Inter-religious Practices and Saint Veneration in the Muslim World

Abstract

Using a micro-historical approach, with the mausoleum of al-Khidr in Karak (Jordan) as a case study, this paper questions the restructuring of tribal solidarities during the Mandate period. Between 1937 and 1939, the shrine was the scene of major conflicts involving members of Greek Orthodox and Muslim tribes. The case soon became a national matter. Due to this dispute, the local tribes affirmed or redefined their political importance in a context of social and political restructuring. The authority of al-Khidr was disputed through the control of its symbolic territory. It was therefore his holy figure who guarantees the constitution, the recomposition and superimposition of symbolic borders between social groups. These stakes challenged the young Jordanian government, which tried to regulate the conflict by nationalizing the holy site. This case study reveals the complex mobilisation of modes of belonging at the local level and the porosity of social group boundaries. This chapter insists on the multiplicity of factors that leads to the mobilisation of confessional identities according to the contexts and groups concerned.

Making Waves: The Role of Indigenous Water Beings in Debates about Human and Non‐Human Rights

“…Such assumptions have been challenged not only by ontological debates about conceptual dualism, but also the work of material culture scholars elucidating how meaning is encoded in things (Boivin 2004, 2010; Gell 1998; Henare et al 2007; Strang 2004); and by new materialism's robust critique of anthropocentricity (Bennett 2009; Chen et al 2013; Coole and Frost 2010; Helmreich 2011; Knappet and Malafouris 2008). These have demanded greater acknowledgement that, while instrumental engagement with the material environment has become the norm, humankind is not the sole creator of the world we inhabit.…”