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Paper short abstract:

Genealogies in Islam are known as media channeling authority from one person to another across time and space. Focusing on Indian Ocean networks in Islamic Java, I discuss interactions between genealogies and other claims to authority that bypass the established infrastructure genealogies provide.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have noted that genealogies of descent and transmission or initiation play an important role in the spacio-temporal imagination of Muslims as they provide the imaginal and institutional infrastructure for linking disparate historical moments across vast geographic areas with the teachings and power of the Prophet Muhammad and his Revelation in seventh-century Arabia. Spread across the Indian Ocean world by traveling sayyids, Sufis, and scholars (Ho 2006, Alatas 2020), this genealogical infrastructure has often organized power relations by validating hierarchies among Muslims and Muslim communities (Green 2012; Birchok 2015). Yet in the Malay-Indonesian world, genealogies often coexist alongside a very different practice of connecting with the sacred history of revelation and claiming its authority: Qur’anic figures feature in narratives and appear to Southeast Asian Muslims to convey God’s knowledge and blessings (Brown 1970; Iskandar 2011), thus creating additional, narrative relays that likewise channel knowledge and blessings from the prophetic past to the present. These figures include especially Nabī Khiḍr, Moses’s mysterious companion in the Sura of the Cave, who has unique access to God’s knowledge. Frequently the teacher of Java’s kings and wali in traditional Javanese literature (Soeratno 1978; Meyer 2021), Khiḍr is known to this day to meet with select individuals (Quinn 2018). Drawing on my ethnographic field research in Yogyakarta, I ask what meaning Javanese Muslims assign to the appearance of Khiḍr, especially in relation to more institutionalized infrastructures of genealogical linkage. I argue that Khiḍr’s presence simultaneously relativizes these conventional links, underscoring divine freedom irreducible to conventional genealogies, and legitimizes them, since Khiḍr is most commonly known to appear to individuals who are already part of their reach. By thinking through these ambiguous relations, this paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of genealogy and the infrastructures of authority in the Indian Ocean world.