‘Carnivalesque’ is perhaps the best, if not the only way to describe the scene: in front of the Prophet’s wives graves in Damascus, Shi‘i pilgrims can buy imitation Viagra, sex-enhancement crèmes, and massage oils. Sexual paraphernalia and sex toys are otherwise banned in Syria, and medical drugs such as these are usually only for sale at pharmacies. Yet, an array of sex-related items could be bought from make-shift vendors, right outside of the shrines of two of Prophet Muhammad’s wives until very recently.
Until the Syrian Uprising severely limited Iranian pilgrimage to Syrian sacred sites starting in 2011, thousands of Iranian religious tourists, along with Shi‘is from Lebanon, Iraq, and the eastern Arabian Gulf would come annually to visit the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab, the mausoleum of Ruqayya, as well as the Bab al-Saghir cemetery right outside of the southern wall of the Old City of Damascus. Bab al-Saghir is a historic cemetery, which houses the remains of two of the Prophet’s wives, Bilal al-Habashi, the first muezzin, several companions of the Prophet, the heads of those who fought on the side of Imam al-Hussein at the Battle of Karbala (in 680 CE), as well as the body of the first Umayyad Caliph, Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan.
This paper will draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque in order to examine the Shi‘i practices and discourses at play in and around the Bab al-Saghir cemetery. It argues that the visitation rituals and the consumer practices encouraged by the make-shift market at the doors of the cemetery are carnivalesque, because they emphasize ‘grotesque’ elements such as death, gender, sex, economic exchange, as well as the limits of religious power and authority. The paper compliments Paulo G. Pinto’s seminal article (“Pilgrimage, commodities, and religious objectification: the making of transnational Shi‘ism between Iran and Syria”) by emphasizing the role of the grotesque and how it both strengthens, but also undermines simplistic understandings of ‘communitas.’
