Zainab¿s Traffic - Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders

What is the value-religious, political, economic, or altogether social-of getting on a bus in Tehran for its travelers who embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey to reach the Sayyida Zainab Shrine outside Damascus across two international borders? Under what material conditions can such values be established, reassessed, or transgressed, and by whom? Zainab-s Traffic provides answers to these questions alongside the socially embedded-and spatially generative-encounters of ritual, mobility, desire, genealogy, and patronage along the route. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims- desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors- experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab-emerging out of a self-described -po