In Pejaten, a neighborhood of South Jakarta, tucked behind alleyways that blur the lines between domestic and communal life, a man named Abeb begins his day not with speech, but with presence. He opens the windows to let in the call to prayer, lights the stove with one hand while fingering his misbaha with the other, and gently rouses his children, by rubbing their backs and humming the litanies of his forefathers. He speaks little, but in that silence lives an entire world of Islam: warm food laid out before the hungry, old qasā’id sung softly while mending clothes, the steady rhythm of prayer timed not by clocks but by stars. To those around him, he is not a preacher, not an ustadz, not even a known public figure. But he is the one everyone calls when a child is sick, when someone dies, when a marriage is near. In his home, Islam is not merely taught. It is breathed.
Figure 1. A typical meal served at Abeb’s house. The act of feeding guests, often with lamb biryani, homemade side dishes, and sambal, forms a sacred rhythm of presence, repeating the ethics of care and proximity foundational to wilāya. | Source: Private family archive. Used with permission.
In contrast to the kinetic outreach of public preachers and the contemplative embeddedness of more institutionalized Bā ʿAlawī enclaves, Abeb—whose full name is Ḥusayn Idrūs b. Hood al-ʿAydarūs (b. 1966)—embodies a distinct modality of Bā ʿAlawī life: one grounded in everyday rhythm, domestic gestures, and spiritual attunement. A descendant of two of Jakarta’s most prominent families—the al-ʿAydarūs paternally and the al-ʿAṭṭās maternally—he stands at the genealogical center of Hadhrami society in the capital. Born amid the upheavals of the Islamic world—Tehran, Kabul, Cairo, and Jakarta, all reverberating with revolutionary and Islamist ferment—Abeb came of age as Suharto’s secular developmentalism faced growing religious unrest.
In contrast to the kinetic outreach of public preachers and the contemplative embeddedness of more institutionalized Bā ʿAlawī enclaves, Abeb—whose full name is Ḥusayn Idrūs b. Hood al-ʿAydarūs (b. 1966)—embodies a distinct modality of Bā ʿAlawī life: one grounded in everyday rhythm, domestic gestures, and spiritual attunement.
Out of this ferment, Majlis al-Ḥusainī emerged in early 1980s Tanah Abang as a space of spiritual experimentation and intergenerational tension among Bā ʿAlawī youth. From it arose two sensibilities: one embodied by Rizieq Shihab (b. 1965), whose genealogical pride merged with populist militancy; the other by Abeb, whose presence anchored an ethic of nearness and habitual care. He never positioned himself as a leader, but his gestures and constancy quietly shaped the majlis from within—offering a different grammar of religious presence amid Jakarta’s shifting terrain.
Having moved from his ancestral neighborhood of Tanah Abang to various rented homes across Jakarta—including his current residence in Pejaten—Abeb inhabits a spatial and social liminality that reflects the broader dislocation of urban religious life. Yet it is precisely within this flux that his informal majlis has endured for over four decades, quietly shaping a model of wilāya as embodied presence—where sacred authority is sustained not by visibility or speech, but by the constancy of care and repetition.
Figure 2: Abeb (center, standing) with companions during a private gathering in South Jakarta, c. 2023. Such intimate settings reflect the quiet rhythms of wilāya—ethics passed not through sermons but through companionship, service, and presence. | Source: Private family archive. Used with permission.
His majlis bears no signage, institutional structure, or formal leadership. Instead, it unfolds through acts of daily hospitality: meals prepared for friends, neighbors, and visiting religious figures. These include notable names such as Jefry Buchori, Arifin Ilham, Emha Ainun Najib, and Buya Arrazi. Each gesture—choosing meat, seasoning dishes by memory, reciting Fātiḥa before cooking—enacts a form of ethical care that embodies wilāya as lived continuity. These are not spectacles of charity but quiet devotions, grounded in the belief that baraka resides in the labor of nearness. Authority here is not discursive but sedimented—tactile, quiet, and enduring.
Figure 3: Abeb (second from the left) pictured with friends and religious figures at the residence of Habib Rizieq in Petamburan, Jakarta. The photo captures the enduring ties between intimate religious actors and public Islamists, even as their trajectories diverge.
While the intention of this paper is not to exhaust the full explanatory scope of wilāya—a concept whose semantic registers permeate the Qurʾān, the Prophetic tradition, and centuries of Islamic thought—its centrality to this study necessitates a succinct yet meaningful engagement. A comprehensive treatment of wilāya would be an immense undertaking, not least because it appears in over 200 Qurʾānic verses and has preoccupied a wide range of classical scholars, from Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq [1] and al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī[2] to Ibn Taymiyya.[3] More recently, scholars such as Henry Corbin,[4] Vincent Cornell,[5] Wilson Chacko Jacob,[6] Mohammad Amir-Moezzi,[7] Maria Dakake,[8] Hamid Mavani,[9] and Abbas Barzegar[10] have interrogated its dimensions, linking wilāya to charisma, sainthood, communal authority, protection, sovereignty, and aesthetics. Building on these works, this study foregrounds wilāya as the spiritual substratum undergirding Islamic moral formation and social intimacy—a framework through which proximity, care, and ethical transmission unfold. This discussion directly follows the lived lifeworlds of the Bā ʿAlawī community in Indonesia, where wilāya takes form not as theological abstraction but as lived nearness—quietly sustained through mundane gestures. It is this ontological and relational grounding that marks wilāya apart from the more legalistic and instrumental logic of siyāsa.
As Ibn ʿArabī describes it, wilāya is “the station of those who remain with God after the passing of prophecy,” a station of divine intimacy and ontological continuity.[11] Wilāya, in this sense, is an orientation—a spiritual affinity with the Divine Names that shape existence. It is both vertical (wilāya takwīniyya) and horizontal (wilāya tashrīʿiyya): the former rooted in the Muhammadan Light, the latter expressed through embodied ethics—especially within the family and home, which serve not only as instructive models but also as constitutive pathways of saintly formation across generations.
Figure 4: Working Theory of Wilāya—From Ontology to Social Manifestation. This diagram outlines how the ontological principle of wilāya, centered on the Ahl al-Bayt, unfolds into normative ethics and culminates in lived, social assemblages.
It is no accident that the Qur’an places the Ahl al-Bayt (the Prophet’s Household) at the center of Muslim ethical imagination. The verse of purification (Q. 33:33) does not merely assign status—it evokes a cosmology. To be pure and purified is to be embedded in kinship, in care, in familial rhythms. The Prophet’s household was not an abstraction but a site of moral cultivation—where mercy, generosity, and humility were practiced, not preached. The household is thus not simply the metaphor of Islam’s ethical core—it is its locus.
To be pure and purified is to be embedded in kinship, in care, in familial rhythms.
Anthropologically, the Qurʾanic emphasis on love for the Qurba (Q. 42:23) suggests that what matters most in the divine economy is also what matters most in human life: nearness. The structure of kinship—its cares, obligations, and intimacies—is the ground where ethical life takes root. Islam does not merely acknowledge this—it sacralizes it. By rooting moral life in the proximate, Islam teaches that what is present and near carries ontological weight. And that is wilāya: the sanctity of nearness.
This is also why—even though God is the Omnipresent—He nonetheless has a House. In Islam, sacred geography is never abstract; it is shaped by proximity, ritual, and relational presence. Through His Friends, His servants, and His House, the divine becomes intimate. Wilāya is the axis that binds metaphysics with kinship, anchoring revelation to the fabric of human lives—not through abstraction but through nearness. It reminds us that even the Transcendent insists on the nearness of place, and that moral formation cannot be divorced from home, care, and presence.
Through wilāya, especially in the Bā ʿAlawī ṭarīqa, this ethical pulse was preserved intergenerationally—not through seminaries or mass media, but through maternal discipline, culinary repetition, and silent gestures. These became forms of memory and transmission far more durable than curriculum or decree.
Yet in modern urban life, such relational rhythms face erosion. The spatial transformation of Jakarta is both instructive and constitutive. As Christopher Silver[12] observed, few cities have experienced such rapid change as Jakarta. Tanah Abang, at the center of Jakarta, once home to dense multigenerational Bā ʿAlawī households, has been rezoned into commercial districts. Kin-based networks have fragmented, and with them, the domestic scaffolding that supported wilāya.
Sociologist Gavin W. Jones[13] and Abidin Kusno[14] have shown how urban precarity disrupts not only households but religious transmission itself. In a world of vertical housing, digital alerts, and algorithmic religiosity, Islam increasingly circulates as image and commodity. Livestreamed rituals replace embodied gathering. The result is a disembedded Islam—visually available but ethically untethered. Walter Benjamin warned that mass reproduction severs the aura of presence. The same holds true here: Islam is consumed, not lived.
These spatial and social dislocations do not merely fragment domestic life; they corrode the very conditions in which wilāya once thrived. What emerges in its absence is a form of Islam increasingly defined by public visibility rather than private virtue. This disconnection is especially visible in the rise of what might be called ‘performative piety’—an Islam of gestures and proclamations, often severed from the ethics of care that once grounded it in everyday life.
A growing body of scholarship has examined how post-Reformasi Indonesia has seen an intensification of Islamic revivalism, charismatic preaching, commodified piety, and emergent majlis cultures. Scholars such as Robert W. Hefner,[15] Mona Abaza,[16] Julia Day Howell,[17] Jajang Jahroni,[18] Chaider Bamualim,[19] Syamsul Rijal,[20] Mark Woodward et al.,[21] and Arif Zamhari[22] have traced how this landscape often privileges the performative over the formative dimensions of Islam. Politicians publicly invoke the Prophet’s name while neglecting his ethics of proximity. Piety becomes spectacle—stripped of wilāya. Presence is replaced by volume.
This theatrical religiosity coincides with a broader ethical deficit in the public sphere. Despite the increasing visibility of Islamic symbols and rhetoric, Indonesia’s position on Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index [23] remains troubling—scoring only 34 out of 100 and ranking 115th out of 180 countries. Such figures suggest that the flourishing of public Islam has not translated into greater moral integrity or social trust. Institutions proliferate, but authority decays. What remains is form without substance—siyāsa without wilāya.
Here, Hayrettin Yücesoy’s work [24] offers an instructive contrast. He distinguishes between the imāma discourse—rooted in divine authority—and siyāsa—the realm of governance and pragmatism. His analysis shows how caliphal legitimacy was gradually stripped of its sacred dimension and reconstituted through administrative rationality and rhetorical performance. In doing so, Yücesoy compellingly reframes early Islamic political history as a shift toward secularized statecraft. But what his framework underemphasizes is the deeper substratum of wilāya, from which legitimate imāma must emerge. For, not all awliyāʾ are imāms, but all true imāms are awliyāʾ. Wilāya, hence, is not peripheral to politics; it is its ethical root. Without it, siyāsa becomes machinery without soul.
Wilāya is not peripheral to politics; it is its ethical root.
To remember wilāya is not to romanticize domestic piety. It is to recognize that Islam without wilāya risks becoming disembodied—sound without soul, form without force. In an era of techno-piety and neoliberal Islam, where faith is increasingly platformed and privatized, wilāya returns us to the ground: to the kitchen, the sickbed, the silent prayer before a meal.
And perhaps, if we listen closely, we may still glimpse it in a tune hummed while folding laundry, a whispered bismillah at the market, a gentle hand on a child’s back at dawn. That is wilāya. And that, too, is Islam.
Musa Alkadzim is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII). His research explores the ethics and metaphysics of wilāya among Bā ʿAlawī communities across Indonesia, focusing on the intersections of kinship, authority, and domestic religiosity.
Endnotes
- Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. (1983).Miṣbāḥ al-Sharīʿa (2nd ed.). Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlā lil-Maṭbūʿāt. English translation: Haeri, F. (2000). Lantern of the Path. Qom: Ansariyan Publications.
- Al-Tirmidhī, al-Ḥakīm. (1996).The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism: Two Works by al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (Trans. B. Radtke & J. O’Kane). Richmond: Curzon Press.
- Ibn Taymiyya. (2019).Al-Furqān bayna awliyāʾ al-Raḥmān wa-awliyāʾ al-Shayṭān.
- Corbin, H. (1993).History of Islamic Philosophy (Trans. L. Sherrard & P. Sherrard). London: Kegan Paul International in association with Islamic Publications.
- Cornell, V. J. (1998).Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- Jacob, W. C. (2019).For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Amir-Moezzi, M. A. (1994).The Divine Guide in Early Shi‘ism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam. Albany: SUNY Press.
- Dakake, M. M. (2007).The Charismatic Community: Shi’ite Identity in Early Islam. Albany: SUNY Press.
- Mavani, H. (2013).Religious Authority and Political Thought in Twelver Shi’ism: From Ali to Post-Khomeini. London: Routledge.
- Barzegar, A. (2014). Charisma and community in the aesthetics of political Islam.Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 97(3), 340–348.
- Chittick, W. (1998).The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Cosmology. Albany: SUNY Press, p. 397.
- Silver, C. (2007).Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge.
- Jones, G. W. (2016). Demographic transformations in Indonesia. In Guilmoto, C. Z., & Jones, G. W. (Eds.),Contemporary Demographic Transformations in China, India and Indonesia. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
- Kusno, A. (2013).After the New Order: Space, Politics and Jakarta. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. See, Introduction.
- Hefner, R. W. (2000).Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Abaza, M. (2004). Markets of faith: Jakartan da’wa and Islamic gentrification.Archipel, 67, 173–202.
- Howell, J. D. (2001). Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic revival.Journal of Asian Studies, 60(3), 701–729.
- Jahroni, J. (2004). Defending the majesty of Islam: Indonesia’s Front Pembela Islam (FPI), 1998–2003.Studia Islamika, 11(2).
- Bamualim, C. S. (2011). Islamic militancy and resentment against Hadhramis in post-Suharto Indonesia.Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 31(2), 267–281.
- Rijal, S. (2020). Performing Arab saints and marketing the Prophet.Archipel, 189–213.
- Woodward, M., Rohmaniyah, I., Amin, A., Maarif, S., Coleman, D., Arif, & Sani, U. M. (2012). Ordering what is right, forbidding what is wrong: Two faces of Hadhrami daʿwa in contemporary Indonesia.RIMA, 46(2).
- Zamhari, A., & Howell, J. D. (2012). Taking Sufism to the streets.RIMA, 46(2), 47–75.
- Transparency International. (2023). Corruption Perceptions Index.
- Yücesoy, H. (2024).Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought. Columbia University Press.