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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. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrims women’s desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors’ experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab—emerging out of a self-described “poverty of mobility”—demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual. 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 is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Emrah Yıldız (EY): On 8 January 2009, while reading the daily news from local media in Turkey’s Kurdistan, I was astounded by a brief clip from Antep. None of it seemed to make sense. It reported that three days earlier, on 5 January, Turkish security forces in Gaziantep had stopped and searched a bus carrying forty-four Iranian pilgrims from Tabriz to the Sayyida Zainab shrine outside Damascus, Syria. During the operation, a joint search team of city police and antiterrorism special forces recovered fifty-seven kilograms of heroin stashed inside the air conditioning system. The twelve barrels of contraband fuel oil stowed above passengers’ suitcases, the report continued, were recovered empty, having already been delivered to their destination in Doǧubeyazıt, Turkey, on the border with Iran. Cigarettes tucked in the seats four cartons at a time were destined for the Iranian Bazaar in Gaziantep.

The operation concluded later that day with the simultaneous arrest of five Kurdish men—four with Iranian passports, one with a Turkish one—in multiple regions of southeastern Turkey. They were charged as the suspected traffickers—not only of heroin but also the oil and cigarettes. Accepting the charges for the oil and cigarettes but denying those for the drugs, they pleaded guilty but requested a reduced sentence in light of their confession. The news piece ended with a picture of Iranian pilgrims, who reportedly claimed that they had nothing to do with the heroin and that the golden amulets hidden in their shoes should be returned because they were for personal and ritual use and did not violate any laws of trade or commerce between Iran and Turkey. A week later, on 16 January 2009, I boarded a plane to Gaziantep to find out more about the route of seemingly religious and deeply commercial mobility. I was curious to find out how asaint visitation (ziyarat) bus became the vehicle of contraband (kaçak) commerce in a bazaar in Gaziantep that was named after Iranians some seven hundred kilometers away from the closest Iranian territory. I wrote Zainab’s Traffic to make sense of this confluence.

The desire to make sense of this confluence set me on a journey of my own that included many road companions along the way; pilgrims, bus drivers and attendants, tour guides, merchants, contraband merchants and consumers, state officials, and journalists accompanied me across four countries, on a route spanning from Tehran and Tabriz to the east to Damascus and Beirut to the west. And along that ride, I learned that one cannot take the journey for its destination; when one remains open to all the encounters that a journey has in store for the traveler, the ride is enriched beyond measure. And if one is lucky, as I have been, some of those encounters—some fleeting, some long-lasting—become profound experiences, culminating in multiple companionships. Zainab’s Traffic is an amalgamation of those companionships that move saints, selves, and others across borders.

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?

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

EY: Zainab’s Traffic reframes the socio-cultural analysis of transnational mobility through an integration of three current trends within anthropology: (1) the study of religious practice in its discursive, mundane, and ritualistic dimensions; (2) the study of economic exchange and circulation through a focus on the pragmatics of value; and (3) the study of state and region formation with an emphasis on cross-border mobility. 

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. Whether it is through the study of the spatial politics of saint veneration in Islam, analysis of cross-border gold trade and sanctions, or examination of pilgrim women’s desire for Syrian lingerie accompanying their pleas with the saint in marital matters, the book develops the idea of visitation as a ritual of mobility across geography, history, and category. Iranian visitors’ experiences on the road to Sayyida Zainab—emerging out of a self-described “poverty of mobility”—demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of ritual. 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.

Once we center our analysis of ziyarat on its practitioners and their routes, their embedded but dynamic roles in this transnational traffic come to the fore. Neither a political invention of religious tradition or its commercialized aberration, Sayyida Zainab’s ziyarat demands an anthropology of Islam that re-embeds Islam back into its dynamic historical and social context of praxis. What is at stake here is not just the crossing of territorial state borders, but also the crossing of conceptual borders between religion, economy, and politics, whereby different notions of Islamic authority, economic rationality, and political sovereignty battle for hegemony over subjects, geography, and history.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

EY: Jadaliyya readers might be familiar with my short-form analyses, translations, and editorial work for the Turkey page, where I investigated a range of topics spanning the classed sociality of Gezi Protests, the intersections of queer and Kurdish politics in Turkey, as well as Twelver Shi‘i rituals of commemoration in the midst of a regional conflict. While Zainab’s Traffic shares the same attention to mobility—social as well as physical—as a way to recast conventional tropes of analysis used in the study of the Middle East, it is also my first monograph that marks a departure from these earlier writings in scale and scope of the argument and analysis it presents.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

EY: I hope Zainab’s Traffic will appeal to generalists and specialists alike across anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, Middle East studies, and religious studies. I strove to write an accessible yet multi-layered and multi-faceted book that culminated in the particular ethnographic form and voice the readers will find in Zainab’s Traffic.

In addition to the introduction excerpted below, there are four body chapters, a conclusion, and an epilogue. The first chapter throws us into the traffic of the saint visitation route to Sayyida Zainab. Chapters 2 through 4 are structured around the shrine, the bazaar, and the borders of the route, respectively. The body chapters and conclusion are each preceded by an ethnographic interlude. The individual placement of these interludes is motivated by three aims: to give the reader a cross-section of the multitude of actors I encountered along the route; to draw out emically the themes and topics that will be prevalent in the succeeding chapters; and to capture the dynamic and complex subjectivities of the pilgrims I opened with—ones that are not reducible to ethical or political projects alone, precisely because they are irreducible to subjects of religion and religion alone. 

If, after reading this book, the reader leaves with a sense of Islam as a religion, and the Middle East as a region, different from what is presented in social analyses of Islam and territory in the region, then I will have achieved my goal. Approaching ritual through the prism of traffic could help us restore that empirical sociality and historicity. Then we can reframe ziyarat as a movement across the conceptual borders of religion, economy, and polity—and as such, ziyarat is not only ethically but also politically instituted. One way into that process of political institution is by chronicling the spatial production of its institutions such as shrines, bazaars, and borders; tracing how they connect to one another is the task of traffic as a particularly productive analytic for rituals of mobility like saint visitation.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

EY: I am currently at work on two lines of research. The first one, tentatively titled Bearing Asylum: Queer travels across class, gender and religion, chronicles queer asylum as an asylum of translation and translocation across Iran, Turkey and Germany. My d i f f e r e n c e s article, “Migrant Sexualities, Queer Travelers: Iranian Bears and the Asylum of Translation,” provides an early view of this ongoing project. My second line of research investigates the regional lives of economic sanctions and studies cross-border trade in “fictitious commodities” (money, land, and labor) between Iran and Turkey as a significant and understudied method of sanction mitigation. Drawing upon this line of research, I explored the relationship between sanctions and the first of these fictitious commodities, namely money, in an IJMES article, “Of Nuclear Rials and Golden Shoes: Scaling Commodities and Currencies across Sanctions.” I am spending the 2024-2025 academic year as the Global Horizons Junior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study to shape that second line of research into my second monograph, tentatively titled Outsmarting Smart Sanctions: Currency, Mobility and Security between Iran and Turkey. 

This interview was first published on Jadaliyya.