Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Date of Submission

2025-07-20

Advisor

Ramsha Siddiqui

Committee

Soha Macktoom

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

Performative Embodiment, Femininity, Azaadari, Ishq, Ritual.

Abstract

This thesis explores how the legacy of Zaynab bint Ali is embodied, performed, and preserved through the mourning rituals of South Asian Shia women. It examines how practices such as matam, majlis recitation, and spatial caretaking shape devotional subjectivity rooted in ishq, or devotional love. While Zaynab is often framed as a symbolic figure in textual and theological traditions, this study is concerned with how she is lived, how women come to inhabit her grief through repeated ritual gestures and intergenerational memory. The thesis draws on long-term immersion within women-led majalis in Mandi Bahuddin and Lahore, and includes semi-structured interviews with zakiras, nauha reciters, and majlis organizers, alongside field observations in both home-based and institutional mourning spaces. It uses Catherine Bell’s theory of ritual and frameworks from material religion (Marei and Shanneik 2024; Meyer 2019) to show how mourning is structured not only through the body, but through objects and space. Sacred items like chadors, alams, and tasbeehs are examined as emotionally-weighted instruments that preserve grief across generations. Across its chapters, the thesis argues that mourning is not only an expression of loss but a mode of devotional labor through which Shia femininity is formed, sustained, and transmitted.

Pages

1-63

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