Zainab's traffic: spatial lives of an Islamic ritual across Southwest Asia

Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites in Syria. By travelling via Turkey on buses, and venerating Sayyida Zainab at their destination, these pilgrims disrupt conventional conceptions of not only Islamic ritual, but also Iranian mobility under sanctions. Their experiences venerating Sayyida Zainab – emerging out of a self-described ‘poverty of mobility’ – demonstrate the utility of a more expansive conceptualization of ritual in anthropology. Instead of taking ritual for a scripturally canonized ‘manual for’ pious self-cultivation, here I approach ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria. This approach produces a dynamic and spatial conception of ziyarat as a ritual of mobility. Ethnographic attention to these pilgrims’ politically conditioned and regionally networked spatial practices reveals that their movements are irreducible to ethical projects of cultivating piety alone. What is at stake in Iranian pilgrims’ movements is nothing short of the extra-religious conditions of religion – those of the economy and the polity. These stakes illuminate how religious practices interarticulate with political and social institutions – including bazaars, borders, and shrines – that remain understudied in recent anthropological scholarship on Islamic piety.