Ziyara

Healing, in conjunction with dream and vision requests at sacred sites, is a well-documented phenomenon in Turkey and the Middle East, and plays a major role in local Muslim traditions. This article presents an ethnographic account of dreaming and healing traditions, focusing on the worship of Hızır and Şeyh Yusuf el-Hekim commonly practised at pilgrimage sites in Hatay, Turkey. It demonstrates how Muslims and Christians visit these pilgrimage sites for the purpose of both vows and dream-quests. I argue that visits to local pilgrimage sites – including dreaming and healing as key elements of these visits – lead to a virtual encounter with the saint and a ritual transformation of agency for the worshipper. In reference to the work of Bakhtin, I utilize the concept of the chronotope to analyze oral traditions about Muslim saints and the interrelatedness between temporal and spatial dimensions of visits to these pilgrimage sites. I link this approach with Kapferer’s concept of virtuality so as to account for the personal testimonies of those who visited these sites and experienced virtual encounters with Muslim saints through dreaming and healing. In conclusion, I present details from one of my own experiences at a site and discuss how this changed my relationships with my interlocutors.

This chapter investigates Islamic pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the network of Islamic holy sites in the city during the Mamlūk period. Using the Faḍā’il al-Quds pilgrimage guides on Jerusalem dating from the Mamlūk period, the study will first enumerate the holy sites visited by Muslim pilgrims on the Ḥaram al-Sharif complex. Second, the study will delineate the Islamic holy sites existing outside the Ḥaram and in and around the city. Third, the intensive building of Islamic religious institutions undertaken by Mamlūk authorities in Jerusalem will be examined to reveal how the sacred sphere further extended beyond the Haram complex and into the city and its environs, thus blurring the liminal spaces separating the sacred from the urban. Finally, the study will demonstrate how this phenomenon of blurred liminal spaces in Mamlūk Jerusalem also existed in another important Islamic holy city – Mecca. Research will demonstrate how medieval Mecca’s holy sites were also not restricted to al-Masjid al-Ḥarām complex and its Ka‘ba, but, rather, numerous secondary holy sites were scattered throughout Mecca city and its surrounding mountains, resulting in the blurring of liminal spaces in Mecca as well. This chapter will thus attempt to show how, just like in medieval Mecca, the sacred in Mamlūk Jerusalem transcended beyond the Ḥaram al-Sharīf complex, and that the presence of Islamic holy sites and religious buildings both inside and outside the Ḥaram rendered the boundaries delimiting the sacred from the urban more fluent. The city of Jerusalem, it will be argued, thus became one wider liminal space during the Mamlūk period.

Pilgrimage plays an important role in many religious traditions. Indeed, one of the five pillars of Islam is the Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim is expected to perform at least once in their life. But this isn’t the only ritual of its kind present in Islam. Indeed, a common practice in Sufism is the Ziyara – a pilgrimage or visit to a saint or the tomb of a saint. This study aims to give a comprehensive overview of one of these pilgrimages – the Ziyara Bogal of the Tijaniyya Sufi order. Through observational methods and interviews, the present thesis will look at strategies of ritualization and charismatic authority, as well as the political implications of the pilgrimage in West African society. Extensive fieldwork was conducted in Senegal, The Gambia and in the diasporic community in Sweden both during the pilgrimage itself and several months before and after, and theories relating to the main themes (ritualization, charismatic authority) is used to analyze the material. As such, the study will map out multiple significant aspects of the ziyara and give an insight into how Islam is lived and practiced in the region.

This chapter considers the significance of journeys and the forms of veneration to Muslim sacred sites in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. We specifically focus on the sites that have been elevated in various degrees to the status of “national sites”, and fallen into an embrace with the realm of post-war Muslim identity politics in the past two decades. Yet we attend to these changes with caution. We argue that despite the ongoing process of "nationalisation" of these sites in the public discourses — the process that is also often taken as a proxy and starting point in the scholarship — more attention needs to be paid to the complex affective and historical intertwinements of Bosnian Muslims with the sites. Throughout the chapter, we argue that a more nuanced ethnographic attention needs to be paid to the rich Bosnian Muslims’ conceptualisation and practices associated with both journeys and the forms of veneration to Muslim sacred sites to fully appreciate the complex engagement with these sites.

This article enhances the understanding of consumption practices, particularly gift giving, within the
context of an Islamic pilgrimage called the ziyara. Pilgrimages are rich sites of analysis of entangled
secular and sacred consumption. The findings of ethnographic research undertaken in this area have
made a significant contribution to the literature on gift giving. Three particular types of gifts have been
identified (1) ordinary liturgical gifts, (2) supplication gifts that invite ‘prayer’ counter-gifts and (3)
soteriological gifts in the form of hassanat that are given to ensure other-worldly salvation. Pilgrims
see the purchasing and consumption of gifts as activities intrinsic to their pilgrimage, even as sine qua
non in the case of gifts distributed in the shrines. The consumption of material objects appears to be
integral to pilgrimage rituals and transforms the intangible spiritual experience of the pilgrims into
something ‘palpable’. The gifts are intended to embody the sacredness of the sites visited by the
pilgrims and allow family and friends to partake in their sacred experience.

האם ההלכה המוסלמית מתירה למוסלמים שאינם פלסטינים לבקר במסגד
אל–אקצא כשהוא נתון תחת שלטון ישראלי? בשנים האחרונות גבר העיסוק
בשאלה עקרונית זו בקרב פוסקי הלכה, פוליטיקאים, וגם בקרב בעלי דעה
בקרב הציבור הרחב בעולם הערבי, בעקבות קריאתו הנועזת של מחמוד
עבאס בשנת 2012 לכל ערבי ומוסלמי להגיע ולקיים את מצוות ה'זיארה'
בירושלים. מאמר זה מציג את הדיון שהתפתח סביב סוגיה זו, ממפה את
הצדדים השונים בו ועומד על מורכבותו. שאלת הביקור בירושלים, טוען
המאמר, חושפת פערים תפיסתיים עמוקים המפלגים את העולם הערבי
והמוסלמי. ראשית, בשימוש הרטורי במושגים דת ופוליטיקה: בעוד
שהמצדדים בביקור בירושלים תחת שלטון ישראלי מגייסים נימוקים דתיים
לתמיכת המטרות הפוליטיות הפלסטיניות אך מפרידים עקרונית בין דת
ופוליטיקה, השוללים את הביקור ממזגים בטענתם את הדת והפוליטיקה
כמערכת עקרונות אחת ברוח תנועות האסלאם הפוליטי. ושנית, במשמעות
המוענקת ל'נורמליזציה' עם מדינת ישראל: המצדדים בביקור בירושלים
רואים בהתנגדות לנורמליזציה עיקרון גמיש ופרגמטי, ואילו השוללים
רואים ב'נורמליזציה' עקרון קפוא, סביבו אין מקום לפרשנות.

The text under study is a ḥadīth (Chapter 79, Ḥadīth 2) from Ibn Qūlawayh’s (d. 979/80) manual titled Kāmil al-Ziyārāt (The Perfection of the Visitations).

The ḥadīth is attributed to the sixth Shiʿi Imam, Ja’far al-Ṣādiq (d. 765) who instructs his companions on how to perform the ziyāra to third Shiʿi Imam, Ḥusayn b. ʿAli in Karbala, Iraq, the site of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom and burial. The memory of Ḥusayn and his martyrdom was (and continues to be) extremely significant for the Shiʿa as a center point for constructing the community’s collective memory.

I posit that the ḥadīth, in its ritual context, enacts the Imāmī trope of walāya (loosely defined here as the divine authority of the Imams) both for the ritual subject and the (spiritual) Other. This argument anchors itself in a critique of speech-act theory by engaging with the poetic performativity of the text rather than focusing on isolated lexical content. My analysis draws on Stasch’s work on ritual as poetically dense figuration of macrocosmic order in the microcosmic action of the ‘here-and-now’. I thus seek to demonstrate how the poetics of the text fashion the ziyāra ritual as a metapragmatic icon of walāya, which appears to have been a distinctive theological characteristic of the early Shiʿi community.

This analysis specifically looks at the form of the text as well as the (assumed) bodily orientations expressed in the text as semiotic resources that contribute to the ziyāra’s poetic density. Working within this paradigm, I suggest that the frame of the ritual’s text is a central locus of its performative ‘force’. I focus on two linguistic elements of the text’s frame: (1) the reflexive and reportive calibrations of the descriptors in the text (such as bearing witness and the salām) and (2) how the participant roles of speakers and addressees are filled and related.

This article revisits one of the lesser-known works of Islamic art preserved within the walls of the Justinianic fortress, later the Monastery of Saint Catherine, at the foot of Jabal Mūsā (Mount Sinai) in Egypt. It is a small wooden piece of furniture emblazoned with a bold inscription identifying it as a ‘kursī,’ a name associated with furniture destined for a multitude of different uses. The particular use of the Sinai kursī as a stand for a Qur΄ān volume is ascertained and its widely-held dating to the early 12th century is revised in the light of historical evidence. Furthermore, the inscription helps elucidate the importance Sinai’s biblical landscape held for the Muslim population of the Near East during the early centuries of the Islamic era.

This study is a critical investigation of the cult of saints among Muslims and Jews in medieval Syria and the Near East. Through case studies of saints and their devotees, discussion of the architecture of monuments, examination of devotional objects, and analysis of ideas of "holiness", Meri depicts the practices of living religion and explores the common heritage of all three monotheistic faiths. Critical readings of a wide range of contemporary sources - travel writing, geographical works, pilgrimage guides, legal writings, historical sources, hagiography, and biography - reveal a vibrant religious culture in which the veneration of saints and pilgrimage to tombs and shrines were fundamental.

This article presents the edition of three unpublished 16th-century scrolls preserved in the Palau Ribes Collection (Barcelona) that contain diagrammatic representations of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. One of them certifies the fulfillment of the major (ḥajj) and minor (ʿ umra) pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca on behalf of a little girl, in what appears to be a certificate reused by removing the names of the original parties. The other two documents extoll the city of Medina and the Prophet Muḥammad, as part of the pious visit to his tomb (ziyāra) carried out by individuals who are not mentioned by name. In addition, the three documents share the same material characteristics, and present textual structures that suggest they were mass-produced models. They therefore constitute three case studies evidencing a significant shift in the production of Islamic certificates of pilgrimage, and can thus help expand our knowledge of the ritual itself.