Listening for Belonging: Sonic Practice, Care, and Ethical Tension in a Marginalized Sufi Community

What if belonging isn't something you believe your way into — but something you hear your way into? This paper enters the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship, a transnational Sufi community largely invisible to both Islamic studies and mainstream American religion, to ask what happens when sound itself becomes the primary medium and metaphor of communal life. Drawing on years of scholar-practitioner ethnography, I analyze The Resonance of Allah, the central mystical text of the community, as a living relational ontology — one that doesn't merely sustain belonging, but continuously refines and transforms it, drawing participants into subtler and subtler frequencies of individual and collective attunement and realization. Belonging, this paper argues, is not a destination. It is a practice — fragile, charged, and demandingly transformative.