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Paper short abstract

This paper examines digital pilgrimage among the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan. It traces how the ritual of zikr (remembrance) circulates through digital infrastructures to reconfigure ritual movement, territorial attachment, and political orientation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines pilgrimage as a site of cosmopolitical action by tracing how the ritual of zikr (remembrance) circulates through digital infrastructures among the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan. Rather than treating pilgrimage as movement toward a fixed sacred destination, it conceptualizes digital pilgrimage as a distributed process in which breath, sound, technical systems, and sacred presences jointly produce mobility, territorial attachment, and distinct political orientations.

The paper follows how zikr, traditionally performed by physically congregating at sacred shrines, is increasingly performed virtually on platforms such as Zoom. Drawing on Islamic ontologies of presence and anthropological work on cosmopolitics and digital religion, I show how this expansion of sacred mobility generates new anxieties about place and presence. While in Sufi thought, divine proximity is affirmed as universally accessible, a claim reinforced by Zoom-mediated zikr that can be performed from anywhere, certain shrines, cities, and national spaces nevertheless come to be experienced as ethically denser and more secure for devotional life because digitally mediated presence renders the sacred addressable and locatable rather than purely atmospheric. I argue that this shift gives Sufi devotional life a distinctly nationalist inflection that classical Sufi thought did not foreground.

By theorizing digital pilgrimage among the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order as a cosmopolitical process shaped by digital infrastructures and nonhuman mediators, the paper shows how pilgrimage is reconfigured in ways that sustain political boundaries and territorial attachments rather than dissolving them in a polarized world.