Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala: Religion That Matters

Volume Editors: Fouad Gehad Marei, Yafa Shanneik, and Christian Funke

Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East (Vol. 179)

Publisher: Brill

Publication Date: May 23, 2024

Pages: 424

ISBN: 9789004691339

This book examines material and multi-sensorial expressions of Shiʿi Islam in diverse, and understudied demographic and geographic contexts. It engages with conceptual debates and makes several propositions that push the frontiers of scholarship on Islamic and Religious Studies, Material Religion, Heritage Studies, and Anthropology and Sociology of Religion. The contributions presented in this volume demonstrate how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as links and gateways to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The volume posits that materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious–in this case, Shiʿi–heritage.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala, by Fouad Gehad Marei and Yafa Shanneik
• Part 1: The Visuality and Aurality of Shiʿi Materiality
  • Ch 1. The Literal and the Hidden:
    Some Bektashi Religious Materialities, by Sara Kuehn
  • Ch 2. Mediated Devotion
    Sound and Media in Transnational Azeri-Turkish Twelver Shiʿism, by Stefan Williamson Fa
  • Ch 3. Sonic Messages
    Hizbullah’s Mawlid an-Nabi Celebrations in Lebanon, by Ines Weinrich
  • Ch 4. Materializing Cultural Memory
    From Wartime Eulogies to Panegyric Pop in Contemporary Iran, by Maryam Aras
• Part 2: Gendered Perspectives on Shiʿi Materiality
  • Ch 5. Affective Consanguinity
    Blood, Mothers and Martyrs on the Battlefields of theIran-Iraq War, by Sana Chavoshian
  • Ch 6. Zur-khane
    A Material Approach to the Embodiment of Twelver Shiʿi Male Virtue Ethics, by Ingvild Flaskerud
  • Ch 7. Khidma: In the Service of Ahl al-Bayt
    Gender, Agency and Social Capital in Shiʿi Religious Statue Art in Kuwait, by Nada Al-Hudaid
  • Ch 8. A Price for a Wife or a Token of Love?
    Negotiating the Materiality of Mahr in Diasporic Shiʿi Marriage, by Marianne Hafnor Bøe
• Part 3: Sacred Objects and the Materiality of Shiʿi Life-Worlds
  • Ch 9. Turbat al-Husayn
    Development of a Tabarruk Ritual in Early Shiʿi Community, by S. M. Hadi Gerami and Ali Imran Syed
  • Ch 10. The Place of Material Objects in the Alawi Ziyāra
    by Amelia Gallagher
  • Ch 11. Festive Illumination, Prayers, and Grave Visitation
    Jashn-i Nisf Shaʿban in Kashmir, by Hakim Sameer Hamdani
  • Ch 12. Wishing Trees and Whirling Rocks
    Eco-material Rituals at the Alevi Shrine of Abdal Musa, by Christiane Gruber

About the Editors

• Fouad Gehad Marei is a Research Fellow at Lund University in Sweden. He is specialized in Middle East politics, Muslim societies and cultures, Material Religion, Digital Religion, and conflict stabilization and transformation. He has published in the journals of Religion and Society, Political Geography, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and Leadership and Developing Societies.
• Yafa Shanneik is Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at Lund University in Sweden. Her book The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics among Shi‘i Women in the Middle East and Beyond was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
• Christian Funke is an independent scholar of religious studies, with a focus on Iran and Islamic societies. His research spans Ritual Studies, Material Religion, and Islam and politics in contemporary societies.

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Source: Brill