Sacred Space, Saints, and Salutations: Ziyāra across Sectarian Boundary Lines (13th-14th Centuries)

Through a close examination of unstudied Sunnī ziyāra liturgies like those found in Ibn Farhūn’s (d. 1397) Kitāb Irshād al-Sālik, my dissertation challenges the prevailing notion that ziyāra as scripted liturgy was restricted to Shīʿī sources. In my dissertation, I explore the disjunction between premodern and modern Sunnī ziyāra practices and answer: In what contexts did ziyāra liturgies emerge and develop? How did pilgrims engage with ziyāra liturgies? How can we compare ziyāra across sectarian lines? How did ziyāra liturgy communicate certain norms and ideals to spiritual participants? This project highlights several understudied aspects of ziyāra such as the study of female saints and women’s ziyāra to shed light on broader questions of sectarian identity development. My research draws on methods from ritual, material, and gender studies and illustrates that reading ziyāra literature across sectarian divides grants key insight into an understanding of intra-religious relations and sectarianism in the Middle East.