Enchanted Cosmopolitanism: Framing and Meaning making in a modern Muslim pilgrimage

• In Event: Sociology of Religion Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8. Navigating Modern Religion

Abstract

My paper asks an orienting question: how do pilgrims frame their experience of a pilgrimage in the global era that encourages increased participation? The Arba’een in Iraq is the world’s largest annual religious gathering, with a peak attendance of 21 million in 2022. This exponential growth has occurred only since 2014, in the ever-present threat of ISIS and other anti-Shia terrorist violence. Using fieldwork spanning 2020-23 across Pakistan and Iraq, complemented by 47 semi-structured interviews of pilgrims and participating in the Arba’een in September 2022, I answer the question utilizing the concept of framing.
Drawing on framing analysis of Goffman (1974) and its generative elements taken by the framing perspective of social movements (Snow 2004; Snow et al. 1986), I argue that Pakistani Shia pilgrims frame the religious Arba’een pilgrimage as an enchanted cosmopolitanism. Shia pilgrims utilize discursive framing processes to bridge the enchantment that derives specifically from Shia religious figures and sacred sites to a cosmopolitan frame that embraces diversity and humanitarianism. These efforts are built on strategic frames used by religious minorities around the world that leverage global institutions to create protection and communal memory around their identity by aligning it with global values. Pilgrims also imbue the pilgrimage experience with miraculous narratives of enchantment, seeing global and cosmopolitan developments as a blessing of the Imams who grace the land of Karbala.
Miracles of the Shia Imams are an established literary tradition in South Asia, known as mojizat (Urdu: miracles). Enchanted cosmopolitanism borrows the narrative of this literature but transforms the nature of the miracles. Instead of framing it as direct, supernatural intervention by the Imams in the lives of their followers as it happens in the mojizat, Shia pilgrims see the hospitality and charitability at the pilgrimage site of the Imams’ indirect, miraculous intervention.

Author

• Eisar Haider, University of Notre Dame