Crafting Sacrality from the tensile life of objects: learning about the material life of prayer beads from a Khaksari Sufi Murshid

Cont Islam https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-017-0407-5 Crafting Sacrality from the tensile life of objects: learning about the material life of prayer beads from a Khaksari Sufi Murshid Younes Saramifar 1 # The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Abstract Sufi mystical experiences and practices are populated with objects. Objects exist among masters as well as disciples and followers regardless of the meanings and significations that practices impose on them. The life of these objects begins before they are enacted into sociocultural and religious relationships, as they are crafted or traded before they take on the overwhelming semiosis ascribed to them by religiouscultural codes or social networks. This article presents an apprenticeship ethnographic journey in which I follow an Iranian Sufi master and, along with him, the tensile life of Sufi prayer beads, or tasbihs. I address prayer beads as an object prior to their gaining of any religious meaning in the networks of everyday life. Tracing the material life of prayer beads reveals how the Bobjectness^ of the rosary preexists the material practices that give it meaning in the Sufi order. Through the approach of speculative realism I examine what it means to study a religious-object-in-itself. I follow the religiously loaded object and its spiritual emergence by way of object-oriented ontology to forgo the meanings and relationships that shadow the objects. Keywords Object-ness . Object oriented ontology (OOO) . Rosary . Prayer beads . Anthropology of Tariqat . Material Sufism I have been enchanted by colourful prayer beads and the click-click-click of the beads falling onto each other in my grandfather’s hand. The sound also calls to my mind the hands of Sayed Doa, who lived next door to my house when I was growing up and foretold the future through the beads. I was born in Iran, where the tasbih, prayer beads or rosaries, are a constant companion of practicing Shi’as. They are found in various sizes and shapes, and carried in pockets, placed between the folds of prayer rugs, kept next to * Younes Saramifar 1 Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands Cont Islam the Quran, fashionably looped around a wrist. I became familiar with these rosaries because I was born in a place where Shi’ism is the predominant faith and shrines are plenty. Every shop in the old part of Isfahan near the shrine and the cemetery sold rosaries along with other religious items. However, by 2007, economic crisis, inflation, and increasing rents forced most of those shopkeepers to either sell their stores or change their business to something more profitable. The only shop that remained of this traditional trade was that of Mulla Habib, who was firmly dedicated to his trade. He handcrafted the rosaries, carving the beads from a variety of materials. He turned enough profit to maintain his store near the shrine and served only select clientele. In this article, I explore the life of prayer beads as expressed in the ideas and notions of the Khaksari Sufi order, of which Mulla Habib held the title of murshid kuchak (lesser master) in Isfahan until he passed away in early 2012. He carved the beads and crafted the tasbihs to his last day, and under his guidance I traced the object-ness and materiality of the tasbihs. I became his apprentice in order to conduct an ethnography of the tasbihs and explore Bhow religion happens materially^ (Meyer, Morgan, Paine, & Plate 2011: 207–211). My ethnography of the last year in the life of this Sufi murshid is what Tim Ingold (see Jones, 2003) calls apprenticeship ethnography, and the practice redefines and develops the traditional anthropological method of participant observation into an act of collaboration and learning. I remained his apprentice from 2010 until early 2012. I concentrate here on three months that I was allowed to stay at his home in Isfahan while the Sufi murshid was ailing. Throughout this article, I have attempted to maintain the ontological authority of Mulla Habib in my writing style by discussing theory alongside tales and ethnography so as to not weigh down his own ways of seeing and addressing the world with the weight of jargon and abstraction.1 Therefore, the tales of apprenticeship are in the form of a narrative that corresponds to the theoretical framework instead of trying to mix theory with description. My apprenticeship was a new development for me, but my familiarity was with the order was old. I was introduced to the Khaksari order through the maternal side of my family, who have been close to the order since the early years of its founding in central Iran. Because the context of my inquiry remains close to me and my upbringing, and given my proximity to the question at hand, as well as factors beyond my control in this research, such as an affection for the larger principles of Sufism, my inquiry is rooted in what Haraway (1988) calls situated knowledge. However, I don’t claim to have the role of Bprivileged stranger^ (Aamodt 1983); I had left behind any allure for the Khaksari Sufi order long before apprenticing myself or confirming a covenant with any murshid. Despite this situated knowledge, I was challenged to discard my notions of the prayer beads and their meaning when I became familiar with a different reality while conducting participant observation in the workshop of the Sufi murshid. I always had assumed that the tasbihs were tools in the service of believers and prayers, but under the guidance of the Sufi murshid, I was tasked with comprehending the sovereign presence of the tasbihs and the raw materials of the beads. 1 The ontological authority of correspondents refers to assigning the authority of telling to the people who share with the ethnographer how the world is seen and how the components of that world are placed in their organic perceptions. To assign the authority is not to maintain the right over the ethnographic tales told but to surrender to the coherence believed in by the people who welcome and permit us ethnographers entry to their world. Cont Islam My relationship with the Sufi murshid did not depend on my background: I was never initiated into the order, and he did not have a personal relationship with me despite the fact that I had known of him since my childhood. In early 2008 I was associated with an advocacy campaign that helped minority groups in the cities of Isfahan, Semnan, Arak, and Yazd. The campaign advised religious minorities and Sufi orders that practiced Shi’ism in a manner different from what the Iranian state declares to be the true practice of Islam. Therefore, my close interactions with the Khaksari order made it possible to establish a relationship with the Sufi murshid and finally become his apprentice. My encounters with Mulla Habib describe the tale of an object believed to be religiously and spiritually loaded object by the Khaksari (...truncated)