Author : Georg Stauth, Samuli Schielke
Year : 2009
transcript Verlag, 2009 – Religion – 192 pages
As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolutenotion of the transcendent, which its followers establishand celebrate, in a seemingly contradictory fashion, at veryspecific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and in the vast andcomplex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrinesaround the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigmfor the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban planning, regional networks, imaginary spaces,and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has, however, become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology, on the other.While they have often tended to posit the local in opposition to the universal, in this volume islam ologists, anthropologists,and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local, the place, and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints.
Chapter 7 The Making of a 'Harari' City in Ethiopia: Constructing and Contesting Saintly Places in Harar Patrick Desplat Introduction: Debating Muslims, …
