2025/11/22 by Finbarr Barry Flood · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Islamic Studies and History #Historical and Architectural Studies #Eurasian Exchange Networks
paper · doi:10.1093/jis/etaf048
The past two decades have seen an extraordinary efflorescence of scholarship on the history of relics in Islam and the practices associated with them. Relevant publications have proliferated across the fields of anthropology, art history, and religious studies, signalling a sea-change in scholarly interest from virtual neglect to the burgeoning of what constitutes an emerging genre of scholarship.1 The bulk of these recent publications have focused on the early modern and modern periods; Ottoman relic collecting and associated devotional practices have received particular attention, while their Mamluk antecedents have been the subject of fewer but no less significant studies.2 By contrast, this welcome contribution focuses on the formative period of Islam between the seventh and tenth centuries ce, offering a nuanced survey of emerging (and often diverging) attitudes to relic veneration and tomb visitation within the early Muslim community.3 The subject is hardly new to the author, who has published a series of pioneering articles on such topics as haptic and olfactory dimensions of early Islamic pilgrimage and relics, after completing a fascinating doctoral dissertation on saliva and the holy body in late antique monotheisms.4 This book might, therefore, be seen as the culmination of a long-term interest in questions of embodiment and sensory dimensions of material religion.