Saints and their pilgrims in Iran and neighbouring countries

Sean Kingston

2012

xiv, 169 p.

Anthropology of Persianate societies ; vol. 1

9781907774140

Contents: Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 sanctity of Karbala in Shiite thought / Khalid Sindawi -- ch. 2 Pilgrimages to the Iraqi 'Atabat from Qajar era Iran / Tomoko Morikawa -- ch. 3 Listening, non-knowledge and the auditory body Understanding Sufi zikr ritual and sama as sites of aesthetic experience / Seema Golestaneh -- ch. 4 Between history and memory A case study of a martyr mausoleum in north of Iran / Morvarid Ayaz -- ch. 5 Innovation in the tradition of saint veneration in Turkey during the twentieth century Venerating Nasreddin Hodja in Aksehir / Hakki Gurkas -- ch. 6 revival of Shia rituals in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime Permanence and evolution / Pierre-Jean Luizard.

The importance and ramifications of saints, sainthood and pilgrimage in contemporary Iran and neighbouring countries are great, yet the academic conceptualizations of them and their entailments are sorely lacking. This book places the saints and their pilgrims in sharper focus, and offers important correctives to all-too-common Western misunderstandings, the foremost of which is the erroneous portrayal of Islam as primarily a body of legal doctrine and corresponding practice, and the associated principle that we can 'know' Islam if we 'know' Islamic law. In an effort to challenge such a limited, and limiting, perspective, this volume suggests that both anthropology, insofar as it can focus on experience and practice, and history, insofar as it can encompass more than an institutional/political 'names and dates' discourse, can reveal something of the dynamism of the faith, as more than the sum of its laws. The approaches demonstrated in this book on Shiite Pilgrimage offer windows into the beliefs and lives of 'ordinary' people, past and present, and thereby bring forth agendas akin to those of 'subaltern studies'. Finally, the memorializing documented in these chapters provides evidence, past and present, of widespread desires for a more concrete, even immanent, relationship that is direct, unmediated and, at least partly, involves forms of intercession - even though such desires for immanence in the Islamic world have previously been considered as limited to devotees of the Sufi saints or the Shi'i Imams or their progeny.

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