Islam and the Devotional Object

The management of the dead underwent major transformations in early modern Istanbul, owing to rapid population growth and its consequences in the city's urban layout. Starting around the turn of the sixteenth century, the majority of the urban dead began to be buried outside the city walls in the newly emerging communal graveyards. As the physical space of the living and deceased residents of the capital gradually came to be separated, death and burial rituals started to be performed by individuals outside the immediate family or community members of the deceased. This was especially the case for those who did not have family or community ties in the city. This article examines the ritual processes by which corpses were prepared for interment, through washing, shrouding, and burial; how funerals, coffins, tombstones, and graveyards were managed; and how individuals, communities, and institutions participated therein. In particular, the author's goal is to question (1) how urban transformations led to modifications in death and burial rites; (2) how those rites became professionalized and impersonalized through the early modern period; and (3) whether these changes created new relationships between the living and the dead in the physical, mental, and emotional landscape of Istanbul.

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Islam and the Devotional Object

Abstract: Felicitous Egypt has no rival for her three sources of delight: the sultan's processions, the flooding of the Nile, and the rightly guided mahmal moving by day.Al-Jabarti, 18142 Section from the belt of the Ka'ba. Credit: TXT 280; Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage. Khalili Collections.

Cited by 4 publications

References 193 publications

Is the Subject the Locus of Muslim Ethics? Relocating the Ethics of Tithing in the Transnational Shi‘i Community

Is the Subject the Locus of Muslim Ethics? Relocating the Ethics of Tithing in the Transnational Shi‘i Community

“You were not commanded to stroke it, but to pray nearby it”: debating touch within early Islamic pilgrimage

New Methods for Governing Death in Istanbul

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