Twelver Shi’i Self-flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria
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A01=Dr Edith Szanto
A01=Edith Szanto
Ashura
Author_Dr Edith Szanto
Author_Edith Szanto
Category=QRPB3
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
flagellation
healing
Iraq
Muharram
occult
Shi'ism
shrines
suffering
Syria
Twelver Shi'is
Product details
- ISBN 9781399548281
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Edith Szanto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Alabama. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto in 2012. She has written several articles on Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, ranging from Shi‘i ritual and seminaries, jinn and magical healing, to interfaith dialogue, Zoroastrianism conversions, as well as Kurdish film.
