Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
Making Concentric Circles: The Performative Aspects of Sufi Devotional Practices and Modes of Constructing a Reality
- Wahyu Widodo
- Date
- Thursday 17 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2025
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
The involvement of bodily movements has been deeply embedded in Islamic devotional practices in the Islamic world, e.g., in Devran dhikr in several Turkish Sufi paths and in the performance of ṣalawatan in several majlis dhikr in Indonesia. Furthermore, the position of the Arabic language is central to devotional performances, and it has always been accompanied by other languages (e.g., Indonesian, Turkish, and other local languages). In this lecture, I will explore a Sufi ritual involving the asking of help to God through the Wali Kutub (Ar. sing. quṭb, pl. aqṭāb; Jv. Kutub) or ‘the Poles of the Saints’. This ritual is known as the Walikutuban (see figure 1). Since 2014, this Sufi ritual has been revitalized and practiced by the members of the Nahdhatul Ulama (NU), the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia. This ritual is closely connected with conception of the Sufi saint’s hierarchy (marātib al-awliyā’ or ṭabaqat al-awliyā’) and the conceptions of sainthood and prophethood (nubuwwa) in Islamic doctrine. In this lecture, I will discuss the spatial positionality of the participants in the Walikutuban ritual, particularly the spatial arrangement of the leader and the participants, as well as their body orientations. The choreography of the ritual involves being arranged in concentric circles, where the participants encircle the leader while moving and pausing at each of the cardinal points to call upon the invisible Wali Kutub who are located in certain corner of the world. Furthermore, I will examine the sounding patterns in the ritual text that are uttered by the participants and the leader in unison when they call upon to the Wali Kutub. I conceive of the performative elements of the ritual as modes of constructing a reality. The interplay between the modes of the arrangement of the participants and the sounding of the text in the ritual construct the desired reality of the ritual’s devotees. Thus, the performative elements of this ritual help us to understand what worlds the ritual’s participants are trying to build.
About the speaker
Wahyu Widodo is lecturer at the Faculty of Cultural Sciences at Brawijaya University in Malang, Indonesia. His doctoral thesis explores the Walikutuban ritual from the philology of performance lens.
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