Traces of the Prophets

Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam

By: Adam Bursi

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Hardcover | 12 January 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover
280 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.2

Hardcover

$340.75

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Contributing to scholarship studying Islam alongside other late antique religions, Traces of the Prophets highlights how early Muslims deployed sacred objects and spaces to inscribe and dispute Islam's continuities with, and differences from, Judaism and Christianity. The book argues that prophets' relics ritually and rhetorically shaped Muslim identities in the first centuries of Islam.
Traces of the Prophets rewrites the history of holy bodies and sacred spaces in the emergence of Islam. Rather than focusing on theological controversies among early Muslims, this book is grounded in the material objects and places that Muslims touched and 'thought with' in defining Islamic practice and belief. While often marginalized in modern scholarship, sacred relics and spaces stood at the disputed boundaries of emergent Islamic identities. Objects and spaces like Abraham's footprints in Mecca and Muhammad's tomb in Medina provided sites of shared Islamic ritual, as well as tools for differentiating Muslims from non-Muslims.

Industry Reviews

This engagingly written study replaces stereotypes about Muslim iconoclasm and Christian saint-worship with an absorbing account of late antique debates over the significance of holy remains and the parameters of ritual engagement with them -- debates that crossed boundaries between elites and commoners, Sunnis and Shi'ites, and Muslims and non-Muslims.

--Marion H. Katz New York University

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