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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab

Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab

Szanto, Edith

Hardcover

Series: Advances in the Study of Islam

Islam

ISBN10: 139954828X
ISBN13: 9781399548281
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: Jun 30 2025
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.23
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

This book examines contested Muharram practices, as well as the institutions and authorities that promoted or condemned them until 2011, when most Shi'is fled Syria.

For 40 years, the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab was a place of miracles, where violence engendered healing. To experience miraculous healing, Shi'is attended mourning gatherings, studied at seminaries, self-flagellated, and frequented spiritual healers. Supported by the political establishment, Shi'i institutions arose to serve Iraqi refugees and Iranian pilgrims. Seminaries promoted various practices, some highly controversial. Wounded, traumatized, impoverished, and oppressed, asylum seekers from Iraq who performed flagellations sought salvation - a worldly restoration requiring saintly beneficence. In Syria, where Shi'is were often asylum seekers from Iraq, daily concerns centred on the here and now, on survival, and on the bitterness they felt. They prayed for justice and retribution, as much as for physical and psychological healing.

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