Habib Syech bin Abdul Qadir Assegaf performs sholawat (devotional songs) in rice fields, stadiums, streets, and town squares across Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Yemen, Egypt, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Ten of thousands of people convene in these spaces, constituting mass assemblages of devotional piety fifteen to twenty times every month for the last twenty years. Politicians, presidents, Islamic leaders, and a white Irish ethnographer populate the stage that sits within the riot of multicolored lights, aromas, sound waves, and environment that coalesce into experiences of Islamic devotional piety. This Islamic devotional piety, however, cannot be explained by an appeal to aliranisasi, a Middle Eastern ecumene, Sufi tropes, or Hadhrami lineages. The presence of political and religious elites at these events, furthermore, is of little significance to many who come to these events. All of these elements play a role in the formation of these ephemeral assemblages of Islamic devotional piety, but they do not explain the persistence and durability of these events. The entanglements of multiple Islamic sensibilities, socio-economic backgrounds, ages, and ethnicities across Indonesia and the wider world demand a different conceptual framing. In this paper, I will argue that baraka (blessings) is one of the driving mechanisms behind these majelis (assemblages). I develop an ontology of baraka and reflect on the importance of both understanding this rough ground of entangled relations and of taking different Indonesian Islamic ontologies seriously.
