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Edith Szanto, "Twelver Shi'i Self-flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
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Edith Santo
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Shehna Saqqani
hello Salaam, and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm your co host shehna saqqani. Edith Santos 12 Vershiri self flagellation rites in Contemporary Syria Mourning Syeda Zaynab, published in 2025 with Edinburgh University Press, 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 Shia 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, Sandha 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, to displacement, and to the search for justice and healing. In doing so, Santo pays close attention to how people actually live their religion through relationships with saints, engagements with religious authorities, media, ritual performance, and forms of spiritual healing. In this conversation, Santo and I explore specific Muhadram 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 Maharam in Sayyid al Zainab 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 Zainabiyya seminary and how changes in its physical and institutional structure reshaped how knowledge was taught and who held authority. We also discussed relationships with saints, with spiritual healers like Shaykh Abu Ahmad, and the ways that media, music and ritual performance mediate piety. Santo also treats us to reflecting on some of her experiences, observing and engaging with these rituals herself. This book is essential reading for anyone who's interested in Islamic studies, generally in Shiite studies and Middle Eastern religious life, or the ways that communities navigate devotion, trauma, and healing through ritual. So this here is my conversation with Edith Santo about her book Twelver Shia Self Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria. Morning, Syed Zaynab. Hi Salaam. Edith, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your incredibly fascinating book, 12 Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria. Morning, Syeda Zainab. I have to say I enjoyed it so much. It's one of the books that I simply, you know, as academics, we get to a point where we just know what the point is and then move on to the next thing. No, not with this book. I needed to know everybody's stories. I needed to follow up with. It was so fascinating. It wasn't just like, I have things like, oh wow, you know, all throughout in the margins or oh, that makes sense. Or icy. And a part of it is that my own training is primarily Sunni Islam. And so I was learning so much about Sharia Islam here and then just the. And I love ethnographies. I love all things that involve actually working with humans and people and learning people. So I truly enjoyed it. It was like just really, I cannot emphasize enough how much fun I had reading the book. So thank you for writing it and thank you for agreeing to come and talk with me about it today.
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Edith Santo
Thank you. That is very, very kind of you. I appreciate that. Of course.
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Shehna Saqqani
So our first question to our guests here in the New Books Network podcast is to tell us about your intellectual background. Who are you? How did you get to Islamic studies? How did you become interested in this?
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Edith Santo
Thank you. That is a fantastic question. It is a broader question. Like with most people, I started out, I grew up in Germany. Let me start with that. I grew up in Germany and there at the time when I was growing up, that is in the 80s, Muslims were already the other. There was a minority of Turks there. However, in contrast to France and Britain, as of course Edward Said tells us there, the study of Islam is generally also tied in with empire. However, in Germany, the Germans lost their colonies already by World War I, and hence this was not the main issue there. Not only this, I have a Hungarian background, as you can tell from my last name. What happened there is that my parents both left Hungary in the 1960s as refugees and my mother left on religious basis and my father left on the basis that he was originally a folk German. So there were many Germans in Eastern Europe, really, even up till today. But there was a great movement of peoples at the end of World War II, including my own family. However, my grandmother, grandfather did not want to leave Hungary and so he changed our last name from Zuhovein to Santo so that he would not be detected. Santo means the one who harvests or the one who plows and brings in the harvest. And so it's just, it's farmer basically and it's a super common last name. It was basically the best way to go incognito in Hungary at the time. My father remembers when he was young that there were still some Muslims in Hungary up until 56, which was the revolution in Hungary, a failed revolution against the Soviet occupation at the time. So during this time he remembers that there were some Turks and there are in fact a couple of mosques still left in Hungary. Hungary was under Ottoman rule and was part of the Ottoman Empire. And so there was always this sort of shadow of the Middle east or of Islam in the background, even though that's not where my family was. My family was Southern Baptist, which is very strange in Eastern Europe of all places. Right. It turns out I found this out really only last couple of years. There's a book by somebody who's. His name is Kish, last name which means small. And he wrote this fantastic book on the Baptist movement in Hungary. So it turns out that my ancestor, my great, great, great great grandfather or so, married the niece of the man who originally brought the Baptist movement to Hungary, right? So my family was a part of a sect. They were a part of a cult in Hungary. And so instead of studying myself, I want to study the other cult, which was, in a sense, Muslims in Europe, because what better way to study yourself than study the mirror, right? And so that's how I got into that. Plus, like many others who sort of grow up in a Eastern Europe, you know, we're as patriarchal as the rest of the Middle east and Hungary. Also, the idea was the women eat in the kitchen, the men in the living room, which didn't bother me, I have to say, because who wants to listen to how you fix cars anyways? And in the kitchen is when you got all the good bits anyways in terms of the food. So that was fantastic. I did not mind this at all. Nevertheless, there was a kind of a tension, let's say this way, between my Hungarian upbringing and that was my first language at home, and then me going to school in Germany, which is where I grew up, as I said. And then dealing with those contacts in Germany, being an Eastern European meant that you were an outsider. It's funny enough because today I go to Germany now I'm no longer an outsider because there's so many other immigrants that have come in that suddenly I have become white, even though I wasn't before, which is very strange to Alabamians when I say that here, because there's a very different understanding of ethnicity here, right? But nevertheless, from the way I look, from how short I am in Germany, it could always tell that I'm in, quote, unquote, Eastern European at the time, that is in the 80s, right? So I grew up in Germany, as I still said. I grew up Southern Baptist in Germany. And even there they were considered a cult also. So Hungary is 95% Catholic. And of course, under the Communist atheist, my family wasn't. And then in Germany also there it was mainly either Lutheran or Catholic. And so again, we were sort of the odd ones out. And I like to argue with people, hence I like to argue about religion. And what better way to disprove them than to study it? Of course, it wasn't necessarily my first choice. I was going to be an engineer, you see, when I was growing up. Yes, of course, my parents are both. My father's a mathematician, my mother's an architect, and I was really good at numbers. I don't know, something happened. And then religion, yeah, Became my next topic. I thought about philosophy, but religion was even more interesting. And I think the reason why I ultimately chose Islam was that it was the thing that pissed everybody off the most.
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Shehna Saqqani
Oh, my God. And in Islam, we say everything by intention. It came with a lot of good.
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Edith Santo
Of course, I was young. I mean, I was like, you know, I was 18, 19. So, I mean, it's totally normal. This is what one does at that age. And then. So then I became an undergraduate. And I was an undergraduate, of course, at the time of 9, 11. And I was supposed to work at the airport that day in Phoenix, Arizona, because they had us work at information counters, those of us that spoke multiple languages. And so then it became this contentious issue. And partly because of that, I ended up studying abroad. And I really enjoy that, mainly because I found that the conversations in the United States became very restrictive because of the political circumstances. And as such, that is one of the reasons I ended up going to Toronto for my PhD, and I was really grateful to be able to do that. As an undergraduate, I studied abroad in Cairo at first, so at the American University in Cairo, and I loved it. And I, as an undergraduate, I lived at home. Of course, as in Europe, they don't kick you out of the house at 18. You know, in contrast to these Americans, we're a little bit more Eastern in that way. In any case, I'm just kidding, of course, but. Right. So I stayed at home as an undergraduate. I did my master's at the University of Texas at Austin, and I studied there. My master's advisor was Kamaran Orayi, and I'm eternally grateful to him. He was a fantastic advisor. Among the conversations I remember having with him was walking to class and saying something like, we do academia because we enjoy it. And he says, yes. Yeah, that's why.
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Shehna Saqqani
Was he being sarcastic or was that
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Edith Santo
a. Oh, and then, like, there's no. I mean, you wouldn't want to do it for, like, other reasons. Right. Some sort of external reason. You want to do it for the joy of it. Because you enjoy thinking and talking and debating. Right? Yeah. So I really appreciated him in lots of ways. And he was a social historian, and so he always made sure that we thought about complexities, et cetera. And especially because he comes from a history background, that was very helpful because he also talked about religious change. And that was also very important because there is no such thing as an essentially this culture, that culture, this religion or that religion, it changes in time and place. And that's always important. So it's always important to recognize what the context is that we're talking about and even with people themselves. So. And we'll get with that with my book, of course, because in my book I'm talking about a refugee context. And therefore that definitely shapes the ways in which people then speak about piety, let's say. Alrighty. So then I did my PhD. I ended up first before the PhD, I went off and I did a Fulbright in Syria and I loved it. It was fantastic. Syria was. It was at this moment when I was there, which was in the mid 2000s, so first decade of 2000. And it was at a time when Hafez al Asad was gone. There was this new. The Syrian Spring. There was a new opening, but yet there weren't yet all these malls and Western restaurants yet. So it was still. There was very much a local flair to a lot of items, peoples, everything. I just loved it. Then the Iraqi refugees were coming in and that. And added a level of complexity. At this time I met my ex husband who was working at UNDP at the time. And so I thought about working for the UN there and I got to see how some of those things worked. So I volunteered with both UNDP and unhcr. And that was really interesting because I got to see how it is that the state and international institutions deal with refugees, which then gives a very interesting context to thinking about religion in that context, especially when those religious recipients are recipients of that governmental or non governmental aid. Right. So I spent some time in Syria. Then I went off to Toronto where I did my PhD and I loved it. I love being a big city. I grew up in a small town in Germany of less than 2,000 people. In order to go past anything fourth grade, you had to go out of town and take a bus for 45 minutes. So I just really enjoyed being in a large city. And it was a very different kind of life. And that was fantastic. And I appreciate that I was at the center of many intellectual debates. Toronto at this time was expanding. There are all sorts of centers opening up and that is where I got to meet other people, for instance. So aside from my own advisor, Amira Mettemeyer, there's also Karen Ruffel and also Laurie Silvers, who has since published all of these novels. So there's just a lot going on in Toronto and I really appreciate that. I wasn't quite done in Toronto. I broke my elbow actually that summer, because this is what happens, you see, when I have deadlines and there's just too much to do. I start having accidents. It's really quite terrible. It's happened more than once in my life. So anyway, my point, right, So I left off. I got a job as being ABD in Iraq, the American University of Iraq and Suleimani. And I was there for altogether eight years. I was really grateful for the time there. It was. It was fantastic. Informative in lots of ways. I got to. I was the one show religious studies person, but I was also teaching world history classes and I got to teach business ethics. You know, you think that like religion can't be applied beyond itself. It's fantastic the ways in which suddenly you find yourself part of all sorts of programs. So it turns out business ethics actually hires people from outside of its field. Who knew.
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Shehna Saqqani
Very helpful to know. I have a friend who's currently an Islamic studies person who's currently considering but is hesitant because she doesn't think she qualifies something with hospitals and ethics. Yeah.
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Edith Santo
Oh, absolutely. One should apply. My predecessor was somebody who had a master's in divinity and then was ABD in business but never finished. And so I inherited the course because he left. And it turns out that was fascinating and I learned so much. And I even quote that book that is that business ethics books in my religious studies classes. Sometimes these things cross pollinate in interesting ways. So yeah, I was there then for eight years and I learned a lot. I'm really grateful I got to go there because of course, Syria became inaccessible post 2011, and this allowed me to be in the region. Learn about something else. In this case, the Kurds tend to be Sunni. Of course, there are many various groups among them. So Sufi orders are central, especially in the countryside. Also the various political leaders tend to come from Sufi families, so sheikhli families, that is both the central two parties at the moment. Both come out of the Naqshbandi and the Qadari order. And then they compete with each other in interesting ways. Super fascinating. And that also post 2014, with the rise of ISIS, then suddenly there was this large conversion towards Zoroastrianism and there was a growth of Zoroastrianism left and right. And then there's this whole question, does that count as apostasy? Yes or. And here the answer was for those who did it, no, because they were simply going back to their roots. That was their argument. Oh, wow.
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Shehna Saqqani
But apostrophe, theologically, that's so fascinating.
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Edith Santo
They made a nationalist argument that was so interesting. So in this case, the nationalist argument trumped the theological argument. Right. So that was very fascinating. Right. But going back to then, also the case of Shiism, I found Shi' ism to be fascina. And in Egypt, when I was doing my master's and I did my master's ultimately on Egypt and I did an ethnography there, I did it on women in shrines in Egypt, which of course they were Sunni. And there's the shrine of Sayyida Zainab in Egypt, and there's also the shrine of Sayda Zainab in Syria. And there it's a Shi' I shrine, even though you have mainly Palestinian refugee camps around that area. So those would be then Sunni again. So there was just this interesting shift. There was some replication. There's also a difference. And of course, in Egypt also there are Coptic women who go to that shrine for fertility purposes, not the case in Syria, which was very different. So I really appreciated seeing things in this comparative light and just really seeing how human beings react, because that's what I find most interesting is that ultimately we're all simply humans. We're all simply trying to live our lives and make sense of things and hopefully thrive. Yeah.
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Shehna Saqqani
Thank you so much for that, for that introduction. I learned a lot from you about you, of course, but also about the whys of this book. And that was the thing I that context of Sayyidah Zainab, just the refugee context, of course, obviously very Shia, but then not entirely. You're in a space with lots of Sunnis around. It's just incredibly fascinating. So then let's talk a little bit. Well, actually, because I was going to ask if we could talk about the book and its main aims and findings, etc. But let's, in case these terms come up, then we have let's see. And havzat or related terms in the context, if they're relevant to what you're talking about in your answers. But yes, if we could define these terms. And then I would love for our audience to hear about your main findings of the book methodology as well. You talk to actual people. You stay there. I really enjoyed reading. See, and this is the thing. I love reading the human parts in these books when the scholar is talking about. And then this happened and then I did this and I was in. So your story is very, very present here as well. But yeah, what are the questions, the main questions you're asking in this book? What is your methodology like? What are some main findings that our audience could hear about?
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Edith Santo
Thank you. In terms of the methodology, as you pointed out, much of this was me being there. In other words, what I tried to do here was an ethnography, an ethnography of a religious community. And my Advisor for my PhD advisor was an anthropologist or is an anthropologist. And she would always tell me that, yes, people are just messy. That is what happens. It's just human beings. And I. So I would go to not only talk with the people, I went to the shrine and I went to various institutions. And thank you for bringing up the hussainias. Hussainias are ritual halls where people get together in order to perform morning gatherings. And these are the Majalis azan. So morning gatherings. Morning as in commemorating usually one of the dead of. In the battle of Karbela. There were also Maghael es Farach. So happy gatherings. These also existed. They would be for birthdays or for like the wedding day of Imam Ali and Sayyida Zaynab, for instance, or any of the other birthdays. So they were happy days as well. AHU Sayina is one of the terms that they use for it technically. Zaynabiya is another term, although Zaynabiyyah in this case was also the Hausa Zaynabiya. So that was a particular seminary. The Hausa can refer to both the Hausa as a whole. So the seminary as a whole. So all seminaries in a town are the seminary, but the individual schools are also seminaries. I like to think of this sort of like the University of Toronto. It has so many different colleges within itself and so many departments and so many schools within itself. So you have that collective term and then you have the individual groupings within that. And that's what you have with least Hausa. The other important issue to note here is that because this was, as I like to. I think I quoted my dear colleague from University of Exeter, Robert Gleave. He called the Sayyidah Zainab the bus stop Hausa. So the traditional seminaries are Karbela and Najaf. And then he calls the Iranians ones would be Qom and Mashhad. And for him, Sayyida Zainab was the one that those are the ones that were kicked out out of the other ones that is particularly kicked out of Iraq. And. Or they're the ones that didn't tow the government line in Iran and therefore ended up in Syria. And it was a bus stop Hausa, because people would come through, excuse me, from Iraq or other places, flee, come to Syria. And in Syria they would then reapply or apply for asylum somewhere else. So they were there. That's why As a stop. As a stopover. And on the COVID by the way, that was my painting on there of the shrine itself. Yeah, I did that during my Ph.D. at some point. And so it's a very pretty bus stop. That doesn't mean it's not temporary, however. So because it was this stopover, there are also a lot of different communities and hence they changed and mixed a lot of their terminologies. For instance, the Pakistani, the Iraqi and Lebanese Shia, for instance, would commemorate different deaths on different days of the first ten days of Muharram. So it depends on which place you went to. They would just apply this different ethnic group's views on how it ought to be. So there was a lot of mixing going on and I think that made it fruitful in lots of ways. People generally didn't ask which one is the correct one, because also the people among themselves were quote, unquote, mixing. These Iraqis were now newly impoverished. So that's nice that they claimed that, you know, they may have. Some may have claimed that they were quote, unquote, the ones that were correct, but the other ones had a nicer house. So like, why would you go to the correct one when you get the better food in a different place, or the nicer cushions or the better sweets? So everybody just did their own thing and people did mix and people had friends also over the decades things changed slightly. So the Afghans, for instance, who had come in early onwards, they're the ones who assimilated the most and tried to intermarry locally because there was no place for them to go back to, versus some of the other ones, depending on time and place, whether or not they intermixed or not. And of course it depends on what kind of opportunities arise. Right? So yeah, so there's a number of different. The terms are slippery. Let me just say this up front. This is one of the reasons why the editor of the series, and I was really grateful for it, had me add that glossary right up front, loved
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Shehna Saqqani
it, kept referring to it, by the way.
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Edith Santo
Fantastic, right? And even the people themselves also you said like, okay, you need to list the people as well, just so we know who is who.
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Shehna Saqqani
Right.
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Edith Santo
So the method is me trying to trace both groups and people. So I attended this Hauser Zaynabi and I'll tell you why the Hausa Vietnam Khomeini didn't let me register, because at the time my ex husband, you see, he was Sunni. And so as such I couldn't get a letter from some sort of Shia imam, attesting to his moral character, which he was not exactly very religious, would have been difficult anyways. So I couldn't go there. So I basically went where I could go and where they would let me. And so I so I did what I could. I followed various peoples. I went there over a period of several years. I would go on and off for several months and would then attend House of Zainab was the one that I attended the most regularly throughout all this time. And I had a friend who went and so I would go with her, but the teachers all knew me. It was fantastic. It. And in terms of my findings, I think that I heard this this is not new to, of course, any of the listeners here either, neither to you. Most research is me search and so we find what we look for ultimately. And when I started all this in my twenties, so this book has admittedly been a long time in the making, I had a very different outlook on the world as I do today. And so that's why that last chapter was in addition to me coming back around and now trying to find some semblance of hope, reconciliation, healing, all of that after I had found at the time a lot of what I saw in my 20s, a lot of simply making do, not that there's anything wrong with that, a lot of suffering, which I didn't want to necessarily whitewash either, and I want to sort of keep in there. I wanted to show that people are, again, just simply people, that people compete, that it's not that communitas is not simply about a happy being together. That doesn't mean that everything is unhappy either. Again, I wanted to capture this human condition, which is perhaps a little squirrely. At least that's how I felt in my 20s. And so it perhaps reflects that the most.
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Shehna Saqqani
Yeah, thank you for that. No, the glossary was so helpful. And not just of all of the historical figures, but also the people that you are engaging with. So you talk about the you mentioned the refugee context of Sayyida Zainab briefly here. And then in your previous answer also, this is of course, the Zainab who is a sister of Hassan and Hussein and who is present during Karbala. What role does for those of our audience, for those of our audiences, in case they don't know what is the. If you could briefly just recount what role she plays at Karbala because of which then she becomes significant enough to have an entire seminary, I mean, a whole city or town named after her. Why does she matter? And I was of course, not surprised, but disappointed that she's not one of the infallibles, conveniently most of whom were, you know. But I was like, she's only a minor. What is it? A minor infallible. But yeah, but, but so, so, so the, the, the town of Sayyida Zainab that you're working with and then also the main seminary that, that you're, that a lot of your interlocutors are in, who gets trained there, who is teaching there, how do they, how do they get to do the kind of work they want to do there? What is that? You know, who, who attends and who teaches, et cetera, and who, who becomes a teacher? Mulaya. Is it a mulaya is that.
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Edith Santo
Yeah, Mulaya is the morning. But then may or may not also be a teacher.
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Shehna Saqqani
Right, Exactly.
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Edith Santo
Yeah.
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Shehna Saqqani
So some of your interlocutors or both. So yeah. So the town of Zaynab and then also the specific seminaries that you're working with. Yeah.
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Edith Santo
As you pointed out, said Zaynab is the sister, was the sister of Imam Hussein and Imam Al Hasan and the daughter of Fatima Zahra and Imam Ali. And as such she was considered to be a minor infallible. This is important because there's a, because she is seen as the example of or the one who self flagellated, that is she cut her head supposedly with a knife. So right over here, by the way, this doesn't bleed a lot. So it's not like, I mean, it does bleed a lot. I'm sorry, but it's not, it's not a deep wound. So I was told here too by, I think Laurie Silvers is the first one who pointed this out. But this is done also in wrestling where you can cut yourself on the head and it bleeds a lot and looks terr terrible. It's called red for green fun. You do it for money. So in the she context, you cut yourself right over here. It looks really terrible, but it's not a deep wound. So. Okay. In any case, so Sara Zeynep, suppose they cut herself after the battle of Karabela and after the heads are cut off and they're all on these spears and they're in front of her and she's following these heads and the enemy, of course, that has taken her captive. So the enemy being Yazid and the whole. These are his troops who have defeated Imam Hussein at the battle of Karbala, or as Nabil Hussein likes to call it, the massacre. And he's of course right, because if you have such a disproportionate number of soldiers versus just the family of Muhammad that is that really a battle? In either case, that's what it's called. So there is a battle. Hussein dies. Everybody dies within those first 10 days of Muharram on the 10th, and that's when it's over with. The women are taken captive and are then taken to Damascus as prisoners of war. And she then supposedly takes one of these spears or a knife and cuts herself out of mourning. So now the question is, first of all, did it happen? Secondly, should other people then follow her in doing this? And now the question is, should other people fall unheard in doing this? Meaning men and women or just men? Right. And so at what point and to what extent should this be done? Going back to Sayta Zainab for a moment, though. So she ends up in Damascus. That's what the story says. There's a film about this as well, called the Sabaya. So she ends up in Damascus, and there one of the children dies or Qaya dies, and she is there. And she speaks truth to the Umayyad Caliph. And the reason why this is important is because for those who celebrate her, she is the woman who spoke truth to the Caliph. And sheism thus preserves truth because of a woman.
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Shehna Saqqani
Correct.
- [37:03]
Edith Santo
And there's a whole question about what she does afterwards. There are those who say she went back to Medina. There are others who said that she went off into exile to Egypt and that's why she's buried there. Others say, no, she stayed there in Damascus. Others said, no, she went off to Iraq to be in Karbella. So there are different debates and ultimately it doesn't matter. Everybody thinks that wherever they are is where she is, and so she's close by. Importantly, I would like to point out that she's not the only female who has a shrine around her in Qom. We have Saidama Suma, who is the sister of the Avimam Reza, who is in Mashhad. And Masuma is technically not Masoom either. And neither does she have a minor infallibility. That's aside the point, even though Masuma, of course, means the infallible one. So this is actually the second female with her shrine town. Right. But the other one is sort of standardized and we don't necessarily think about that. But Cytoxena, of course, is important. So in many ways, though, also because Cytozena has multiple locations, she is. I think that also adds onto that sort of mystery, which doesn't happen with the Masumet. Right. Because of Saida, Zainab then. So we have the shrine. The shrine was quite small until about a hundred years ago or so. And then in the first part of the 20th century, it starts to grow as there's a concerted effort of the Shi community in Damascus to promote it. And there are businessmen from elsewhere who give a lot of money. Among others, there's a Pakistani businessman who gives a lot of money because his son is healed. And this is, of course, normal throughout. Lots of shrines receive endowments because of miraculous healing. This is not abnormal. So the shrine town grew. It also grew because of the Palestinians and the Golanis who were displaced in the late 40s and then from the various Iraqis, but also foreigners who then had to leave Iraq in the 70s under Saddam and also in the 80s because of the Iraq Iran War, and then in the 90s because of sanctions. This also meant that you had a lot of poverty in the area, which meant that, for instance, there was, for instance, prostitution, et cetera, because of that, of course. So this is a shrine town that saw a lot of growth and a lot of change while I was there. And since I've been there, the shrine has basically doubled in size because they kept on adding to it. Right. So who was there and who attended and who taught? Practically everybody, depending on what areas you went to. So there were some shrines, sorry, some Hausas and some Husseinias that were. That were attended mainly by Kuwaitis, some were mainly by Iraqis, some Iranians. So those were the largest two groups, the Iranians and the Iraqis. There were also those that came from India and Pakistan. There was one Hausa directly dedicated to South Asians. The South Asians generally followed, depending on. But they were oftentimes they would follow Khomeini and Das Khamenei. Then later onwards. And there were those that had converted, let's say they were local Sunnis, they had married in, that happened. There were a couple from Saudi Arabia even. So, again, this is the whole eastern Arabian Gulf states. Those came in with much more money, of course. So there was a distinction between where somebody was from or what kind of national background they had. And that influenced probably how much money money they had. Not always, of course. There were also Afghans, if they were, for instance, from Ahwaz, that would be Arabs from the Iranian side of southern Iraq and southern Iran, right on the Gulf of the Persian Gulf. Those at a certain moment were particularly likely to be watched, for instance, by the Syrian government because the Iranian government asked them to be handed over. So there were all these Various political issues also at hand. Also there, of course, Lebanese. There were those Lebanese who were with the Iranians and those that were against the Iranians. So that existed also. So it's not ever single and straightforward. And some Syrians thought the Lebanese were snooty, and some thought they were not independent.
- [41:54]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [41:55]
Edith Santo
There was just a wide variety, even among the students and the teachers themselves. There were those that were much older. There were those that belonged to important families, and then there were those that were very young. In Syria, the school requirement was up to sixth grade, which means that post sixth grade, what are you going to do? You can either continue going to normal school or you could go to a seminary. Sometimes these seminaries were just ways for women to get out of the house, and they may or may not include childcare. So this was practical in some ways for these women. In some ways, these were ways to meet other people because they were traumatized alone and at home and wanted to get out. Some women were married to Sunnis, and then they had to shut up about it. And sometimes they were not. And then they were quite loud about it. So they were. There was a variety of people. Again, younger students, older students. Sometimes the students were older than the teacher. There's one story I tell where there were some students who were discussing things with a particular teacher who was younger than they were, and this particular teacher was trying to tell them about the nature of marriage. And these students were like, are you kidding me?
- [43:18]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah. That was really fascinating to see as well, in terms of religious. Just authority in general. And then the. The role that the younger faculty played and the.
- [43:29]
Edith Santo
Yeah, right. And I appreciated that. I think I really appreciated that. There was, of course, a sense of camaraderie among these women. It's not like they disagreed fundamentally about the importance of devotion or doing your best or being good and et cetera, but there was just debates on the details of how this ought to look like. And, yeah, this was very helpful. And then, of course, sometimes people would say one thing in classroom and then. And doesn't mean it turned out that way in the real world.
- [44:13]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah.
- [44:14]
Edith Santo
And there's a story of my friend who's, you know, where the teacher argued, you know, that the husband ought to do this. It's like, yeah, that's nice, but he's not. So let's move on. That's the reality. Okay, now we're doing. So I appreciated, again, the reality check that we got there. And at the same time, the students did generally agree that they became better people and virtue Was something emphasized. And this notion of virtue as, yes, you got to be self sacrificing and put your children ahead of you and try not to take the easy way out. Honor, of course, not necessarily being an Islamic issue, but certainly being a cultural value in this context as something that needs to be preserved. And here's also the question of sometimes people are just unwilling to do certain things. Some of these people thinking sort of beyond this context, they could have chosen differently, but they made certain choices because it is what they felt they needed to do for themselves. And that didn't have necessarily anything to do with. With it was not necessarily Islamic one way or the other. Yeah, people just use religion and culture to justify their own choices sometimes. And that's human.
- [45:47]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah, I mean, I do often say that religion. I don't, I don't. I'm not convinced that religion is a source of our values. In fact, we get to project onto religions.
- [45:57]
Edith Santo
Right.
- [45:58]
Shehna Saqqani
Our. Our own values instead. So. Well, speaking. Speaking of the relationship between the teachers and the students. So chapter three was incredibly fascinating because of the. When you talk about the space, the physical space, and then the way that learning happens. And as I was reading before you got to the changes that occur later, I was like, wow, this is such a. It feels very. Obviously there's hierarchies, but it's not very hierarchical. It wasn't unidirectional. The teacher isn't in charge in the student. Because when you talk about the disagreements between teachers and students and very real issues like polygamy and so on, or the hijab, and they're disagreeing with each other and the teacher wasn't. Or the teacher would often say, as somebody would ask, a very practical question, can I visit my family? Xyz? And this is a potential consequence. And then the teacher would give multiple opinions and so on. But all of that to say, I would love for our listeners to hear a little bit about how the space changes. I think the word that you used, something about orientation, the spatial reorientation of the seminary. And then you argue that it affects learning and teaching. What are the changes that happened and then how does that affect the actual learning style? Do they not get to have that? So the debate and the discussion back and forth anymore because of the geographical or I guess, physical location of the space.
- [47:26]
Edith Santo
Thank you. That particular chapter was greatly inspired by Michael Gilsinan's book.
- [47:34]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [47:35]
Edith Santo
And he has this lovely chapter on Majalis versus what he calls the Salon. And he writes about this in middle of the 20th century or so Lebanon. And there he writes that the majlis is where you just sit around in a room and the focus is other human beings, because you're sitting in a circle right on the floor, and you're all equal. Sure. The one that faces the door and is the furthest away from the door, of course, is that that's the most important spot, but you're still in a circle. So there is the most important spot in the circle, but it's still everybody is on one level and everybody can look each other into the eye and have that conversation. And he says the salon is something very different. The salon is the living room that is full of stuff, vitrines that display things. And of course, as I was in Zayda Zeynep, people still had the majlis, that is, they still had the cushions on the floor. In contrast to Damascus. In Damascus, everybody already had couches. But even at the majlis, inside a Zainab, there was still a direction because it was the television in the corner. And so everybody was organized towards this television. And so for a moment there, I think I went on a rampage once or twice. Like Tom people, it's like you're worshiping the television because it's the thing that's
- [48:54]
Shehna Saqqani
always on in the background.
- [48:57]
Edith Santo
Even, of course, now what if. What if it plays Quran in the background? Maybe. Well, maybe that's different. And so I thought of that as also the minbub. So sometimes you'll have somebody like a teacher on a chair. And so then that's already sort of symbolically further up, just like that television is or.
- [49:15]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [49:15]
Edith Santo
So then that already the idea, the
- [49:18]
Shehna Saqqani
idea of a TV in a seminary, like, absolutely unheard of. I mean, especially in the Pakistani context. But then I just realized, as you're saying, what if the Quran is being played in the background instead? You know, mosques have TVs, and they're specifically for women to be able to see the imams in the women's section. So there's that.
- [49:37]
Edith Santo
And you have many more screens now. Right. So post 2020, we have screens everywhere. And this is not just at the university. I'd like to, to give you an outside example, I have a neighbor here who's an architect here in Alabama, and He says that post2020 he's an interior designer. And among other things, he also designs churches. And he says that whereas previously churches were not necessarily like this, today churches are always built or for the majority, with a corner up in the front, a screen on this side and a screen on this side. So that people sit around looking at two screens. And that's normal churches. And so this is, I think, spreading everywhere. And even inside a Zeynep. They did have. Now they didn't have screens per se at the time. They had projectors, for instance, when Bassem Karbilay played downstairs and the women got to listen to it or to see it. So to some extent there are always, as you point out, screens, because women will watch sort of the imam on the screen or the shaykh give a sermon on the screen. So I wonder, I haven't been back to Syria since 2011, but I wonder whether or not there are more screens everywhere now. Certainly when I was. Now that I'm saying all of this, I was in Karbala a couple of years ago for a conference and
- [51:10]
Shehna Saqqani
there
- [51:11]
Edith Santo
are more and more screens everywhere, there too, in other contexts. So anyways. But right, so this spatial reorientation is happening in lots of ways. And so aside from there are of course pictures now on various sides or various backgrounds. It's Husseinia, Zainabiyas and various schools. Also, over time there was this change, as you pointed out in the book that I call Reorienting space. And here in the Zainabiyeh itself, they then created a stage that was sort of lifted up from the normal, from the others, from the audience. In other places they already had this. So for instance, also at the Hausa of Sadr, at the Sadhrain, they had chairs and there was a sort of a table up front that was a little higher, so the sort of a pulpit for the teacher. And thinking about myself, I teach one large enrollment class with 115 students. And of course I stand up front. And for the most part they don't ask questions. I mean, sometimes they do, but that's not what that kind of space is conducive towards. Then I have one seminar where we sit around a large table, and that's very different. And so it is very interesting the ways in which our spatial organization affects the way in which we in the class, whether or not that's at a seminary or at a university, how we interact with our students. And that is certainly the case here as well. And I think that yes, even in my current seminar, I have one 400 level seminar where we all sit around a large table. And I'm grateful it's only seven students. That's what I get for teaching the 115. On the other hand, they will interject and they will talk with each other in ways, of course, that the large enrollment does not And I think that certainly orientation and spatial orientation allows us to see whether or not there's a focal point on somebody, whether or not somebody is now sitting up on a minbar, whether or not somebody is. That gives somebody authority implicitly. So space can give us authority. And that's super interesting because, because the assumption is usually that that's simply knowledge. It's like, yes, but also the very physical context adds to what happens in that space. Absolutely.
- [53:42]
Shehna Saqqani
You know, I, that makes perfect sense. And you're very clear about this in the book division. I just wanted to audience to hear about the what, what the changes were and what things were with the relationship between the student teacher was like before and after. But as I was reading the discussion on the relationship between the saint and the Shiite individual in Sayyidina Zainab, I was, I mean, it's not just that I'm always reminded of that because so my mom wears Sunni and we grew up in Pakistan. And my mom will still say, you know, people have gotten, she uses the words, which means they know better now. So they don't, you know, this is so this is clearly, you know, you don't do this Islamically. But when she, you know, in a Pakistani context, the 80s, she doesn't have sons. And a woman is really completely worthless unless she has a son and the in law is abused and all of that stuff. And so she begged and begged Allah for a son and it wasn't working. And then eventually she just decided to go to this saint and they were very popular before the Taliban in Pakistan. And so I don't know how things are now, but, but so she went to this Baba the saint and prayed and she got a son. And this is where I was like, this is so fascinating. And I wonder if the Sunnis in your context are also doing the same thing as. Well, humans get desperate. But she had a promise. You know, part of her relationship with the saint was that she promised the saint that I will fast on. And I forget now if she had done this with Allah, but it was the thing. If I get the sun, I will pray. I will fast every year on his birthday for as long as she's alive. And so she does. November is my brother's birthday and she will, you know, she will definitely fast as, as long as she's able to. And so I, she got the sun and now she feels really guilty because people have told her, you don't do that. That's haram. You, it was Allah who gave you the son. It was, you don't you don't go to saints, et cetera. But I, it got me in, it got me interested in whether the Shia, where the non Shias too are at all having this kind of similar relationship with the saints, or is it only the Shiites. And if there's any fun, interesting stories that you want to share with our audience, that would be really, that would be fun.
- [55:57]
Edith Santo
Thank you. Right, this is a problem. What if you don't get what you want and you really need the thing that you want, whether or not that's a son or whether or not that's a job, or it could be the health and well being of a loved one, whether or not that's again, a child or husband or parent or whoever.
- [56:17]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [56:18]
Edith Santo
And we get desperate sometimes in life to do what we need to do. And so we do multiple things. So I had, I had one interlocutor, she was somewhat educated, her ex husband, her former husband, he, she was a widow. So he had died, had been Sunni. She was she and she, her argument was, look, come on, I went to a doctor, it didn't work. So like, I now need to go for plan B and plan C and plan D. I mean, it was straightforward, logical, makes good sense. Right. And so the problem then is what happens when the saints don't come through for you? That's when. Now you need to go a little bit further. And so I think this was Rudy Parette. Rudy Parette argues that prayer, when you're making a deal with whether or not it's God or the saint, what you're really doing is again, you're making a deal, which for him makes it magic. So here was the whole question. I had this really whole chapter here on magic. And part of the reason there was a whole debate about should I keep it in the book or not keep it in the book. But to me, first of all, magic is overstating it. That's really an English term. People do various things in order to force the hand of fate, let's put it that way. And that can be everything from absolutely promising to fast, to going to somebody else to a spiritual healer, which, you know, is that haram? Is that not haram? How different is that from just a normal doctor? How different is that from going to a shaykh, like a Sunni shaykh? There was one particular young woman that I, and I do write about her in here, but I particularly write about her also elsewhere. Now one thing I wrote about, what her sister said. So her sister said, yeah, you should just go to a normal Sheikh, we'll pray with you, but not do any of these other rituals. And it's like, okay, so then the question is the question of how much, not whether at all. So it's not a black or white, but really scales of beret of how much of that is allowed and how much isn't allowed. So that makes it more of a sliding scale. There was even a Christian woman who I met inside of Zainab, and she was. Is the mother of George, um, Girgis. And she. She had not had a son. And she had a dream about George, the one who goes and slays the dragon. It's the St. George, the. It's a classic figure saint in much of the world. And he. She promised him that she'll name the son after him if he gives her a son. And so this. She certainly saw this as being right in line with all the Islamic saints. And what everybody else was doing, it was not different. She was educated from the city. She was not from the countryside. In another instance, there was one young woman from the seminary who was married and her husband was shy, and she was worried about this. And in her dream, she goes to Sayra Zainab and Seida Zainab says to her, I love him anyways. And so that was really lovely. Right. So there's a sort of acceptance. It was not all exclusionary. There was certainly an understanding, I think, in many ways, of common difficulties. Yeah. And then what do you do when your husband, let's say, wants to get a second life wife?
- [60:00]
Shehna Saqqani
Now you.
- [60:02]
Edith Santo
Now you can't exactly go to Imam Ali because he said, I had multiple seconds, you know, like, other wives himself.
- [60:08]
Shehna Saqqani
I was actually, when that came up in one of. I think it was in the healing chapter later on. And, and the teachers are like, yeah, you should let your husband have multiple wives and so on. But also, like, when Imam Ali wanted to marry another wife while he was married to Fatima, the Prophet was like, you can't do that. Right? And so, like, why does nobody ever, like, like use that? Like, why. Why. Why does nobody ever say, well, the pro Muhammad would not allow him to marry another woman because he knew it would hurt Fatima. So why. Why isn't the pre. Fatima or the. Yeah, the pre Fatima or during Fatima, like, why is. Why is it only the post Fatima Ali, like the one that's invoked in this, in these examples? So that was. That was a little bit. I was like, yeah, okay, that's not a. That's not a. That's not a good argument.
- [60:49]
Edith Santo
Also, like, with Selective reading.
- [60:51]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [60:51]
Edith Santo
I mean, why do we. Or why do people idealized the marriage with, let's say, Aisha and not Khadijah, like, where she was 15 years older? Like, I mean, why is that not the ideal marriage? You know? But.
- [61:05]
Shehna Saqqani
And also just the fact that, you know, the t. The. The fact that nobody wants their husbands to be polygamous, and yet you got like, I. It just. It was. I mean, yeah, I. I don't know anyone who's like, oh, my husband can have multiple wives. I'm totally fine with that. Like, no, everybody is dreading that possibility, and they don't want that. That. But, yeah, it was really fascinating to see the example of Ali in particular, to be like, no, you can't stop your husband, or you can't pray against that because you don't go to. It was interesting. I knew that before as well. You go to the kind of whatever you need. You go to the saint. There has to be a parallel. There has to be some relationship between what you want and saint's abilities, the thing that they're focused on.
- [61:51]
Edith Santo
So in anthropology, one might call that mimetic magic. Right. You want something that'll reflect what it is that you want. Right. Some sort of mimesis. Absolutely. And that makes sense. It's the law of sympathy. We all want to be heard and we all want to be seen. And Karen Ruffle has this lovely article also where she argues that, yeah, there's the perfect man. Right. And that's technically Ram. But then, like, Ram, like, also rejects Sita. And same thing for Imam Ali. Like, he's the perfect man. Yeah, but you really want him as a husband. It's like, no, you don't actually want the perfect man.
- [62:33]
Shehna Saqqani
And that's something that I don't think we talk about enough. Like, just because someone is a role model doesn't mean they're my role model in every single area of life. I mean, I had a friend, a Muslim feminist friend, who wrote an article about. And the article went viral. But she also got lots of death. I don't know about death threats, but I know that. That imams were giving sermons against her, which they love to do when we say something they don't like. But she argued that, look, there are certain things about the prophets that Allah talks about in the Quran, including the prophet Muhammad, who did things that I would not want my husband to do. And I do not have to love these things, and I don't have to even love these individuals. They can't force us to do. So. And the hate she got. But it was a really gendered response. The women were like, oh, wow, this is fascinating. I feel. So. I feel more validated with my views about these. These struggling things that these, you know, she gives example of Luth, for example, and. And what he, you know, giving away his daughters, et cetera. But meanwhile, the male readers were like, no, you cannot just. You can't be. You can't pick and choose. And then it's like, yes, we do pick and choose all the time. And there's. That's how.
- [63:34]
Edith Santo
And so do men. Right. Like, everybody does.
- [63:36]
Shehna Saqqani
It's just, you pick and choose all the time. You. We literally have lots. Islamic laws are men picking and choosing, like, messages.
- [63:45]
Edith Santo
It's the human condition. Right. Yeah.
- [63:49]
Shehna Saqqani
Just fascinating. Really fascinating discussions that came up in the book. Yeah. So I. Oh, were you gonna continue?
- [63:58]
Edith Santo
No, please go ahead. Okay.
- [64:00]
Shehna Saqqani
So the chapter on carnivalizing piety, it was so fascinating. I mean, I keep saying this for everything, but I learned so much from this book, like, Edith, this was a very, very enlightening book for me. Thank you. And I dream of one day being in a space where I get to be. I get to observe these things also. I mean, I, you know, wish there was. It was safer for all of us to just to be able to witness all of this. But what I. It was. It was. It was so enlightening to see what Maharam looks like, what happens on the different days, and how the women's morning rituals, or just the women's morning rituals came up earlier, but also just how men and women are. Are flagellating. And one of the most enlightening parts of the chapter was the differences in the different Shia views on flagellation, which, of course. Of course, there are debates about, you know, to what extent, and is this legitimate, is this valid, is this Islamically acceptable, et cetera. But I don't think Sunnis talk about or appreciate enough the internal debates that. That Shiites themselves have about this issue, about this issue particularly, and the purposes that they serve and the things that they symbolize. Of course. But I was also especially struck by your experience, like, when you. When the. When you ask about, do women ever do this? And your intellectors are like, yeah, do you want to join us? And you're like, yes. So I'm a little bit too excited. I don't know if you can tell I'm too excited about this conversation, but let's go back to the Muharram. What does muharram look like in Sayyid Al Zainab and what are the different views? What is the internal debate of self flagellation like in Shia Islam?
- [65:45]
Edith Santo
Right, thank you. I've really used a lot of Bakhtin for this. And I like to think about the carnival. Of course, the carnival is usually something happy. And so one of the difficulties with thinking about this is because this is a sad event. And yet most of the literature that we have about events like the carnival or event religion, as it's been called in newly in other contexts are usually focused on happy events. And this is not that. Nevertheless, this is an event that draws in lots of people. And just because you're crying throughout the Majlis doesn't mean that of course that you're going to be miserable throughout. There's a lot of excitement that happens. There's a lot of stuff for sale. People are out, there's going out at night to see colors and music. And I'm not music. I mean morning, of course, singing and there are going to be drums and there's just a lot going on. And that sort of excitement, of course brings people together. And when you have people being brought together, there's camaraderie and lots of wonderful things can happen. Of course, at the same time, that doesn't mean everybody is happy. People get colds. People sort of are like, like, can you believe they were snotty and like snotted into the cup that we all need to use now?
- [67:06]
Shehna Saqqani
Like,
- [67:09]
Edith Santo
anyways, people are people. But these various groups came together and right. As you pointed out, there are all these debates about what it is that people ought to do. So for the Iranians, by which I mean in this case Khamenei and many others that are associated with the Iranian establishment. And for them it's important to mourn in a way that is acceptable to be displayed online or by magazines and newspapers across the world because they care about their image and particularly because in this case, Right, we're talking in my religion 100 class the other day about insiders and outsiders and the problem with an insider point of view. And I point out that. Okay, well, interestingly, there is not just one insider point of view. What is when you have multiple insiders, insider points of view. And I will tell you a little story that is a follow up to this book that, however, is on this topic and that's the following. So it was 2016 or 17, I was in Iran. I went to this summer class. No, it was winter Clash, actually. Anyways, it was a class on Shiism at the University of Denominations and religions in Qom. So it was a 10 day or something like that event. And I went because I really wanted to go to Qom. And I just, I didn't know where to go. And so it's just, it's really nice, I think the first time when you go somewhere to have the organization, you know, book your hotels and do the all the thing for you, plus you get to meet other people. So it was just a fantastic activity. They also invited me to give a talk while I was there. And I said, fantastic, I will do this, this. So I gave a talk that day about Cyto Zainab in particular, about how interpretations of Cyto Zainab have changed over time. And this is something that Kamaran Arahi argues about, Fatima, where he says that until the 70s or so, the argument is generally that she's this pious Muslim woman, which means conservative and submissive, et cetera. Then comes the revolution. So in the 70s she becomes this hero and suddenly afterwards she becomes government compliant. And so there's this interesting, obviously just discourse that reflects current political realities. Okay, so coming back to Sayta Zainab then, and my talk in Qom. So I talked to them about precisely this, about how Zainab was interpreted differently throughout the various decades and by different people. So for instance, among the refugees in Syria, she was a social worker, whereas previously, again, she was a revolutionary. Here she was a social worker, whereas Iran, she was government compliant, sort of like whatever woman. And I talked about the Shirazis, which are the group or is the group of scholars. And it's a Hausa where I mainly studied. So that belonged to them. And that's Mohammed Mohammad Shirazi and then his son. So he died 2001. So this whole legacy, the Shirazis had a major falling out with Khomeini already in the 80s. And then it just became worse. And Khamenei has not exactly banned them, but some of them were put under house arrest. And they're just not treated so well and calm. And so they left. They disagree with the notion of they don't want a supreme leader. They want there to be multiple ayatollahs that are involved in government. So they want Shurat Al Fukah. Okay, so as I gave my talk, however, in Qom, this girl stands up. So there was a class there, there was a seminary class of girls from Tehran and they were, they came to my talk and the teacher stood up at the end of my talk and started criticizing me. How can you defend the Shirazis? They're the most despicable people out there. They're against Khamenei. Khamenei is the one who has declared them to be practically outside of Islam. Etc. Right. So this is the problem when you have multiple insiders and these insiders are feuding subgroups or belong to mu feuding subgroups. Right. So then you as the outsider or you as the academic. Of course it is our job then to, or I see it as my job to simply say, okay, this is what these guys say. This is the broader context. They don't agree with those guys.
- [71:48]
Shehna Saqqani
Lies.
- [71:48]
Edith Santo
I'm not here to tell you who's correct. I'm just here to tell you why this makes sense in this context. Great. And I just, I really appreciate that. By the way, the outcome of that whole discussion was it went on because there was a whole discussion on like, well, this became a whole thing about Iraq versus Iran and about who was right and whether not sustainers were like had more authority than Khamenei, etc. Any case. So it became this broader debate. Right. But coming back to Cyto Zainab and in particular the case of the Shirazis. The Shirazis are pro salflagellation. They are pro the cutting of the head. I did join them on that one day, as is in the book. It turns out I have very thick calluses on my feet, have always had them. So walking across hot coal was not a problem whatsoever. Also it cooled down immediately because it was on this cold floor. So like the hot coals immediately cooled down.
- [72:50]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah, you said it was even. It was even comfortable. I was like, oh God, yeah, yeah.
- [72:56]
Edith Santo
I mean at that point you're, you're, you know, you're all running across it and you're just all laughing and.
- [73:03]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [73:04]
Edith Santo
And becomes a little bit of a competition as it of course also did among the men as well, who can make the loudest sounds. And it became a question of machismo among the men and certainly among the women also a matter of like who can take the nest and. Right. We all had a lot of fun with that. The Shirazis promote all of these activities even abroad. More recently, Yafa Shanek has a book on the Shirazis also in London where they also do these things and also partly in Bahrain, I think. So this is done not only or this was not only done in Sade Zainab, this was done elsewhere as well. Others think that you shouldn't draw blood. Others think, for instance Hezbollah argued should donate blood instead of self flagellating and that's fine and good. Except of course, that takes the whole fun and game out of the whole machismo question when you're donating blood instead of participating in these rituals. Plus, I will have to admit, me personally, I'm super afraid of needles. And so I did not go anywhere near those blood donation places. Even when the normal doctor draws my blood, I have to, I look away and I ask them to please talk to me. And like, well, I'm like, I'm, I'm like a little six year old, like sitting there crying, I tell you. But this was something very different, I think because yeah, maybe it's just not a needle and being cut is very different. And then they had these chains also with, you know, the Pakistan they had them with and without the little blades at the end. So those can be at least if you're not doing what for too long, it's really quite massaging for the back. I think. I also appreciate physical rituals thinking about that more generally. And I've been thinking about it more about the materialism of it all. So oftentimes one of the issues is that. But we in the modern world, and I'm going to say this, let's say for my class right now, my Religion 100 class, when we think about religion, oftentimes there's this essentialist argument that people make. It's about the spirit and about. It's like religion is in your head or in your heart, but it's certainly not in your body. And I think that these bodily rituals. So of course there's food always sure. Feeding ourselves. But in this case it's also a bunch of physical activity and feeling body parts that you didn't know you had previously. I mean, again, like the running across the hot coals. So like feet burning. Whoever thought that feet are part of religion? I mean, but why not? And I found that very interesting that there's this whole bodily experience that goes into it and that is tied to emotion.
- [76:10]
Shehna Saqqani
And the feet burning symbolizing Zaynab's return right during this hot desert. I just, I mean, yeah, the men, the men don't have, they're not, they're not walking on unburned cold. Right? They're like. Because the men, the men's rituals are very, very public. The women get to see, everybody gets to see them. And the women that you participated with as well are sort of in somebody's home inside a home, a private home. And it's much more private for reasons that you discussed there as well. And like they're so afraid of. Even be. Oh, no, I can hear you guys. That means that the men must have heard us. And, you know, so the men aren't. The men are. The men are not using coals like the women are.
- [76:52]
Edith Santo
No. Some of the men's rituals were a little bit more private. There was one or two occasions where the men were doing this by themselves, where they were. Even though the men otherwise also, of course, will take off their shirts. But in this case, it was a particular Hausa where the men had taken off their shirt and there was a curtain coming down. And on one occasion, I remember there was one girl who, like, sneaked through and was like, oh, yeah, that's my husband right over there. The other one's like, ooh, not that looking. So even with the men, there was a. There was also a feeling of like, okay, we get to see something. Yes, but it's not what we usually see.
- [77:33]
Shehna Saqqani
Right. And it's. It's, you know, debated and stuff, but it's permissible. I can just, like, you know, see this. Right. In any context.
- [77:41]
Edith Santo
Yeah, that's true. There's no men, like, peeking in on the women the way in which these women were peeking in on the men, right?
- [77:47]
Shehna Saqqani
Yes, exactly.
- [77:48]
Edith Santo
This is true.
- [77:49]
Shehna Saqqani
And, like, because you're also partaking in the ritual when you're just observing these men do it. Right? So as an observer, you get. You're also Right.
- [77:56]
Edith Santo
When you're outside.
- [77:57]
Shehna Saqqani
Right. You're atoning for your sins sort of in. In similar ways. Right. It's just different. Different. Different rules for them.
- [78:03]
Edith Santo
Right. Because you're crying for them the way that Zainab cried for her brothers. Right? Exactly.
- [78:09]
Shehna Saqqani
And that was also interesting to see the women's reactions to the men. Some of them being very, very proud, like, oh, that's my son. Oh, yes. And then smiling, and then others being like, no, this is, like, just crying or not. So, like, very, very human reactions. Right. And the human diversity. That was a really, really wonderful chapter. I really enjoyed that one. Thank you. And then. But. But your experience, I'm interested. Like, what did you. Which specific things did you get to partake in? And what did you learn? Like, what did you learn from both the observation, but also for. If you experience. If you did specific things, too. Like, I. When the. When one of the women asks you, is my. Is there blood yet? And she's just got her head. And you're like, no, not yet. And then she keeps on like, did you. Like, what. What was I. Yeah, I did have a little cut.
- [79:06]
Edith Santo
I Did get a cut, I will say, I'll tell you this. And it wasn't deep, it wasn't a lot. Like, I did bleed some. So like there was. We put a part of the. The white linen that women were used to cover themselves also above their. Their black clothes. Right. Because on white you'll see that blood more clearly. So I did bleed a little bit also just to. Again, you know, you want to fit in.
- [79:34]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah, I would have. If I'd been. If there was somebody saying, do you want to join us? I too would have said, yes, absolutely. You say, needless to say, I'm like, yes, that would be me as well. Right.
- [79:47]
Edith Santo
And I enjoyed the, as you point out, going across coals. What else did we do? Normal flagellation on the back with normal chain chains. Then there was the normal clapping on the face. I do have somewhat long and by the way, in Shiism, you can keep your fingernails longer than in Sunnism because it's a woman's natural. Like at least the Syrian at the. At Abu Nur, where I was in Syria prior to that, that was a seminary for women. They would complain about fingernails, you know, like the shaitan is underneath your fingernails argument. My argument was always, it's much easier to keep them clean when they're a little longer than rather super short.
- [80:29]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [80:30]
Edith Santo
Anyways, that's good to know. But the she's would argue that it's a nat. It's a part of the natural beauty of a woman. So you're allowed to keep them a little longer. Right. So I didn't tear my face or anything like that. Like, that's which I didn't really see often. Sometimes. Yeah. The tearing of the clothes would happen. Not often, however. Usually you're going to beat yourself so much that you're going to become red, you're going to cry out loud. There's not. So a lot of that. What happens happens in a group. It's not for the women at least. You're not going to distinguish yourself by being the one to cry the loudest or by beating yourself the loudest or by becoming the most bloody. In certain ways, the men's was much more performative. The women's was communal, let's say more. So there was less individual performance with the women's activities as compared to the men's. But as you point out, the men's also oftentimes happen outside and in public. And so it makes sense that as an individual man would, for instance, start to beat himself with a chain or cut himself or something. Like that. That would be more. Yeah. Performative or it would be more. Yeah, again, individualistic. That's less the case with the cutting because you're just, you're coming in rows and like everybody gets a cut and continues marching. So that is also very uniform in a sense of people doing it together. You know, interestingly, later onwards, when I was in, when I was in Iraq, I had the father of a student of mine who was a cleric in Najafq is a cleric. He told me, why are you researching all of this? This makes us look bad. He was not against it, but his argument is it makes us look bad. Why can't you write about something that is nice, like interfaith dialogue? I smiled brightly and try not to say anything self incriminating on that.
- [82:37]
Shehna Saqqani
Let's talk about spiritual healing, which you talk about in different contexts beyond just, you know, medicine and use the word Islamicate magic and so on. I really enjoyed the last two chapters as well. But we can condense them and just talk about healing in general. The different kinds of healings that take place in Sayyida Zainab. I was really fascinated with the Tabib Rouhani that you talk about. The Shaykh Abu Ahmed, the fact that more women come to him than men, which doesn't surprise me, but I'm still interested in what is it about and the issues that women are bringing. Always about the. In laws, for example, someone. You just have a really wonderful analysis of the whole scenario. But yeah, so this Tabib Rouhani, the Shaykh Abu Ahmad, who. What was really interesting for me was that when you ask him, like when he tells one of the women who visit him and I forget her name, but he says something about a. Is it a Jewish jinn? Right. And then you're like, I can't believe he just told her that. And then he gives you a lot more details than he gives her. And that was really. In some ways it seems like he's trying to empower the person to do what we're taught in counseling and psychology to. I'm just going to give you this and then you have the healing powers within you and then the women just feel so much better and their healing begins that way. But yeah, what, what is it that he's offering the community? What is. Why do more women come to him than men? Yeah, just, just really. And other stories maybe that you didn't get to mention in here, but that you were a part of that you just observed. And I, you know, I'm, I was really interested like, okay, is this person
- [84:26]
Edith Santo
gonna get a divorce?
- [84:27]
Shehna Saqqani
Because that's what they're coming to avoid. And yeah, okay, she didn't get a divorce then, but did she get a divorce later? I was just wondering.
- [84:34]
Edith Santo
Not as far as I know. Okay.
- [84:36]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah.
- [84:37]
Edith Santo
That said was a passionate marriage, and you can still get divorced later too. There's always that possibility. Right, Right. So women tend to come more to these spiritual healers than men, although that doesn't mean that men don't come. And I think that men perhaps. I think men get help in different contexts. So the landlord that I had who owned the particular clinic where the spiritual healer was, he also owned a men's barber shop and a. And a real estate shop. And I assume, like, this is my.
- [85:17]
Shehna Saqqani
My thought.
- [85:17]
Edith Santo
I don't have proof for this, which is of course why I can't write this, but I assume that the men will have their answers or will have their question answered at the barber shop or in some other context.
- [85:31]
Shehna Saqqani
I thought about that. But then. And the women are getting a very specific, like they're getting a set of instructions here, do this. And also they get. They have to pay for it.
- [85:41]
Edith Santo
Right.
- [85:41]
Shehna Saqqani
You know, like. And so I. Because you do mention that men do. Men do utilize the service as well. But I've just wondered, like, why, you know, and there's also the element, the reasons that women are coming versus what the men are coming. And of course, these are. I know that a female power differential. Right. I mean, absolutely right.
- [86:00]
Edith Santo
And seriously is right, because these women are coming in there because they have no other recourse. Men tend to have another recourse. And so they don't need to come when they don't have this other recourse, then they can also come, I. E. If it's something very different, let's say they have all these nightly nightmares, then they will come, perhaps because it's not something that you can necessarily have quote, unquote, power over. But in the woman's case, let's say she wants to stop the husband from getting a second wife or from divorcing her. Well, a man can, and that is within his power. So it's unnecessary for him to come, of course, and he's not going to come because he really wants a son. He can just get a second wife and like, and be over. Be done with it. So men have recourses, I think, to solutions that women did not. But that, again, that doesn't mean that men don't come to these sheikhs or to these spiritual doctors, these tabibrahanis There were several series also about, quote, unquote, spiritual healing in Syria at the time. Syria produces a bunch of Ramadan series. And so in those, you do have the men come, also less so, but you do have them come as well. So I just. So it's not necessarily the case that this is only a women's strategy, right? Even though, yes, women tend to make up the majority of the clients. I am really like the story, it's one of my favorite ones, thinking about that young woman who comes in about wanting to leave the house and run away, and he tells her she has a Jewish gin inside of her. Because that is that to me. I read that, or I thought about that after I had read Michael Taussig's book on the devil and commodity fetishism. And one of the things that Michael Taussig talks about is the ways in which the problem then becomes transferred to a metaphorical level, in a sense, and then can be addressed, and then that solution is reapplied. In other words, because the problem cannot be directly talked about and cannot be directly approached and resolved, it has to be resolved in this more indirect way. And once I came to understand that, I think that all of it made much more sense to me, right. That this is a way in which these women could then empower themselves to solve their problem. For instance, this girl, the one who quote, unquote, had supposedly the Jewish din inside of her. The way he put it, he says that she probably slept with her boyfriend. She can't undo that he was not going to marry her. She can't undo that either. And she wants to run away because she doesn't want to marry whoever the brothers want her to marry. And so she was just in this unhappy situation. But there's no real way to resolve it because the boyfriend's not going to marry her. At some point, she does need to get married, locally speaking, because it's the normal thing that people do. And even if she doesn't get married to this particular guy, it'll be the next one. And so to some extent, she needed to come around to it and accept things. But at this point, oh.
- [89:20]
Shehna Saqqani
Because when I read that part, it seemed as if he. Because I was like, how does he know? He says something like, she had anal sex with her husband with this boyfriend of hers, and now he won't marry her. And so her brothers are trying to tell her to marry someone else. And I was wondering. So I just assumed that he. That she had divulged that information to Him. Okay. That changes everything for me. Yeah.
- [89:46]
Edith Santo
I'm sorry. That. That wasn't clear. Right.
- [89:51]
Shehna Saqqani
I mean, that he. No, no, it's. It's not. I just assume. Because I, like, it's not that I just. The way that it's written is something like when he's explaining to you. He's saying that. But I know maybe it's me, maybe. Maybe I misunderstood. But, like, I just. I was like, oh, he's telling you a lot of details about the relationship, right?
- [90:13]
Edith Santo
These are the things that he assumed that he.
- [90:15]
Shehna Saqqani
Okay, but you do say that later. You do say that. He.
- [90:18]
Edith Santo
He.
- [90:18]
Shehna Saqqani
There's a lot. He's divulging or he's. He's. He's. He's withholding details from the. From the person who's fitting.
- [90:24]
Edith Santo
So you.
- [90:25]
Shehna Saqqani
Okay, so that's what you. Got it, got it, got it.
- [90:27]
Edith Santo
So what. What he told me on a different occasion was that. That you generally assume the worst case, by which he means you generally assume that there is money, monetary corruption, and then there is extramarital sex. You just assume these things. Even if she did not lose her virginity, which, of course, having a new hymen put in costs her $200, it's not the end of the world, although she didn't have that money. And having anal sex is sort of the normal premarital thing to do in this kind of context. So that was him simply assuming the worst normal scenario. It. Right. That. That is what happened with the boyfriend. And so therefore the next logical thing is that she's hung up on it. I did hear this story that the girl basically had gave herself to him, which was always anal rather than vaginal sex, though, because, again, of the problem of. Of virginity, which needed to be kept. So this was normal to some extent, or this is something I'd heard elsewhere. And then she was heartbroken when he married somebody else. Right. This was not the only story of this kind. And so then she needed to feel like, again, she had some control over her own life. And this was a way to do
- [91:47]
Shehna Saqqani
that, because I thought when you were saying that when he adds these details, I thought it was that his interpretations are what he's withholding, not the assumptions that he's making.
- [92:00]
Edith Santo
Okay, right, right. The assumptions and those. The detailed of the details of these assumptions. Right. Now, he had basically heard that she did say she wanted to run away to Latakia. She may have talked about the man, about the boyfriend, but nothing else. Like, just like, she wanted to run away, like. But that was in the past anyway, so she wanted to run away way it's a majority Alawite city. So that is why she want, if she is a Palestinian girl wants to run away to a majority Alawite city, it's most likely because there's a boyfriend involved. Plus she's 19, of course there's going to be a boyfriend involved because again he just said always assume that there is a problem of sex because people will come for three problems. Right. It's love, money or health. Health. And so his argument is you look at the person, you see them and if it's a 19 year old, it's not going to be health money. Sure. But really it's going to be a love problem because all 19 year olds have love problems. Which always made sense to me.
- [93:03]
Shehna Saqqani
Kind of tracks. Yeah, it makes really good sense monetarily, the amount of money that he's charging them because you said something like it's affordable for the person, but it's still a pricey amount of money. I don't know. I had a lot of thoughts reading that. And this happens, of course this happens in a lot of religious contexts and lots of spaces. And I grew up to a lot of it in Pakistan also and India has made movies out of this. The business that religious leaders make out of something like this. But yeah, that was.
- [93:43]
Edith Santo
I think there's also a psychological issue to that. Right. So like the more we know this, the more we invest in a particular line of thought or a healing or whatever it is, the less we're likely to question it. And so it makes total sense that in this case, if he charges this much money, the only way in which you can justify it to yourself is to say, yeah, this will work.
- [94:08]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah. I was just talking about this actually with a friend recently. Like if someone charges a lot for something, we're more likely to think that this is probably more valuable. Right? That item that grams cost more. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. No, that's a really good point.
- [94:25]
Edith Santo
Yeah.
- [94:26]
Shehna Saqqani
Right.
- [94:26]
Edith Santo
That's what we think quality is all about. Right?
- [94:30]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah, no, that makes really good sense. Thank you for clarifying that and, and providing that detail. So you said you haven't been in since 2011.
- [94:41]
Edith Santo
I have not been back to Syria. I thought about it last two years ago or so. Last year it became easier to get a visa. I could have gotten a visa from Iraq. So I went to Iraq and there from Baghdad. But there was even like an up to two month waiting period and of course I can't wait around all summer just to get a visa. And then at this point, I'm also worried because, of course, currently there's a very Sunni government that's installed and they're not exactly very friendly towards minorities. So I worry about this. Plus the community, by the way, for the large part, is gone. So when I was in Karbila about what is it like two, three years ago for a conference, I met one of the teachers from the Zeinabiya at this conference in Karbella, working for the shrine there. So even the women that were involved in these institutions in Syria are no longer there.
- [95:42]
Shehna Saqqani
That's what I was going to ask, if there were any. What kinds of changes you've heard about or seen since then.
- [95:47]
Edith Santo
Right. Oh, wow. Much of this is now. It has greatly changed.
- [95:52]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah. Yeah. So as. So we're pretty much done talking about most of the things that I had in mind, and I know we didn't get to everything, but is there anything else that you. That you think is important enough to be addressed that you want to just bring up or provide some, you know, to elaborate on before we end the discussion?
- [96:13]
Edith Santo
I think one of the important aspects to think about is the importance of mourning. A lot of religion today. So this is again, us going back to. I quoted or I noted Michael Taussig earlier, oftentimes religion today is about beliefs and practices and festivals, and oftentimes overlooks the importance of these more negative feelings. And also practicing these things. We think of religion as the thing that contributes to peace and happiness, particularly happiness and joy. And I'm not saying that these sad rituals don't also contribute to joy. They certainly do. And. And that's exactly why that's important, is because these rituals are particularly cathartic in many ways. But also by praying, for instance, for the Imam al Mahdi to come back, those are not necessarily only prayers for peace also. Sure, but not only. And I think that that is really important to realize that absolutely, religion is a social construct that human beings and human beings project onto their own stuff, emotional baggage onto the world around them, including on these discourses and practices that we then call religion. And I think, yes, that is very important that we don't ignore these other facets of human activity, because that is what I think oftentimes again, in the context that I'm in now. So when I was in, in Iraq and had Iraqi students, even for Sunni and Arabs and Kurds, there's still an importance of, of course, memory, and there's an understanding that it's not only about happiness. I think that that is A particular modern Western American or so it's a capitalist. There was a book, I think, out with Duke University Press or so the couple years ago, something on, like, the Imperative to be Happy. Right. And I think that that is something that this. This speaks back to. And I think that is important to know that that very much shifts our understanding of the purpose.
- [98:35]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah. No, I mean, and mourning just as a. I read this really wonderful thing recently on social media. It was a tweet that somebody said something like, please don't. Please do something with your emotions, with your grief, with your pain. Don't just let it sit in your body. Like, do something creative with it. Do something. Something else with it. Like, don't get it out of your body. And that's what mourning, like in a healing way or just in general. I feel like any morning is dealing with. Coping with grief in ways that can heal us. Thank you for adding that. So our final question to our guest is to tell us if there's anything that they're working on currently that we can look forward to in the future. And I have to add, because I really think this is important. It's also okay if you're not working on anything and if you're just resting, because I don't believe we have to have. I don't believe in a very, very capitalist idea of productivity. But if there's anything you're working on right now that we can look forward
- [99:33]
Edith Santo
to in many ways, I think I'm shifting currently. So I've been working on the Middle east for a long time, and I enjoy it greatly. It is simply very sad that Syria is currently, of course, inaccessible. I was in Iraq this summer. I was able to get some university funding for it, which didn't come through last year because of the bombings that happened between Israel and Iran last year. And even this summer, I'm really grateful. My father was with me. We left during the week of the bombing, and so we had to leave overland and take the bus. This would have been more fun had I been in my 20s, because long bus rides were not so much of a problem then. Then they've become more difficult. I mean, it was fine. We were okay. I had never been in Diarbakir, and that was fantastic. So I greatly appreciate the opportunities that I've had there and the project that I was working on right over there. I was now thinking about conversion more generally. One of the things, of course, is post2014, post ISIS, there was a move of conversion towards Zoroastrianism, but also there are many more more missionaries there now. And I find this interesting. Now that I'm in Alabama, I meet all of these locals who all want to become missionaries. And so this is partly also me turning my own lens a little bit around. I'm also considering so thinking more about missionaries and Muslims elsewhere. So I started off with Iraqis here and I've proposed a project, although I haven't started on that yet, to think more about Islam and migration in particular in Europe, since that is an ongoing social and political issue and new and exciting.
- [101:27]
Shehna Saqqani
Yeah.
- [101:28]
Edith Santo
Thank you.
- [101:28]
Shehna Saqqani
Thank you for letting us know. So this was such a fun conversation. I really, really enjoyed it and I'm so grateful that I got to read this book and that I get to have time to got to have a conversation with you about it. So thank you for your time, Edith.
- [101:42]
Edith Santo
Thank you. Thank you so much, Anna. This has been a real pleasure. Thank you.
- [101:46]
Shehna Saqqani
All right, so that was me in conversation with Edith Santo about her book 12 verse Shiri self Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria Mourning Syeda Zainab, which was published in 2025 with Edinburgh University Press. Thank you so much for joining us. And I'll see you in another episode. Sal Lamp.