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This article is based on fieldwork in Jakarta and Solo, Central Java in the summer of 2009, funded by the International Institute Individual Fellowship at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank all of my interlocutors, as well as colleagues who have provided me with generous and critical feedback, including Paul C. Johnson, Stuart Kirsch, Webb Keane, Michael Feener, Engseng Ho, Christina Zafeiridou, Daniel Birchok, Anand Taneja, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers. I am also grateful for the comments I have received from the organizers and participants of the Anthro-History Seminar at the University of Michigan (Fall 2009), the Arabia-Asia Relations conference held under the auspices of the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Chair in Arabia-Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, Singapore (June 2014), and the workshop on transnational and local networks of pilgrimage at Vanderbilt University (March 2015). Last but not least, I am indebted to David Akin for helping me improve the clarity and quality of this article.
And proclaim the hajj among people: they will come to thee on foot and (mounted) on every kind of camel, lean on account of journeys through deep and distant mountain highways.
------The Holy Qur,an, 22: 27
The last decade has witnessed a steady increase in the number of Indonesians embarking on pilgrimage (ziyara) to visit the tombs of Muslim saints and scholars scattered around the Hadramawt valley of the former South Yemen. Despite the considerable presence of the Hadrami diaspora in Indonesia, the idea of a pilgrimage to Hadramawt did not really exist among Indonesian Muslims of non-Hadrami descent until rather recently. Muslims with physical and financial means are obliged to embark on the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, at least once in their lifetime. Many pilgrims from the Indonesian Archipelago have traditionally prolonged their stay in the two holy cities to acquire knowledge from eminent scholars in residence (Azra 2004; Laffan 2003; Taglicozzo 2013). In the early twentieth century, Cairo emerged as another destination for pious visitation, primarily for those continuing their education at the prestigious Islamic university of Al-Azhar, founded in the tenth century (Abaza 2003; Laffan 2004; Roff 1970). Unlike these destinations, Hadramawt had never enticed Indonesian Muslims despite the considerable influence of Hadrami scholars (