Iranian Pilgrims in Traffic: Religion, Economy and Polity across Borders
Emrah Yıldız is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. His multi-sited and multi-lingual research across Iran, Turkey and Syria lies at the intersection of anthropology of pilgrimage and saint visitation in Islam, ethnographic study of paper money, sanctions, and cross-border commerce in political economy as well as histories and geographies of borders and their states in the modern Middle East and Southwest Asia. His first book, Iranian Pilgrims in Traffic: Religion, Economy and Polity across Borders (under contract with California Press) synthesizes these areas of scholarship to chronicle Iranian pilgrims’ journeys to the Sayyida Zainab shrine in Syria. Yıldız’s dissertation that serves as the basis of this book is winner of the 2017 Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences from the Middle East Studies Association. Yıldız is co-editor of the collection “Resistance Everywhere: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey” (Tadween, 2014). His articles are published, or forthcoming, in Cultural Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Toplum ve Bilim (in Turkish). From October 2021 to February 2022, he is a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and affiliated with EUME. From March to July 2022, he is a EUME Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
Iranian Pilgrims in Traffic: Religion, Economy and Polity across Borders
This project follows the pathways of a ziyarat (saint visitation) route, also known as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (pilgrimage of the poor) from bus stations in Iran through a bazaar in Gaziantep, Turkey to the Sayyida Zainab shrine near Damascus, Syria. Often referred to as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (pilgrimage of the poor) in Iran, this route has shuttled Iranian pilgrims and contraband goods such as oil, sugar and tobacco, across the three countries since the 1979 Revolution in Iran. Along the pilgrimage of the poor routes, ritual emerges as a traffic built out of multiple cycles of religious, political and economic practices. As a historical anthropology of this emergence, the broader project re-centers ritual in the anthropology of Islam as a generative dimension of social action and spatial production on a regional scale. On shifting political terrain through which buses of the Hajj-e Fuqara’ route moved, ziyarat and tijarat routes intersected in a traffic itself conditioned by differential regimes of harakat (mobility) across borders. When studied ethnographically and historically that traffic—animated by Iranian pilgrims, Antep bazaar merchants, contraband couriers and Damascene shrine heirs over four decades—is a productive diagnostic of the uneven historicity and sociality of ziyarat as an Islamic ritual.
