The Poetics of Pilgrimage: Assembling Contemporary Indonesian Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt, Yemen

Abstract

AbstractThis article investigates the socio-discursive processes that have enabled the emergence and maintenance of pilgrimage practice by examining the rising popularity of the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Yemen as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims. Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt mainly revolves around visiting the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī (a group of Ḥaḍramīs who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muḥammad) Sufi saints and scholars scattered around the valley. Moving away from ritual analysis, I examine the roles of various actors involved in the production and consumption of pilgrimage. I analyze pilgrimage as a poetic project that frames travel as a transformative process. As a project, pilgrimage can be described as poetic because it hinges on the construction of multiple chronotopes that are juxtaposed, compared, contrasted, and assembled into meaningful alignments. The actors discussed are involved in producing chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt as a spiritually idealized place, which are made to resonate with mass-mediated chronotopes of idealized Islam circulating among Indonesian Muslims, and contrasted with chronotopes of the modern world. Framed by such a poetic mediation, pilgrims comprehend their actual travel to Ḥaḍramawt as a cross-chronotopic movement that they believe transforms their own selves. The article observes the various mechanisms of attraction and seduction at work in pilgrimage practice, while demonstrating the structural similarities between pilgrimage and other forms of tourism.