This study examines how wilāya as a form of religious life grounded in everyday nearness shapes authority within the Bā ʿAlawī community in contemporary Indonesia. Drawing on historical research and multi-sited ethnography in Jakarta, Java, and East Kalimantan (2022–2025), it develops a triadic framework of wilāya comprising genealogical (takwīniyya), ethical (tashrīʿiyya), and social (ijtimāʿiyya) forms of nearness. Takwīniyya links persons to the Prophet through lineage, tashrīʿiyya substantiates that nearness through ethical discipline and devotional practice, and ijtimāʿiyya stabilizes it through recognition within wider networks of trust, hospitality, and companionship.
The study argues that modern public Islam has unsettled the sequence through which these dimensions once reinforced one another. Media visibility and mass circulation now allow recognition to outpace formation. The Ahok mobilization of 2016 and the nasab controversy of 2023 made these tensions especially visible, as descent circulated as a public credential and ethical discipline became subject to public accusation rather than private correction.
Against accounts that locate Islamic authority primarily in public institutions, media platforms, or doctrinal discourse, this study shows that wilāya takes shape most forcefully within domestic and intimate settings where kinship, care, and shared life cultivate durable forms of recognition. It further recovers forms of feminine and domestic labor often obscured in public accounts of Bā ʿAlawī authority, arguing that these practices are not peripheral to wilāya but among its primary enactments.
At a moment when religious authority across the Muslim world is increasingly organized around media reach and institutional scale, this study argues that what is at risk is not merely a single tradition but the relational ground on which authority itself depends.

He is currently an independent researcher pursuing academic interests in Islamic studies. He earned his Bachelor’s degree (Sarjana Agama) from Sekolah Tinggi Agama Islam Madinatul Ilmi, Depok, Indonesia, and his Master’s degree from the Graduate Program of Universitas Indonesia. His research on Hadhrami communities has been published in UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya’s Teosofi: Jurnal Tasawuf dan Pemikiran Islam under the title “Mapping the Trajectory of Tariqa Alawiyya in the 13th–17th Century” (June 2023), and in AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies’s The Maydan under the title “Forgotten Space of Islam: Home, Care, and Sacred Nearness” (July 2025).