The place of relics—-such as hairs and footprints of the Prophet Muhammad, and earth from the land of Karbala, to give some of the most commonly cited examples—-within the religious practices of diverse Muslim groups has been ill-studied throughout the history of Euro-American academic scholarship. Orientalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often straddled a conflicted line when approaching relics in Islam: both denying the existence of relic veneration at all among ‘good’ Muslims and asserting such rituals to be inimical to Islamic monotheism, while also citing the widespread presence of relic worship among Muslims as exemplary of how “Islam is naturally inclined to Animism and easily entangled in its meshes.” Influenced by specific notions of what “true Islam” is, even modern researchers have tended to categorize practices such as the visitation of saints’ tombs and the usage of sacred materials for healing or blessing as aspects of “local” or “folk” custom, without importance or relevance for the study of Islamicate history or cultures more generally.
Taking part in a larger “turn” within the humanities towards the study of bodies, spaces, materiality, and “things,” more recent scholarship has increasingly drawn attention to the role and importance of different relic practices among Muslim groups throughout the breadth of the Islamic world, and from antiquity until today. This panel will bring together a group of researchers examining the functions, significances, and definitions of “relics” within the practices and conceptions of Muslim groups from several different times and locations. Extending from the early Islamic Near East to Mughal India and beyond, these papers will illuminate the different ways that Muslims throughout history have used variegated material embodiments of the sacred in their performances of Islamic piety and identity. Combining literary studies, art history, and architectural history, our panel will deploy a range of sources and disciplines to place the position of different forms of Islamic relic veneration within their historical and material contexts. Drawing the study of relics into the spotlight rather than the edges of the stage, this panel will offer a corrective to longstanding attitudes towards the presence of relics within Islamicate pieties across a variety of contexts.
Art/Art History
History
Religious Studies/Theology
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Dr. Adam Bursi
In discussions of early Muslims’ veneration of “relics” of the Prophet Muhammad, emphasis has often been placed upon (1) physical objects associated with the Prophet, such as strands of his hair, his staff, and his mantle; and (2) textual “relics” of the Prophet, i.e. the hadith reports, collected and shared orally among early Muslims. However, with the notable exception of the area of the Prophet’s tomb and minbar in the Medina Mosque, considerably less scholarly attention has focused upon early Muslims’ veneration of places associated with the Prophet’s life. Yet as recent work by Miklos Muranyi and Harry Munt has argued, the memorialization of “places where the Prophet prayed” (mawadi' allati salla fihi al-nabi) appears to have begun quite early, being institutionalized textually in al-Bukhari’s Sahih and other early texts, and even architecturally by Umayyad and 'Abbasid authorities. Early reports record Muslims visiting and seeking to pray at these locations, and non-iconographically commemorating the Prophet’s presence in them through the scenting of several such spaces with perfume. Not only objects or texts, but places thus became sacred “relics” for early Muslims through their association with the Prophet Muhammad.
This paper will examine the ritualization of some of these “sites of memory” (to borrow Pierre Nora's phrase) associated with the life of the Prophet Muhammad in and around the cities of Mecca and Medina. Utilizing early hadith and akhbar texts, I will outline how these sanctified sites were ritually and materially venerated—-and debated-—in the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries. This topic not only addresses the question of which venerational postures (and attitudes) towards these places were considered un/acceptable by early Muslims, but also carries implications for understanding early Muslims’ varying conceptions of the meaning/significance of ritual practice in these sacred cities. Similar to Marion Holmes Katz's discussion of the “competing construals of the significance” of hajj rites such as the kissing of the Black Stone, we will see that there were differing interpretations of the significances of these spaces’ associations with the Prophet Muhammad.
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Relics – objects imbued with religious power seen as having potential to intervene in this world – were not always associated with holy bodies, as is typical in Christian contexts. This paper argues that Arabic inscriptions could function in relic-like ways, sacralizing objects, and functioning as material invocations of the divine. This is seen most clearly in tiraz textiles woven with pious phrases or the name of the caliph. These inscriptions were positioned across the entry points to the body to invoke divine protection: in garments, text bands appeared across the shoulders or along the opening of cloaks, and in funerary contexts, they were positioned across the eyes of the deceased.
This paper investigates a curious adaptation of script from these textiles to use on objects and architecture, to explore how a single Arabic inscription could function in talismanic ways across materials and geographies. The inscription is not, in itself, a religiously powerful one, but instead a repeating aphorism, “good fortune and prosperity” (al-yumn wa-l-iqbal), that appeared with particular orthographic anomalies on late Fatimid tiraz textiles that circulated around the Mediterranean. The same text, with the same anomalies (a floating waw, a distorted alif-lam) then appeared on a series of objects and architectural spaces on the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the twelfth century. Like the positioning of such inscriptions on bodies, its use in architecture frames windows and doors, always defining liminal spaces as though its presence protected those inside. This paper explores why a series of Muslim, Christian and Jewish patrons and craftsmen would have adapted this motif for their palaces and holy spaces, and how its decorative and talismanic functions would have been perceived. The meanings this inscription carried in the fourteenth-century Iberian Peninsula certainly would have been different than those it evoked in Fatimid Egypt, but its continued use across materials and geographies, and across two centuries, offers insight into the potent protective meanings of Arabic script, within and beyond the Islamic world.
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Ms. Iman Abdulfattah
In many religious traditions, relics are usually understood to be the physical artifacts or remains of a martyr, saint or prophet that are often preserved as an object of reverence in a martyrium or reliquary for perpetuity. What is commonly preserved and venerated throughout the Islamicate world are a corpus of personal effects said to have belonged to the Prophet Mu?ammad, or representations thereof, as well as textual artifacts that have been assigned relic-like status. Sources available on these relics often focus on their use as devotional or cult objects, their role as representations of the Prophet’s presence, and mediators of prophetic blessing.
In Egypt, such relics were actively collected during the Mamluk period (AH 648–922/CE 1250–1517) by high-ranking emirs and notable sultans. Their arrival and popularity during this period was built on the foundations of a very strong and thriving tradition of commemorating the Prophet and his family that dates to the Fatimid (AH 358–567/CE 969–1171) founders of the Cairo. Culturally, the Mamluk period is known for many achievements, including historical writing, socio-religious reforms, and the massive architectural output that altered the landscape within their domain. In the case of the former, Mamluk historians were prolific chroniclers, biographers and encyclopedists who left us with rich sociological, topographical, religious and historical textual accounts; and as builders of pious and secular foundations, they endowed Cairo with a plethora of significant and impressive monuments, many of which are still standing today. All of this growth was meant to awe and inspire both residents and visitors alike, and contributed to Cairo’s appeal as a center of trade and religion as rival states were on the rise. It was under this tremendous and vibrant activity that prophetic relics were brought to Egypt.
Given this backdrop, this paper will examine the mechanism and conditions responsible for the popularity of relics in Mamluk Egypt. It will also explore their use as emblems of power that projected Mamluk authority and legitimacy, since their acquisition coincided with periods of political transition and/or instability.
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Mr. Usman Hamid
It is a commonplace trope to see the incorporation of material objects in Muslim devotional practices, particularly in South Asia, as symptomatic of a “popular” Islam shaped by local religious traditions and disconnected from the textual discourses of Muslim scholarly authority and knowledge systems. In this paper, I challenge these assumptions by examining the logic of Muslim discourses and practices surrounding the veneration of material remains, or relics, associated with the Prophet Muhammad in early modern South Asia. Within the tradition such remains are often referred to as the Prophet’s traces (asar in Persian or athar in Arabic); these include both corporeal relics such as cuttings of the Prophet’s hair or parings of his nails, as well as objects of use, such as his staff, sandals, and cloak. In this paper I examine a particular category of asar known as qadams, stones bearing the impression of a foot, purportedly that of the Prophet Muhammad’s. The study takes as its point of departure the arrival of a qadam from the Hijaz to the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556–1605) in the late sixteenth century.
In my presentation I reconstruct the debates engendered by the arrival of the relic based on two hitherto unexamined works that I read in conversation with other contemporary sources. The first is the Risalah-i Qadamiyah, a prosimetric work written in Persian that was not only authorized by the Mughal court but is also the earliest known treatise on the topic of footprint relics produced in Muslim South Asia. The second is a local history of Gujarat written by the man responsible for bringing the relic to the Mughal court from Mecca.
In tracing the contours of the debate precipitated by the arrival of the qadam, we begin to see how early modern Muslims navigated issues of authenticity and efficacy of sacred objects on the one hand, and questions of textual authority and the economy of knowledge on the other, particularly as it pertained to the performance of rituals of veneration for relics of the Prophet Muhammad. In doing so, this paper seeks to redress the commonplace trope of disassociating material practice from the textual tradition in the historiography of Muslim devotion in South Asia and beyond.
