The Revival of Sufism in Post-unification Yemen In what follows, I will describe several developments in both Indonesia and Yemen that led to the recent rise and popularity of Indonesian pilgrimage to Hadramawt. More recently, pilgrims from the United States, Australia, and Western Europe have begun to visit Hadramawt, albeit in much smaller numbers. In recent years, Hadramawt has become a rising pilgrimage destination not only for Indonesian Muslims, but also for other Muslims from regions where the Ba Alawi had played an important role in the transmission of Islamic knowledge, including substantial parts of Southeast Asia, the western coast of India, East Africa, and the Gulf. This framing allowed the repositioning of Hadramawt from being “a pure point of sayyidly origin to a diverse one of many families with different histories and other beginnings.” It opens up Hadramawt as a meaningful travel destination to those without blood relation, incorporating them into “a shared horizon of territory and time.” Ba Alawi scholars, however, have also produced textual representations that frame such return journeys as a pilgrimage (ziyara). For the Ba Alawi living abroad, travel to Hadramawt constitutes a diasporic return. Central to this tariqa is the veneration of the Ba Alawi pious ancestors. The Ba Alawi, a group of Hadramis acknowledged as the direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (sayyid/sada), had long migrated to various places around the Indian Ocean where they disseminated their own Sufi tradition, the tariqa alawiyya. Pilgrimage to Hadramawt mainly revolves around the tombs of Ba Alawi saints and scholars scattered around the valley. Unlike these destinations, Hadramawt had never enticed Indonesian Muslims in spite of the considerable influence of Hadrami scholars (ulama) in Indonesia. In the early twentieth century, Cairo emerged as another destination for pious visitation, primarily for those continuing their education at the prestigious Islamic university of Al-Azhar, founded in the tenth century. Many pilgrims from the Indonesian archipelago have traditionally prolonged their stay in the two holy cities to acquire knowledge from eminent scholars in residence. Muslims with physical and financial means are obliged to embark on the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina at least once in their lifetime. Despite the considerable presence of the Hadrami diaspora in Indonesia, the idea of a pilgrimage to Hadramawt did not really exist among Indonesian Muslims of non-Hadrami descent until rather recently.
The past decade has witnessed a steady increase in the numbers of Indonesians embarking on pilgrimage ( ziy ara) to the Hadramawt valley of the former South Yemen.
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