Görke and Guidetti’s volume presents twelve case-studies of the establishment, growth, and, sometimes, demise of holy places in the Islamicate world. Their introductory chapter provides a compelling historical outline of the early emplacement of the holy in the central Islamic lands (first-fifth/seventh-eleventh centuries), a useful set of keywords related to holiness in Muslim cultures, and a concise account of theological and legal debates surrounding holy places, sainthood, mausolea, relics, rituals of visitation, and its benefits. The following chapters elaborate on these themes and contiguous topics fundamental to the study of Islamic sacred geography in the longue durée. These include the Islamization of space, the development and institutionalization of Sufism, and the effects of colonialism, secularization, nationalism, globalization, and tourism on religious topographies. Some authors venture far and wide geographically and chronologically while concentrating on a specific tomb, shrine complex, holy city, or network of sacred sites. Most of them deal with narratives, architecture, and rituals, to analyze the religious and inter-religious, political and social functions of the shrines they discuss, under changing historical circumstances. They make use of a combination of disciplines, ranging from archaeology and art history to cultural geography, religious studies and anthropology; all rely on a rich array of sources and supply fine pictures of sites and their contemporary visitors.
In chapter 2, “Caliphs and the Hajj after Hārūn al-Rashīd,” Harry Munt investigates why caliphal leadership of the ḥajj passed into the hands of local officials after the death of al-Rashīd (d. 809), who had personally led the convoy nine(!) times. Munt links this shift to declining central authority, changing notions of religious legitimacy, and the growing reliance on representation and symbolism rather than physical presence. This is the only article in the collection that is dedicated to Islam’s canonical sanctuary.
In the following article, “The Making of the ‘City of Saints’: Fez as a Place of Prophetic Benediction in the Hagiographical Discourse of the Medieval and the Modern Period,” Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino ties the sacredness of Fez to its founder Idrīs II (d. 822), a near-contemporary of Hārūn al-Rashīd. His hagiographers portray him as a saintly figure, continuously sanctifying the city with his presence and prayers. In the fourteenth century, Fez becomes madīnat al-awliyāʾ--a city of many saints and a major Sufi center. Sanseverino links contemporary phenomena such as the Festival of World Sacred Music and “spiritual tourism” in Fez to this legacy, as modern echoes of earlier pilgrimage traditions.
“The Sacred Spaces of Zabīd: Narratives, Powers, and Identity in Medieval Yemen” by Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont (chapter 4), focuses on another city that acquired the reputation of sanctity with time. de Pierrepont dates the process to the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries, and attributes it to a combination of historiographical narratives produced by local scholars, the patronage of rulers (especially the Sunni Rasūlids), and the spread of Sufi practices. The decline the city had suffered in the latter part of this period is presented here as the backdrop for the intensification of the local cult of saints, and the establishment of dozens of shrines that transformed the city from a political capital into a spiritual metropolis and pilgrimage site.
Chapter 5, Claus-Peter Haase’s “Shah-i Zinda: Notes on the History of the Shrine of Qutham Ibn al-ʿAbbās in Samarqand,” explores Samarqand’s earliest Islamic mausoleum and most prominent shrine. It was dedicated in the eleventh century to a cousin of the Prophet, allegedly a missionary and martyr of Sunni Islam, whose persona became conflated with that of the mythological Shah Zinda--“living king”--of early central Asian traditions. In the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, Mongol and Timurid patrons expanded the shrine by surrounding it with impressive monumental mausolea for royal women and nobles.
Another article that demonstrates the alliance between saints, royal power, and dynastic legitimacy, is “Sufis, Sultans, and the Making of Sacred Geographies in India: The Case of Aḥmad Khattū’s Dargāh,” by Sara Mondini (chapter 6). It argues that the institutionalization of Sufi brotherhoods in India, from the twelfth-thirteenth centuries onwards, was accompanied by the creation of a network of shrines (dargāhs) around saints’ tombs. The article focuses on thedargāh dedicated to Sultan Aḥmad Shāh’s spiritual guide, Shaykh Aḥmad-i Khattū (d. c. 1446), in the proximity of Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat. It is one of the principal sacred sites on the subcontinent today, and draws also Hindus, despite contemporary tensions and violence. Mondini regards it as a useful model for the study of the development of Indian sacred geography.
George Quinn’s chapter, “Faith Comes from the Sea: Maritime Symbolism in the Origin Stories of Three Muslim Pilgrimage Sites in Java,” shows how the sea serves as the master metaphor and mediator of Islamic sacred power in Java. He demonstrates this through the stories of three of the nine saints who supposedly had disseminated Islam in the Island in the second half of the fifteenth century, discussing their hagiographies, and the particular architecture of their shrines. Currently too, the shoreline is Java’s paradigmatic contact zone, where the Islamic present connects with the Hindu-Buddhist past.
Islamization is also an important aspect of David N. Edwards’s article, “Creating Islamic Landscapes and Holy Places in Sudanese Nubia” (chapter 8). In this vast area, merchants and holy men appear to have been central agents of the spread of Islam from the later medieval period up till the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. A striking number of small-scale shrines, from simple stone rings to domed qubbas, inscribe Islamic meanings onto the thinly populated ground. Relying on archaeological surveys and ethnographical inquiry, Edwards capture the appropriation and reuse of natural marks, ancient churches, and pre-Islamic tombs. He finds that only a few shrines represent burial sites of Muslim saints; some evoke the ḥajj, some are named after Prophets or Companions.
Sara Kuehn’s “Multiplication, translocation, and adaptation: Sarı Saltuq’s multiple embodied localities throughout Eastern Europe” concentrates on the present-day cult of one saint - the thirteenth-century Rifaʿi dervish, miracle worker, warrior and missionary Sarı Saltuq. Her work, based on archival research and ethnographic observations in tekkes, türbes, and makāms throughout the Balkans, shows how a saint’s presence, and even burial, can replicate across regions without the dismemberment of his remains. Most of the shrines she describes are located in regions where Christianity and Islam intersect; in “threshold landscapes,” such as mountaintops, caves, or by water-resources; as Saltuq is often identified with, or layered onto, local Christian saints and pre-existing sacred architectures.
Eric Ross’s chapter “Producing Sufi Shrines in Modern Senegal” (chapter 10), depicts Sufi mass movements and a network of Sufi shrines (typically around mausolea of charismatic masters), that emerged in Senegal between 1880 and 1914. Ross explains the large-scale factors which triggered their production: massive social, economic, cultural and political transformations under French colonial rule. He also shows the lasting impact of this network on civil society in contemporary Senegal, emphasizing the connectivity between shrines, as an inherent characteristic of both cities and shrines.
Béatrice Henrich, “Hala Sultan Tekke--‘A Small Mosque in a Sea of Narratives’” (chapter 11), in contrast, deals with an isolated shrine: the peculiar case of a Tekke situated on the “wrong” side of the partition line in the divided polity of Cyprus, i.e., in the Greek Christian-Orthodox South. The site is associated with Umm Haram (Hala Sultan), the Prophet’s foster mother (or aunt), probably since the seventeenth century. Its sanctity evolved through texts and material additions (mosque, mausoleum, tekke), typically reinforcing each other over the centuries. It diminished with the significant secularization of Cypriot society in the twentieth century. However, the half-a-century long partition of the island and international peace building projects which funded its reconstruction, invigorated visitation of the place, colouring it with new nationalist ideologies, which suppress older shared Muslim-Christian practices.
With “Prophet Shrines and Religious Communities in Mosul” (chapter 12), by Sara Wolper, we return to clusters of shared sacred sites. Wolper focuses on three of Mosul’s many tomb-shrines: Mar Behnam Monastery (known for miraculous healings, architectural syncretism, and ecumenical patronage), the complex encompassing the Shrine of Prophet Jonah (which had attracted Muslims, Christians, and Jews), and the Shrine of Prophet Nahum in Iraqi Kurdistan (venerated especially by Jews but also visited by Christians and Muslims). All three were founded on ancient sites and had undergone multiple reconstructions--demonstrating more resilience than the populations inhabiting them--until recently (2014-2017) destroyed by ISIS.
Destruction is also the theme of the last paper in the collection: “A New Wave of Iconoclasm? The Destruction of Holy Places in the Contemporary Islamic World,” by Luca Patrizi. It offers a historical and theological overview of aniconism and iconoclasm in various religious traditions, claiming that although Islam did develop an aniconic tradition, Muslims rarely engaged in systematic iconoclasm until the rise of Wahhabism in the eighteenth century. ISIS, Taliban, al-Qaʿida and similar groups which target Sufi, Shiʿi, and Christian sites, or pre-Islamic archaeological monuments, are motivated by political extremism, sectarianism, and sometimes the prospect of looting, rather than by traditional Islam.
As a whole, the book is a welcome addition to the growing bookshelf on sacred space in the Islamicate world, supplementing the recent Saintly Spheres and Islamic Landscapes: Emplacements of Spiritual Power across Time and Place (Brill 2021), edited by Daphna Ephrat, Ethel Sara Wolper, and Paulo G. Pinto. Both explore the creation, expansion, and continuous adaptations of shrines that Muslims venerate, from early Islam to the present, through a series of diverse case studies based in four continents. Saintly Spheres, as implied by its name, puts more weight on understanding the baraka (charisma, spiritual power) of Islamic sainthood, especially Sufi, albeit with special attention to its spatial and performative aspects. Constructing and Contesting Holy Places puts more emphasis on shrines and lodges as contexts of religious devotion, commemoration, political power, communal identity and inter-communal sharing or strife, but also as architectural creations under continuous remodelling.
Thoughtfully reflecting on the resources, artistic talent and creativity invested in monuments of faith, the collected volume edited by Görke and Guidetti also contemplates on the circumstances of their transformation, appropriation, and destruction.