Zainab’s Traffic

Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders

Emrah Yildiz

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780520379824
• eBook ISBN: 9780520976948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the value—religious, political, economic, or altogether social—of getting on a bus in Tehran to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus? Under what material conditions can such values be established, reassessed, or transgressed, and by whom? Zainab’s Traffic provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded—and spatially generative—encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims women’s desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors’ experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab—emerging out of a self-described “poverty of mobility”—demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual. Rather than thinking of ritual as a scripturally canonized manual for pious self-cultivation, Zainab’s Traffic approaches ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Introduction
• [Of Ways and Traffic: Matriarchs of a Prophetic Patriliny]
• 1. Zainab’s Traffic: Spatial Lives of an Islamic Ritual across Southwest Asia
• [Parastoo’s Pathways and Observant Participation]
• 2. Crafting Patronage: Genealogy as Traffic across Generations
• [Banu’s Pathways and Familial (De)Attachments]
• 3. Arrested Mobilities and Fugitive Markets beneath a Fig Tree
• [Muhsin’s Pathways, or Mitigating Sanctions with Tobacco Seats]
• 4. Bordering Ziyarat: Kaçak Coordinates of Territory
• [Karam and Sahand’s Pathways, and a Khayyam Quatrain on Breath]
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index