In "The Bone of Contention," I investigate somatic and semiotic violence inflicted upon the corpses of eminent Sunni authorities and archrivals through revolutionary exhumations by the Safavids in the early modern Middle East. The Safavid revolutionaries exacted posthumous vengeance by disinterring and mutilating cadavers of those associated with the structures of power that sustained the hegemony of Sunni discourse and suppression of Shia. The carnivalesque mockery of the corpses further dramatized the macabre spectacle of the desecration of graves to humiliate the legacy of the dead and their social personality among the living. As Patrick Gary stated, the dead were still a community, and they played vital roles in the social, economic, and cultural spheres of a living community, especially in premodern societies. Therefore, violence against the dead was also an act of hostility toward the living, aiming to fracture the relationship between the living and the dead. Despite the grave role the dead played in animating sectarian politics in the early modern religiopolitical warfare in the Middle East, they hardly receive the credit they deserve in modern scholarship. My research attempts to bring the dead to center stage in the theatre of war that emerged following the rise of the Safavids by studying the registers of contemporary Safavid, Uzbek, and Ottoman sources about the dead body politics adopted by the Safavids. I interrogate why the dead figured so prominently through the public display of exhumations in the Safavid context and what their perpetrators meant to communicate and accomplish through them. I argue that as the "site of memory" and "reservoir of feeling," the tombs and corpses offered profound symbolic capital that the Safavids exploited to command emotions, deal psychological blows to their enemies, and embed formidable ideological defiance in their rivals' consciousness. The physicality or concreteness of the dead proved exceptionally conducive to sensory and sensational subversion of the religiopolitical status quo. Moreover, I demonstrate that the Safavid desecration of tombs occurred primarily in major geopolitical fault lines such as Baghdad and Mashhad. As such, the destruction or construction of tombs represented not only ideological but also territorial assertions of the competing rival forces. "The Bone of Contention" adopts a global historical perspective to situate the Safavid revolutionary exhumations in a broader picture of similar events around the world by highlighting the ancient Biblical precedents and their contemporary reverberations.