Islam is not only spatially-embedded. Like any other religion, it is also a mode and labor of space-making; and it has particular ways of imagining, talking about, making sense of, practicing, and experiencing space that are often more nuanced than those presupposed by the conventional demarcation between the sacred and the profane. And yet the question of spatiality has been rather sidelined in many recent anthropological analyses of Islam compared to the attention that has been given to text, discourse, the body and their role in forming a tradition of practice and effecting Muslim ethical becoming. Such a focus is analytically useful in accentuating the underlying temporal configuration that makes Islam a living and dynamic trans-generational chain of transmission and interpretation. But spatial structuration and practice are as critical as temporal-organization in constituting Islam as a living tradition. Similarly, the role of space in mediating or failing to mediate discourse and the body, or in facilitating ethical lives and moral sociality deserves further attention.
Take the notion of the city. As the historian Ira Lapidus has noted many years ago, the role of the city as the necessary site for ethical learning and cultivation was emphasized by early Muslims and the generations who came after them. This elevation of the city was accompanied by Muslim disparagement of the hinterlands or the desert, the bādiya, as dangerous and nefarious. Reading the works of the historians of early Islam as well as those who focus on the Islamization of different parts of the world can teach us how crucial the question of space, spatial practice, and the built-environment is to the dynamics of Islamic becoming. The centrality of this question is also reflected in the case I am most familiar with, that of the sayyids (sāda; descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad) of the Ḥaḍramawt in modern day Yemen, popularly known as the Bā ʿAlawīs, who have long migrated to the Indonesian island Java and different parts of the Indian Ocean World.
The Bā ʿAlawīs are not only known as successful cultivators of Islamic communities in Java as I have shown in my book What is Religious Authority? but also as builders of communal spaces.
The Bā ʿAlawīs are not only known as successful cultivators of Islamic communities in Java as I have shown in my book What is Religious Authority? but also as builders of communal spaces. Apart from mosques, prayer halls, boarding schools, orphanages, and mausoleums, they also built zāwiyas. These zāwiyas can be found in those major cities of Java with substantial Ḥaḍramī diasporic population, from Bogor and Jakarta in the west to Pekalongan and Solo in Central Java, all the way to Surabaya and Pasuruan in the east. These zāwiyas are not the conventional Sufi zāwiyas like those found in North Africa or other parts of the Muslim world. They are not really ṭarīqa centers headed by a murshid, although the founders of these sites and many who frequent them are affiliated with the Bā ʿAlawīs’ own Sufi order, the Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya. Instead, these zāwiyas are more akin to a clubhouse. They are sites of leisure where men and boys sit, learn, and socialize as they sip tea and coffee. In these zāwiyas news is exchanged, texts recited, lectures delivered, and poems sung. There, the past is recounted and its accumulated wisdoms are passed on to the youngsters.
“This zāwiya is a place where we rest and stay still, a place where we pause the clock after a hectic morning or afternoon,” a Ḥaḍramī man in his early-sixties told me during our encounter in the zāwiya of Solo (Central Java). His remark reminded me of what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote in his phenomenological musing on “corners” which of course is what the term zāwiya means. The corner, Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “is a haven that ensures us one of the things we prize most highly — immobility… Consciousness of being at peace in one’s corner produces a sense of immobility, and this, in turn, radiates immobility” ([1958] 1969: 137). But if Bachelard’s corner is a space of solitude and daydreaming that opens up immense imaginative possibilities, the Bā ʿAlawī zāwiyas are spirited sites of ethical sociality. The in-built corner that constitutes the center and the pivot of these zāwiyas is like a dead-end, a terminus where many paths and daily itineraries temporarily converge with no roads ahead. And there, at that very space of immobility a moral community came to be formed regularly through the maintenance of companionship, most often over the course of a lifetime.
The ethical possibility that is opened up by immobility — which in this case is afforded by the built environment — deserves further rumination. For the Bā ʿAlawīs who are known for their trans-regional mobility, the question of living a mobile life, whether to migrate and pursue the world abroad or to stay home in the Ḥaḍramawt was a burning question ever since they began to emigrate en masse from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
The ethical possibility that is opened up by immobility — which in this case is afforded by the built environment — deserves further rumination. For the Bā ʿAlawīs who are known for their trans-regional mobility, the question of living a mobile life, whether to migrate and pursue the world abroad or to stay home in the Ḥaḍramawt was a burning question ever since they began to emigrate en masse from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In the eyes of many Bā ʿAlawī scholars in the Ḥaḍramawt, to migrate to Java is to surrender one’s moral rectitude to the vagaries of the world. It is to risk one’s soul and religiosity to moral ruin. Interestingly, Java is often depicted in these anti-migration writings as a place of intense mobility. Life in Java is hard, people are constantly on the move, no-one has the time to rest. Everyone is like a nomad running from one place to another in pursuit of wealth as if they are chased by some wild beasts. These scholars reproduce the established trope of Islam as a settled way of life that is contrasted to the morally-questionable nomadic lifestyle of the bedouins. For these scholars, ethical formation requires a degree of immobility.[1]
Nevertheless, while the majority of migrants from the Ḥaḍramawt could be considered as economic migrants, some were scholars. It was these learned actors who ended up establishing zāwiyas in Java. Some of these zāwiyas are modest annexes to the residence of their founders. Others are connected to mosques or prayer halls that they built. Some others are even equipped with a library. There are at least three features that made these sites a proper zāwiya. First is their openness to the public. People come and go and they sit and socialize at these sites even when their patrons are not around. The second feature is the clear separation (demarcated by the built environment) between the zāwiyas and the mosque, residence, or the private quarters of their patrons. Consequently, when people sit at these zāwiyas they do not feel as if they are impinging on people’s privacy or that they need to observe certain manners that befit a mosque as a place of worship. The third feature is the kind activities that regularly take place at these sites.
Among the recurrent activities held at the Bā ʿAlawī zāwiyas is the daily or weekly rawḥa. The term rawḥa comes from the word rāḥa meaning to go or do a thing in the evening or the afternoon. From the same root we also get the term rawḥun meaning soothing mercy, happiness, comport, bounty, and so on. Ultimately, the term signifies something connected to the soul, the rūḥ. For the Bā ʿAlawīs, rawḥa is an activity of resting, of nourishing one’s soul by listening to the inspiring words and deeds of the ancestors, singing the poems they composed, whilst simultaneously catching up with friends. During the rawḥa men sit for about two hours — usually between the afternoon and twilight prayers. They relax after a day of work, sipping small cups of tea and eating snacks while connecting themselves to each other and to their pious ancestors. Elders usually sit with their backs leaning against the two walls that make up the corner of the zawiya. Youngsters sit facing the elders, forming several rows. Some of these youngsters take turn to serve tea and snacks to people gathered as an act of khidma or service, just as the served elders once did to the generation that came before.
Texts recited during the rawḥa are usually “lighter” compared to those studied at the mosques during formal classes. They are usually of the majmūʿ al-kalām genre — that is, collections of discourses of famous Bā ʿAlawī saints or scholars — which contain many morally-inspiring but also entertaining and at times humorous anecdotes. Other texts recited during the rawḥa include the murāsalāt or written correspondences between Bā ʿAlawī scholars. Their recitation exemplifies the virtue of friendship and the importance of maintaining connection through elegantly-composed language. Recitation of these texts teaches people how to be a good human being not through morally-commanding discourse but through examples of lives worth emulating and living. Their recitation is usually interjected with poetry recitation, informal conversation between participating elders and laughter as elders recount their own lived experience in connection with what is being discussed in the recited texts.
While hierarchy based on age and learning structures the sitting arrangement at the zāwiyas, there are times when such arrangements momentarily dissipate, such as during musical concerts and dancing sessions. The built environment of the zāwiya, being a large open space with no chairs and with floors already covered in rugs made it an ideal place to stage a concert. Two kinds of musical performance are usually held at the zāwiyas. One is hājir marāwis which involves two kinds of drums: the bigger hājir accompanied by six to ten smaller mirwās along with a flute. The other is the more elaborate gambus featuring an oud guitar, a violin, keyboard, and tablas. During both concerts men dance in turn. The atmosphere of the zāwiya becomes fun, noisy with clapping and singing in merriment. The normal sitting arrangement is no longer observed as elders and youngsters dance in pairs and sit side by side, becoming playful with one another. Such ludic events are crucial for establishing bonds of friendship between people of different generations whose interactions are usually characterized by formality and deference. Such trans-generational bonds of friendship, in turn, facilitate ethical learning and transmission of moral teachings. Perhaps the closest term to characterize these trans-generational relationships is the avunculate. The elders act as uncles (ʿamm) to the youngsters, even in the absence of a kinship relationship. A relationship characterized by deference and joviality, the avunculate engenders a more amicable ethical learning as compared to the often sterner, father-son or teacher-pupil relationship.
While hierarchy based on age and learning structures the sitting arrangement at the zāwiyas, there are times when such arrangements momentarily dissipate, such as during musical concerts and dancing sessions.
These zāwiyas help to ensure the crystallization and maintenance of Bā ʿAlawī moral communities in Java, a region despised by their ancestors as a place of waywardness. If the German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer once identified the hotel lobby as the emblematic site of modernity, characterized by constant coming and going of strangers who momentarily share a space of transit without gelling into a genuine sociality, the zāwiyas can be characterized as sites of immobility. They facilitate relaxation, socialization, and memorialization of the ancestors, thereby engendering a trans-generational community of reading and listening as well as dancing and joking. These zāwiyas emerge as social spaces for respectable leisure and moral learning, a place where one can momentarily escape from different sites of responsibility, be they workplaces or homes. They offer alternative social venues from the morally-questionable coffee houses. At the same time, they complement the more serious mosques. While they began as diasporic spaces, they have become more inclusive, although they remain as homosocial spaces. These zāwiyas are open for communal activities even when their patrons are away. As a result, people who frequent these zāwiyas never really feel like they are guests in another person’s private space. All of these features made these zāwiyas much beloved to the people who frequent them, to the extent that one friend in Pekalongan proudly said: “I am a child of the zāwiya. I was brought up by the zāwiya.” This, and many other similar remarks I have heard, seems to suggest that the built-environment of the zāwiya is not simply an object used by tradition to realize its telos but as something that possesses agency and affective force. The very corner that is the pivot of the zāwiya structures face-to-face interaction, affording moral relations between contemporaries, while connecting them to the recounted ancestors, thereby incorporating those who are present and absent into a shared moral imaginary. For my Bā ʿAlawī friends, the term zāwiya does not only signify a place or location. More than that, it points to an enduring Islamic social assemblage, a form of life woven from the dynamic interaction between the built environment, leisure time, shared practice, and moral tradition.
[1] One may perhaps recall the concept and institution of ribāṭ which seems to be built on this very assumption. The term ribāṭ performs the function of a maṣdar of the form III of the verb rābaṭa which means staying or attachment to a place or person.