Thirteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The Ba’alawi, descendants of Prophet Muhammad through his daughter and son-in-law, have secured a comfortable position as religious leaders in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia or the Malay world. They are purported to have brought their brand of Sufi Islam known as the Tariqah Alawiyya (Alawiyya Sufi path) successfully through trade and intermarriages with local sultans even prior to Western colonization. This has resulted in much of the Malay world espousing Sunni-Sufi Islam as reflected in the Ba’alawi diasporic homeland of Hadramaut, Yemen. Much sociological and historical studies have thus discussed the Ba’alawi through their roles as adherents of a Sunni-Sufi tradition who have successfully carved a name for themselves in the social, political and religious realms of power with the most popular having supporters that number millions. However, while some of the leaders have participated in establishing a definition of Islam in the Malay world as Sunni-Sufi, other members of the Ba’alawi have embraced other forms of Islam such as Shiism and Salafism. As such, the Ba’alawi are involved in creating a competitive Islamic marketplace in the Malay world in which different forms of Islam try to gain adherents through claiming legitimacy whilst delegitimizing the other. Through in-depth, unstructured interviews with 40 Shiite, Salafi and Sufi Ba’alawi leaders from the Malay world I argue that Ba’alawi Shiites, Salafis and Sufis tap into each others’ embodied, national, institutional, textual and histórico-narrative legacies in order to portray their form of Islam as the most legitimate whilst rendering the other not legitimate.