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The Ways of Zaynab: Patrimony, Patronage and Property outside Damascus
Abstract
This paper examines the transnational career of the Sayyida Zaynab shrine located outside Damascus, as primarily Iranian pilgrims transformed Rawiya--a small village in the 1950s through the 70s into the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab in the 80s until the present day. Marking the neglected connections between patriliny and patrimony in the transnational career of a waqf dhurri, a private religious charitable trust associated with the Sayyida Zaynab shrine, I draw out the involvements of the waqf in a portfolio of real estate development and service industry projects, ranging from a birth clinic to a cemetery. In this broader business portfolio of the waqf, I focus on the architectural expansion of the shrine funded through a series of donations from merchants who have found from West Africa to Pakistan. I want to suggest that the Mourtadhas as the mutawakkils of the Sayyida Zaynab shrine choreographed the transnational career of the Sayyida Zainab waqf and shrine. In the process, I argue, they transformed their patrimony to landed property tied to the only administratively independent waqf dhurri of Syria by politically leveraging their prophetic pedigree. Contested but never compromised until the Syrian conflict, the trans-imperial, -national, and trans-regional career of the Sayyida Zainab shrine under the trusteeship of the Damascene family provides us with a case study to rethink the place of patriliny in studies of genealogy more broadly. It furthermore prompts us to approach patronage as generative of kinship as well as property regimes.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Iran
Syria
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries