Between kinship and public Islam : Wilāya and the Bā 'Alawī religious life in Indonesia

Abstract

This study examines how wilāya as a form of religious life grounded in everyday nearness shapes authority within the Bā 'Alawī community in contemporary Indonesia. Drawing on historical research and multi-sited ethnography in Jakarta, Java, and East Kalimantan (2022–2025), it develops a triadic framework of wilāya comprising genealogical (takwīniyya), ethical (tashrī'iyya), and social (ijtimā'iyya) forms of nearness. Takwīniyya links persons to the Prophet through lineage, tashrī'iyya substantiates that nearness through ethical discipline and devotional practice, and ijtimā'iyya stabilizes it through recognition within wider networks of trust, hospitality, and companionship. Modern public Islam has unsettled the sequence through which these three dimensions once reinforced one another. Media visibility and mass circulation now allow recognition to outpace formation. The Ahok mobilization of 2016 and the nasab controversy of 2023 made these tensions especially visible, as descent circulated as a credential and discipline became subject to public accusation rather than private correction. Against accounts that locate Islamic authority primarily in public institutions, media platforms, or doctrinal discourse, this study shows that wilāya takes shape most forcefully within domestic and intimate settings where kinship, care, and shared life cultivate durable forms of recognition. It further recovers forms of feminine and domestic labor often obscured in public accounts of Bā 'Alawī authority, arguing that these practices are not peripheral to wilāya but among its primary enactments. At a moment when religious authority across the Muslim world is increasingly organized around media reach and institutional scale, this study argues that what is at risk is not merely a single tradition but the relational ground on which authority itself depends.