May 7, 2026

Twelver Shi'i Self-flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria

Mourning Sayyida Zaynab

Edith Szanto

Hosted by Shehnaz Haqqani

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Summary

Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows how these contested rituals served as both spiritual expression and pathways to worldly and psychological healing. The book examines controversial Muharram practices, especially self-flagellation, not simply as ritual acts but as deeply meaningful responses to trauma, displacement, and the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Szanto pays close attention to how people actually live their religion: through relationships with saints, engagement with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing.

In this conversation, Szanto and I explore specific Muharram practices, including self-flagellation, the wedding of Qasim, and other ritualized forms of mourning, as well as gendered dynamics in who participates and why. We discuss what these practices looked like on the ground—what Muharram in Sayyida Zaynab felt like, how different communities understood and debated these rituals, and what purposes they served for those who participated in them. We talk about the Zaynabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discuss relationships with saints, spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music, and ritual performance mediate piety. Szanto also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences observing and engaging with these rituals.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Islamic studies generally, Shi‘i studies, Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual.

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Shehnaz Haqqani

Shehnaz Haqqani is a scholar of Islam whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, religious authority, and Muslim lived experience. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender and sexuality from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her first book, Feminism, Tradition, and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender, was published by Oneworld Publications in 2024. Her current book project examines Muslim women’s interfaith marriages and relationships, exploring questions of religious authority, agency, family, and lived experience. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Project Development Grant, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, among others. She can be reached at shaqqan@emory.edu.

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