Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia (S.E.P.S.M.E.A.)
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Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia (S.E.P.S.M.E.A.) (Founding editor: C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze) Editor Dale F. Eickelman Advisory Board Fariba Adelkhah (SciencesPo/CERI, Paris) Roger Owen (Harvard University) Armando Salvatore (University of Naples “L’Orientale” – Humboldt University, Berlin) VOLUME 111 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/seps Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East Sainthood in Fragile States Edited by Andreas Bandak and Mikkel Bille LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Mazjub Baba (Photo: Jürgen Wasim Frembgen). This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1385-3376 ISBN 978-90-04-24782-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24922-6 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS List of Figures ................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ ix List of Contributors ........................................................................................ xi Introduction: Sainthood in Fragile States ............................................... 1 Andreas Bandak and Mikkel Bille PART I SUSTAINED SAINTHOOD Contesting Fragile Saintly Traditions: Miraculous Healing among Twelver Shiʿis in Contemporary Syria ...................................................... 33 Edith Szanto Saints, Media and Minority Cultures: On Coptic Cults of Egyptian Revolution from Alexandria to Maspero ................................................. 53 Angie Heo PART II CONTESTED REPRESENTATIONS Enigmas of a Pakistani Warrior Saint: Interrogating Media Conspiracies in an Age of Terror ............................................................... 75 Pnina Werbner The Samer, the Saint and the Shaman: Ordering Bedouin Heritage in Jordan .......................................................................................... 101 Mikkel Bille vi contents PART III INDETERMINATE SAINTHOOD Our Lady of Soufanieh: On Knowledge, Ignorance and Indifference among the Christians of Damascus .................................. 129 Andreas Bandak Ecstatic Sainthood and Austere Sunni Islam: A majzūb in Northern Pakistan ........................................................................................... 155 Jürgen Wasim Frembgen PART IV SECULAR SAINTHOOD Imbued with Agency: Contesting Notions of the Extraordinariness of Türkan Saylan ............................................................................................. 171 Daniella Kuzmanovic The Secular Saint: Iconography and Ideology in the Cult of Bashir Jumayil .................................................................................................. 191 Sune Haugbolle Index ................................................................................................................... 213 LIST OF FIGURES 3.1. Coptic pilgrims remember the 23 martyrs of the Alexandrian bombing (January 2011) at the mausoleum shrine in St. Menas Monastery of Maryut (photo by the author) ............. 53 4.1. The Beitoon Noor (photo by the author) ........................................ 96 4.2. The mazar under construction (photo by the author) ............... 96 4.3. The miraculous wall (photo by the author) ................................... 97 4.4. Pious followers of the Shaykh (photo by the author) ................. 98 5.1. Ammarin men performing the Samer in Amman, Jordan (photo by the author) ............................................................................ 106 5.2. The grave of Salem Awwad (photo by the author) ...................... 110 6.1. Photo of the icon in Myrna’s home (photo by the author) ....... 139 7.1. Mazjub Baba (photo by the author) ................................................. 157 7.2. Mazjub Baba conversing (photo by the author) ........................... 159 9.1. “Bashir al-Jumayil is gone but the struggle continues”. Banner, Place Sassine, Beirut, 14 September 2010 (photo by the author) ................................................................................................ 197 9.2. Commemorative ceremony for Bashir Jumayil, Beirut, 14 September 2010 (photo by the author) ....................................... 199 9.3. “Dream of the Republic” Bashir Jumayil banner, Place Sassine, Beirut, 14 September 2010 (photo by the author) ......................... 205 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This volume started with a conference entitled ‘Sainthood in Fragile States’ at the Danish Institute in Damascus in 2010. The editors would like to thank Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, as well as Jørgen Bæk Simonsen and the Danish Research School for Regional Studies for funding for this seminar. Also a special thanks to former director of the Danish Institute in Damascus, Hans Christian Korsholm for hosting the conference and together with Lone Visby making the conference a pleasant and constructive stay. The broader topics have been discussed at the Centre for Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, and the feedback from collegues and guests at research seminars have been highly valuable. In particular we want to thank Catharina Raudvere and Anders Hastrup who served as discussants on a research seminar on a version of the introduction. Lisa Wedeen and Glenn Bowman have given constructive criticism and insights, which are highly appreciated. Also, we appreciate the comments from two anonymous reviewers and the collaboration with Brill, particularly Ingrid Heijckers-Velt and Nicolette van der Hoek. Andreas Bandak & Mikkel Bille Copenhagen, August 2012 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Andreas Bandak is an anthropologist, PhD, and Assistant Professor at Centre for Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the Christian minorities in Syria, where he has done extensive fieldwork in Damascus. His thematic interests include Eastern Christianity, sainthood and belonging. He has co-edited a special issue of Ethnos vol. 77 no. 4 entitled Foregrounds and Backgrounds: Ventures in the Anthropology of Christianity (2012). In 2010 he received The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation’s Elite Research Travel Stipend. Mikkel Bille is Assistant Professor at Centre for Comparative Cultural Stud- ies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a PhD in anthropology from University College, London. His doctoral research was on material culture and heritage among the Bedouin in Jordan. He has co-edited An Anthropology of Absence (2010), New York, Springer, with Tim Flohr Sørensen and Frida Hastrup; and co-authored an introduction to mate- rial culture studies in Danish ‘Materialitet’ (2012), Frederiksberg, Forlaget Samfundslitteratur, with Tim Flohr Sørensen. Jürgen Wasim Frembgen, Islamicist, anthropologist and writer, is Senior Curator of the Islamic Collection at the Munich State Museum of Ethnol- ogy as well as Professor for History of the Religion and Culture of Islam at the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies/University of Munich. He has published extensively on South and West Asia, focusing particularly on Pakistan. His research has been mainly devoted to the study of Islam and Sufism as well as to aesthetics, anthropology of the body, social outsiders, and facets of popular culture. Sune Haugbolle is Associate Professor in Sociology and Global Studies at Roskilde University. He is the author of War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge University Press 2010) and co-editor of The Politics of Violence, Truth and Reconciliation in the Arab Middle East (Routledge 2009), and Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image (Indiana University Press 2013). xii list of contributors Angie Heo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from University of California at Berkeley and has taught at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. She is currently completing her study of Coptic Chris- tianity, media and visuality in Egypt. Daniella Kuzmanovic is Assistant Professor in modern Turkish studies at the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She received her PhD in Comparative Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen, where she also received