Islam and the Devotional Object

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-1-108-48384-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 278 Seiten, HC gerader Rücken kaschiert, Format (B × H): 183 mm x 260 mm, Gewicht: 732 g

In this book, Richard J. A. McGregor offers a history of Islamic practice through the aesthetic reception of medieval religious objects. Elaborate parades in Cairo and Damascus included decorated objects of great value, destined for Mecca and Medina. Among these were the precious dress sewn yearly for the Ka'ba, and large colorful sedans mounted on camels, which mysteriously completed the Hajj without carrying a single passenger. Along with the brisk trade in Islamic relics, these objects and the variety of contested meanings attached to them, constituted material practices of religion that persisted into the colonial era, but were suppressed in the twentieth century. McGregor here recovers the biographies of religious objects, including relics, banners, public texts, and coverings for the Ka'ba. Reconstructing the premodern visual culture of Islamic Egypt and Syria, he follows the shifting meanings attached to objects of devotion, as well as the contingent nature of religious practice and experience.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McGregor, Richard J. A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Sonstige Religionen Sonstige Religionen: Kult, Riten, Feiertage, Zeremonien, Gebete
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Naher & Mittlerer Osten
• Geisteswissenschaften Islam & Islamische Studien Islam: Kult, Riten, Zeremonien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Objects over distance; 2. An exuberant and elusive palanquin; 3. Processions, banners, and the religious spectacle; 4. The relic and its witness; 5. Religious topography and the relic; 6. Defacing and displacing.

Über Autor(innen)

McGregor, Richard J. A.
Richard J. A. McGregor is Associate Professor of Religion and Islam at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Sanctity and Mysticism in Medieval Egypt (2004), co-editor of The Development of Sufism in Mamluk Egypt (2006) and Sufism in the Ottoman Era (16th–18th C.) (2010), and a translator of the Arabic edition of The Epistle of the Brethren of Purity: The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn (2009).