Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala

Buchpräsentation von Fouad Gehad Marei (Lund University) und Sana Chavoshian (ZMO). Discussant Samuli Schielke (ZMO)

This presentation aims to introduce Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala an edited volume by Fouad Gehad Marei (Lund University), Yafa Shanneik (Lund University) and Christian Funke. Published by Brill in 2024, this book comprises twelve chapters which examine the material media – images, objects, clothes, food, incense, holy waters, spaces, and sounds – that instantiate somatic, corporeal, and visceral expressions and experiences of Shiʿi Muslim devotion and religiosity in Twelver, Alawī-Nuṣayrī, and Alevi-Bektashi communities in diverse demographic and geographic contexts. Drawing on this rich empirical material, Religion That Matters engages with conceptual debates in the fields of Religious Studies, Material Religion, Anthropology of Religion, Media Studies, and Cultural and Heritage Studies. By examining how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as gateways and links to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly, the book makes several propositions that push the frontiers of the social and anthropological study of religion. The volume also examines how materialities of religion are integral to processes of heritagization that are shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious — in this case, Shiʿi — heritage.

Leading scholars in Religious Studies and Material Religion have described Religion That Matters as a “rich conversation partner and meeting ground for researchers working on the intersection of religious studies, Islamic studies, anthropology, and material culture studies” and a “programmatic  intervention and significant contribution towards analyzing complex aesthetic formations and religious spaces and atmospheres, and the material and rather mundane techniques and technologies that might involve.”

Fouad Gehad Marei is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University (Sweden). His research covers Islamic religiosity and piety movements, Muslim cultures and politics, Material Religion, Digital Religion, and affect, aesthetics and the sensorium in contemporary Muslim societies. Fouad’s recent research has examined Shiʿi ritual practices and cultures in the Middle
East and the diaspora. He is the co-editor of Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala (Brill, 2024) and the editor of the forthcoming special issue “Influencers of Faith: How Religious Social Media Users Shape Religion and Pious Self-Fashioning” (Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture). His research has also been published in the journals of Religion and Society, Political Geography, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and Leadership and Developing Societies. In addition to academic publications, he authored several policy papers on conflict stabilization and transformation, decentralization and faith-based civil society, insurgency and rebel justice, and the prevention of violent extremism (P/CVE). Fouad holds a PhD from Durham University (United Kingdom) and has previously held academic positions at the Free University of Berlin, the Orient Institute in Beirut, and University of Birmingham. He is currently based in Berlin.

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