ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the historical emergence of Ḥaḍramī shrines in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on Java. It examines how these sites came to be recognized as important nodes in a transoceanic sacred geography that connects Southeast Asia to South Arabia and beyond. While Southeast Asia may seem peripheral from the point of view of the Islamic heartlands, for Ḥaḍramī Sufi-scholars and their followers residing in the Ḥaḍramawt, the Hejaz, East Africa, and elsewhere, the region is by no means peripheral. For these actors, Southeast Asia is perceived as a spiritually significant region where Ḥaḍramī saints once lived and their traces remain, thereby turning it into an important pilgrimage destination. The transfiguration of Southeast Asia as a spiritually significant region for Ḥaḍramī Sufi-scholars is a historical achievement, an outcome of slow but steady socio-discursive processes involving actors of different generations from across the Indian Ocean. This chapter traces such processes by following the itineraries of Ḥaḍramī Sufi-scholars. In doing so it uncovers an alternative Islamic imaginative geography that centrally features Southeast Asia and cannot be easily fitted into the established center–periphery model.
