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.
Emrah Yıldız is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University.
"Zainab's Traffic is an exceptionally creative and multifaceted ethnography of a critical Muslim pilgrimage route across multiple nations and territories in southwest Asia. Emrah Yıldız brilliantly shows how people navigate movement and trade in this unusually complicated context while simultaneously teaching readers about Shi'ism, the region, political economy, trafficking, ritual, and a variety of commodities."—Lara Deeb, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology and Program in Middle East and North African Studies, Scripps College
"Carefully researched and elegantly written, this work is the first and only book in English on the significance of the current Iranian Shi'i pilgrimage across Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The ethnographic account is written in such a way that you not only read about the pilgrimage but also travel with the pilgrims. Zainab's Traffic is a pleasure to read."—Minoo Moallem, author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister
"A remarkably innovative and fascinating ethnographic account of a modern pilgrimage that is filled with memorable individuals, important theoretical insights, and more than a few surprises along the way. Highly recommended!"—Dwight F. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of Arabic Languages and Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture
212 pp.6 x 9Illus: 14 b/w illustrations; 5 maps
9780520379831$29.95|£25.00Paper
May 2024