In this presentation, Fouad Gehad Marei (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)), co-editor of Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala (Brill, 2024) will introduce and discuss the recently published edited volume. The book features twelve chapters which explore the material media — images, objects, clothes, food, incense, holy waters, spaces, and sounds — that instantiate somatic, corporeal and visceral expressions and experiences of Shiʿi Muslim devotion. Drawing on rich empirical material from Turkey, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, Albania, South Asia and the diaspora, the book examines how religious materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as gateways and links to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly. The book makes several propositions that push the frontiers of the study of religion while also examining how materiality is integral to the politics of heritagization processes that are shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious — in this case Shiʿi — heritage.

The book is being presented for the first time in London and the United Kingdom. Hosted by the Aga Khan Centre and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, this is an occasion to engage with practitioners and scholars of religion and religious heritage, and to discuss the rich aesthetic formations, religious spaces, atmospheres, and material techniques and ‘mundane’ technologies that constitute Shiʿi religious experience and expression.