read their texts, and I visit their graves. I want to be close to them.”

As someone with no blood connection, Manan—like Muhsin discussed earlier—tries to forge intellectual and spiritual connections to the Prophet through his scholarly descendants. One key difference between Manan and Muhsin is that the former did not engage in mulāzama. Rather, Manan maintained his connection to the Bā ʿAlawī scholars through what is known in Islamic knowledge culture as taraddud, meaning to “frequent” someone. As the historian Michael Chamberlain notes, “Where mulāzama implied constant propinquity, taraddud meant regular contact” (1994: 118–19). Manan's daily activities prevented him from establishing continuous physical propinquity, and for that reason he chose taraddud as his preferred means of connectivity with the living Bā ʿAlawī scholars. As Chamberlain (ibid.: 119) wrote in his study of Islamic knowledge practice in medieval Damascus, both mulāzama and taraddud are situated in a continuum of practices that includes pilgrimage.

Manan's trip was an alignment of his own embodied self with the mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt that he was exposed to in the majelis taklim of Habib Anis. He was able to recognize the places, graves, and histories of the saints he visited:

Note the historical density of Manan's recollection. Prior practices of the Bā ʿAlawi that have been discursively preserved in chronotopic forms are experienced as textures, imbuing Manan's journey with historical depth beyond the immediate context. The landscape, the people, and the materials he encountered made present the longer spatiotemporal dimension. Such a density renders Manan's journey and his recollection of the trip as a reflexive meditation on a particular structure of chronotopic interlinkages that generate dialogical resonances with an idealized past.

When Manan returned to Indonesia he went to Habib Anis to report about his pilgrimage:

Observe how, for Manan, pilgrimage was experienced as a spiritually transformative process. At the same time, it enabled him to become a producer of the mythic chronotope of Ḥaḍramawt. While Halimah and Muhsin can reproduce more durable chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt—through their majelis taklim or printed books—Manan can do so only in limited fashion. He only reproduces such mythic chronotopes in his conversations with friends and neighbors, and does not have the ability to present it in more durable forms. It may be, though, that as the number of such pilgrims returning to Indonesia increases, these interpersonal discourses will mutually amplify their impact and they will become as important as mass-mediated chronotopes.

“A BLACK ANT CRAWLING AT NIGHT”

Thus far I have suggested the importance of understanding pilgrimage as a poetic project involving cross-chronotope alignments that generate particular dialogical resonances and oppositions that frame travel to Ḥaḍramawt as a transformative process. Such alignments help to limit possible interpretations opened up by the iterability of chronotopes. As a project, however, the notion of pilgrimage cannot fully erase differences, discontinuities, and variability of equivalences. To illustrate this point, I now turn to my final interlocutor, Zahidah.

Born in 1948 to a Ḥaḍramī father and Tunisian mother, Zahidah chose not to mix with Arabs while growing up. She recalled to me how her father used to tell her about the land of her ancestors, while simultaneously inculcating Indonesian nationalism in her. A few years ago, Zahidah became interested in learning more about her ancestral land. This interest came at a point when her financial condition was improving considerably, and she would visit different countries every summer. In 2001, her brother was planning to go to Ḥaḍramawt to visit his son who was enrolled at the Dār al-Muṣṭafā academy, and Zahidah decided to go along.

When I asked Zahidah whether she was going to Ḥaḍramawt for a pilgrimage, she replied:

In explaining her position regarding pilgrimage, Zahidah evokes another Prophetic chronotope that differs from the chronotopes of a Prophetic past summoned by the likes of Halimah, Muhsin, and Manan, that of a Prophetic ḥadīth regarding idolatry (shirk). As such, Zahidah's discourse attests to another possible cross-chronotope alignment, one that resonates with reformist Islamic discourse. Such an alignment underscores opposition between the practice of grave visitation and Prophetic practice. Growing up in Jakarta and being educated in secular educational institutions familiarized Zahidah with modern reformist Islamic discourses that have dominated urban religiosity in twentieth-century Indonesia (Bowen Reference Bowen1993: 39–73; Feener Reference Feener2007: 24–80).

Throughout her recollection of the trip, Zahidah discussed the inconveniences of visiting Ḥaḍramawt. Her list of complaints included:

• • There were a lot of flies in Ḥaḍramawt.

• • The dust was overwhelming.

• • There are dry plateaus all around.

• • Our bags were thrown from the airplane for us to pick up ourselves.

• • I had always heard about Ḥurayḍa. My father was from Ḥurayḍa. But it was not that impressive.

• • What was imprinted on me was eating fish in a restaurant by the road during our journey there. It was served with raw onions cut in half.

• • It was extremely hot!

• • When I returned to Indonesia, I was thankful that my grandfather chose to migrate to Indonesia. [switching to English] Good choice!

• • The weather was very hot … as if it were a gush. Even sitting in front of a cooling fan was more like being pummeled by a gush of scorching air from a carburetor, wih wih wih….

• • I refused to wear the niqāb (face covering). But it was clear how the air of Ḥaḍramawt necessitated women covering their faces because of [she raises her voice] THE INTENSITY OF THE DUST!

As I listened to Zahidah it became clear to me how similar her chronotope of Ḥaḍramawt is to that of Halimah in that both accentuate physical and material inconveniences. Yet, while for Halimah these index Islamic authenticity, and the austerity and forbearance of the Ḥaḍramīs, for Zahidah they index backwardness. Dialogical opposition between Ḥaḍramawt and Indonesia is maintained in both chronotopic alignments, but in Zahidah's account, the dialogical resonance between Ḥaḍramawt and chronotopes of the Prophetic past is largely missing. Thus niqāb indexes “the intensity of the dust” rather than the virtue of Ḥaḍramī women.

In contrast to the mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt that involve disassociating the valley from modern and/or Western influences, Zahidah's recollection presents a more complicated picture of contemporary Ḥaḍramawt:

Zahidah noticed the satellite dishes that dominate the urban skylines, an important detail that people like Halimah and Muhsin left out of their accounts. For Halimah, the Ḥaḍramīs are remnants of an Islamically idealized past who should be admired and emulated, but for Zahidah they should be pitied. Zahidah's description further shows how people in Ḥaḍramawt are in touch with the wider trends of globalization. Like the Indonesians, the Ḥaḍramīs aspire to modernity, and for this they should not be emulated.

Yet this does not mean that Halimah's trip was not transformative. During her journey she learned about her saintly ancestors: “What I saw in Ḥaḍramawt were mosques, graves, and plateaus. When I entered the gravesite of al-Muhājir, I thought that this place was so high, desolate, with no one around. Why was he buried there? Ah, and this al-Muhājir, I have heard about him before, from my son-in-law. I do not like reading history books. My son-in-law explained to me that he was our ancestor who first migrated from Basra to Ḥaḍramawt.”

While pilgrimage for Muhsin and Manan became a means of aligning themselves with and materializing the preconceived mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt, for Zahidah travel to Ḥaḍramawt entailed learning about her roots in situ. As she visited her ancestors' tombs she also learned about their histories. Her journey to Ḥaḍramawt enabled her to talk about her ancestors whose graves she had personally visited.

The most striking contrast between Zahidah's description of Ḥaḍramawt and those offered by Halimah, Muhsin, and Manan has to do with their recollections of visiting the graves of Tarīm:

Here we see how, like other visitors, Zahidah's exposure to the graves of Tarīm evoked alignment with other preconceived chronotopes. However, while Halimah, Muhsin, and Manan aligned their actual visitation with older mythic chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt, Zahidah linked her own experience at the cemetery with other Prophetic chronotopes that circulate in the majelis taklim of modern reformist Muslim scholars. Such contrastive chronotopes are usually deployed to warn people about the danger of idolatry (shirk). As someone who grew up in Jakarta without strong connections to the Bā ʿAlawī scholarly community, Zahidah has been exposed to such teachings. Central to this Islamic ideology is the emphasis on safeguarding the purity of one's belief in God's unicity (tawḥīd) from what is perceived as the polluting threat of practices like grave visitation and seeking intercession. For this reason, Zahidah was accused as being a Muhammadiyah, the name of an Indonesian reformist organization founded in 1912 and known for its zeal in introducing modern education and celebrating progress, while purifying Islam from what it deemed “syncretic” practices. While Zahidah herself is not a follower of Muhammadiyah, the term is used in contemporary Indonesia to label those who have adopted a similar stance.

What is crucial to grasp here is the contested nature of pilgrimage as a poetic project due to the iterability of its constitutive chronotopes. Despite various mediations that try to limit interpretation by establishing a specific dialogic constellation, pilgrims and visitors do align their travel experiences to other chronotopes. Attending to this subtle but salient point allows us to develop an approach to pilgrimage that does not cling to the communitas paradigm, with its tendency to celebrate communal effervescence, or the contestation paradigm, with its insistence on positing pilgrimage sites as religious voids.Footnote ³ Instead, being at pilgrimage sites often creates a new stimulus that can evoke multiple “chains of associations” that guide the pilgrims “away from reflections about the actual experience of the site” (Picard Reference Picard, Picard and Robinson2012: 12) and toward other, preconceived chronotopes, thereby generating other alignments that afford varying interpretations (Coleman and Elsner Reference Coleman and Elsner1995).

Zahidah's journey to Ḥaḍramawt was itself a poetic project and a transformative process, albeit one at variance with those of other actors discussed in this article. Her account of her journey reproduces a foreign and backward chronotope of Ḥaḍramawt presented as in dialogical opposition to modern Indonesia. In doing so, she denies coevalness between Ḥaḍramawt and Indonesia. In her view, Ḥaḍramawt is certainly part of her past, but not her future. Ḥaḍramawt should remain irreversible with no ability to affect her present and future. It is not a chronotope worthy of emulation. Such a poetic pattern makes her travel a cross-chronotopic movement toward her past, while it also enhances her appreciation of being a modern Indonesian: “I was not sad when I left Ḥaḍramawt. The heat was unbearable. I remain thankful; thankful that I was born as an Indonesian. When I arrived back in Indonesia, I prostrated myself and kissed the soil, thanking God for life in this country. When my children picked me up, I wept, thanking God. I felt great pity for the women of Ḥaḍramawt, locked in their homes. I think people exaggerate about Ḥaḍramawt. I felt constricted there. I could not breathe.”

Zahidah's case stands as an important reminder that pilgrimage is ultimately a poetic project directed toward a particular process. As a project, it will remain subject to the iterability of its constitutive chronotopes and the “intrasocietal heterogeneity” (Stasch Reference Stasch2014a) of the travelers. Consequently, it can generate a variety of transformative processes.