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

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

Paperback

Series: Advances in the Study of Islam

Islam

PREORDER - Expected ship date May 31, 2027

ISBN10: 139954831X
ISBN13: 9781399548311
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: May 31 2027
Pages: 272
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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