DSR Lecture Series "Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders"

Emrah Yıldız in conversation with Simon Coleman and Nada Moumtaz

The Department for the Study of Religion is hosting a book reading and lively conversation between Emrah Yıldız (Northwestern University), Simon Coleman, and Nada Moumtaz, for the 3rd talk of DSR Lecture Series, in collaboration with the Evasion Lab.

What is the value—religious, political, economic, or altogether social—of getting on a bus in Tehran to embark on an eight-hundred-mile journey across two international borders to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus? 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. The book and this talk develop the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Rather than thinking of ritual as a scripturally canonized manual for pious self-cultivation, Zainab’s Traffic approaches ziyarat as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria.

Emrah Yıldız works as assistant professor of anthropology and Middle East and North African studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (2024),. editor of “kaçak | qaçax | قاچاق : Fugitive Forms of Bureaucracy and Economy across Southwest Asia” (2024), and co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey” (2014).

Simon Coleman (FRSC) is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

Nada Moumtaz is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.