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Paper short abstract:

Based on long-term fieldwork with Shiʿi Muslims in Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus this paper argues for a relational understanding of Islam which pays due attention to the ways individuals and communities live alongside, and cultivate relations with, supernatural beings.

Paper long abstract:

Muslim lives exist in "networks of relationships" (Orsi 2013). This comprises both horizontal human-human relations and vertical ones, which include not only a powerful monotheistic God (Schielke 2019) but other supernatural beings who are taken to be really, literally present in the everyday circumstances of their lives. Based on long-term fieldwork with Shiʿi Muslims in Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus, in this paper, I argue for a relational understanding of Islam that pays due attention to the ways individuals and communities live alongside, and cultivate relations with, supernatural beings.

The cultivation of intimacy-relations of closeness, familiarity, and love—with the Family of the Prophet is central to Shiʿi Muslim religiosity, sociality, and subject formation. As immaterial yet immanent beings imbued with agency and the ability to witness and intercede in this life, Shiʿi Muslims see the Family of the Prophet, collectively known as the Ahl al-Bayt in Arabic, as actors in their lives with whom they seek to forge relations. Engaging ethnographically with human relations with such immaterial beings is not only essential to understanding diverse modes of Muslim religiosity but further "destabilizes the distinction between the material and immaterial, natural and supernatural" (Bubandt 2018, 7-8) which underlies much anthropological scholarship. Doing so pushes the study of human-nonhuman entanglements beyond its materialist biases (Fernando 2017) to consider the possibilities of extra-secular 'becomings' (Haraway 2008), ways of becoming attuned, encountering, and living in a relational context with immaterial as well as material beings.