The authoritative textus receptus of the Qur?an is known to have been prepared at the command of the third Caliph ?Uthman b. ?Affan, around 650 CE. Most early Muslim authorities agree that ?Uthman prepared between four and nine copies, kept one in Medina, and dispatched the rest to the Muslim garrison towns (al-amsar), to serve as master copies of the sacred text. Albeit, as I will show, only some aspects of the format of ancient codices were considered by later copyists as obliging features of the mushaf. At some point, Qur?ans known as masahif al-amsar were accorded special sanctity and treated as precious potent relics. In the twelfth century, several codices were known as "Mushaf ?Uthman," i.e. the codex that the caliph had read in Medina at the time of his assassination (656), and stained with his blood. Private and public rituals in honor of those Qur?ans developed in the great mosques of Damascus, Cordova, Marrakesh and Cairo, and in shrines as distant as Tashkent and mountainous Uzbekistan. I will linger on some of these rites, showing that the codices were treated as talismanic repositories of baraka (blessing), not only as holy texts. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some of those ancient Qur?ans, or folios taken out of them, were appropriated from their previous settings, and displayed as artifacts in the museums of Istanbul, Cairo and St. Petersburg. My talk will uncover the vicissitudes of a couple of ?Uthmani Qur?ans, and analyze the transitions in their purpose in changing historical contexts. I will show how the social and bodily practices of engaging with the object, the arrangements of its display, and the discourse by which it was addressed, changed along with its changing perception. As I intend to show, however - focusing on the discourses of the recent catalogues of the "Pavilion of Sacred Relics" of the Topkapi Museum and the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul – the same object may be a textus receptus, a relic and a cultural artifact at one and the same time, depending on the eye of the beholder.

Lockers originated in al-Azhar as informal congeries of trunks and chests in 1359-60 (al-Maqrizi). Attempts by Mamluk authorities to ban these unseemly objects failed, and the mosque developed into a lived social space. Under Ottoman administration, this improvised storage arrangement developed into an uneven locker system. Lockers surfaced in al-Azhar’s courtyard and interior, in fraternities (riwaqs), and neighborhoods (haras). By 1672, Evliya Çelebi reported over 2,000 lockers in al-Azhar, arranged in six- or seven-tiers, each tier the height of two men. The basis for this transformation was legal recognition of the usufructuary possession of lockers by Ottoman judges. Ottoman sijill records from 1530 to 1650 show that usufruct rights to lockers passed through family networks and circulated beyond those directly associated with al-Azhar. Indeed, some owners were women. Lockers were central to the quotidian functioning of al-Azhar as a center of Islamic teaching and learning. Students and scholars used lockers to store quires, codices, writing materials and instruments, vessels, kettles, utensils, bread, bedding, clothing, headgear, and valuables. Over time, lockers took the form of capital, which, if inherited or purchased, could be parlayed into financial gain, and, occasionally, into locker empires (shares in multiple lockers). When Shaykh Ahmad al-Ghunaymi al-Ansari died in 1634-5, the renowned Arabic grammarian and scholar of dialectical theology (kalam) had built a locker empire at al-Azhar; at the age of 80, he held usufruct rights to eight lockers in the Fuwwat fraternity. This paper studies the social lives of Ahmad’s lockers following his death, the reallocation of three lockers to students and scholars of al-Azhar, and the inheritance and sale of five lockers by his son Kamal al-Din and widow Kulthum. This paper builds on the insights of Arjun Appadurai, Celia Lury, and Igor Kopytoff, who demonstrate that a biographical approach to material objects, for example, the study of ‘paths’ and ‘life histories’ of objects, can illuminate their human and social context. This approach, when applied to al-Azhar’s lockers, can offer insight into the everyday lives of Muslim educational institutions, and the values of the men and women connected to them. It contributes to previous material histories of al-Azhar, which privilege its built environment, e.g., reused pre-Islamic columns with Corinthian capitals, Fatimid stucco, and Mamluk revival mosaics (Barrucand, Behrens-Abouseif).

In Khartoum, Sudan – just south of the old city center – is a large cemetery dotted with the built legacies of the country’s layered past: headstones mark the resting place of Egyptian colonial officials and plaques identify influential Sudanese nationalists, but one mausoleum, with a small neoclassical dome and ionic pillars, stands out from the others. This tomb is a small-scale replica of the Kitchener School of Medicine, the grave of a Persian businessman who made his fortune in Sudan and upon his death in 1933 left a waqf to the school. Even today, people leave coins, food, and other tributes at this miniature medical school. Understanding the social practices and materiality of this tomb-cum-colonial monument illustrates the challenges and opportunities of placing the study of Islamic Art and Architecture in conversation with material culture studies through an analysis of this and two earlier domes. Between 1885 and 1924 two domes dominated the skyline of the capital of Sudan: the tomb of Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi (built 1885; destroyed 1898) and the Kitchener School of Medicine (opened in 1924). At first glance, it appears as though these two physical structures fall into distinct analytical frameworks: the tomb is easily included into the long tradition of the study of Islamic Art and Architecture, while the dome of the medical school lends itself to enquiry through material culture and science and technology studies. However, these structures are intimately connected through histories of violence, and this paper argues that local populations understood the neoclassical dome of the imperial medical school – which signified the advent of modern medical training through a memorial for the slain Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener to colonial health officials – as a successor to the dome of Muhammad Ahmed’s tomb that was destroyed on Kitchener’s orders in 1898. These two structures – and the practices surrounding them are part of the same genealogy of Sufi tombs, which mark the place of the dead as well as being a space of healing and regeneration for the living. Thus, considering the three domes together as syncretic architecture of healing also illuminates the generative opportunities for new material culture studies of the Middle East.

The Rif??? and Sa?d? Sufi orders are known for the material ways of practicing their dhikr rituals (remembrance of God’s absolute unity and transcendence) as something they – literally and figuratively – feel in the flesh. The spiritual goal of leaving behind the multiplicity of the world to achieve ecstatic union with God is reflected in the coming together of the participants in a shared ritual context and the creation of a single ritual performance from a variety of sensual and multisensory elements. Based upon a series of ethnographic observations of these rituals in the Balkans, I will discuss the embodied practice of these charismatic feats. To celebrate Nevruz, the beginning of the New Year which coincides with the arrival of spring, the orders hold a propitiatory ritual which lasts about five hours and is extremely exacting. I will focus on the ecstatic performances with self-mortification, rendered at moments of physical and emotional arousal of the members of these Sufi communities, the material artefacts (especially the ritual weapons) and images featuring in the ritual space as well as the motivation to pierce—in such moments of intoxication— cheeks, throats, and other body parts with sharp iron pins, skewers and swords without any blood flowing. I will thereby consider the powerful dimensions of the body’s pain of these ‘rites of passage’ in the taming and domesticating of the dervishes’ own ‘animal’ or base soul (nafs), often referred to as ‘training (one’s) soul’, and the dramatic immediacy that the practice conveys to both participants and audience. The ritual activities are seen as a sign that the struggle with one’s nafs is the supreme choice. By mastering the vulnerability of the perishable physical body, the dervishes demonstrate that, in order to experience pure love, physical passions must be mitigated, overcome and mastered.

Clothing conventions function as devices of social and cultural powers which operate to reveal the cultural particularities that ‘discipline the body,’ and individuals may construct a comfortable and dynamic zone and affirm their identity in relation to their communities by confirming these conventions. Nevertheless, women deliberately choose to maneuver within their society’s standard code of dress in order to increase their mobility. Palestinian women revitalize the meaning of cultural dress and incorporate contemporary fashion into its design as an act of contesting the binary between mainstream fashion and traditional garb. Their performativity is a form of agency because, as wearers, designers, and advocators of the Palestinian thob, they gain authority over the discursive inventions of cultural and national symbols. As a result of this expression of authority, they reconfigure what has been historically connected with tradition and antiquity into contemporary and fashionable. The use of modern communication technologies and social media platforms to popularize this transformation brings the thob into the global mainstream. As a result, the thob gains a more malleable and plastic cultural significance which differs from what was previously perceived to be old fashion and traditional. This study applies gender theory and historical perspectives to the narratives of first and second-generation Palestinians in the United States to unearth generational, historical, and cultural conditions that inform and transform the ways women conceptualize the modes of dress. Apart from the narratives of over twenty women, this study also utilizes community and family albums, videos, and online commercials to trace the transformation in the meaning of the thob, as gendered garment, among Palestinian women in the United States between 1950s and 2000s. These materials and narratives reveal that Palestinian cultural clothing and other types of ornamentation serve as means for women to enlarge their social role in addition to generating new meanings as ‘expressive culture of the community’ for a displaced population.