The edited book Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala (Brill, 2024, 425 pages) by Fouad Gehad Marei (Lund University), Yafa Shanneik (Lund University) and Christian Funke examines the material media — images objects clothes foodstuffs incense holy waters spaces and sounds — that instantiate somatic, corporeal and visceral experiences of Shiʿi Muslim religiosity. Drawing on rich empirical case studies from diverse demographic and geographic contexts, the book includes twelve chapters that engage with conceptual debates in Religious Studies, Material Religion, Anthropology of Religion, Media Studies, and Cultural and Heritage Studies. By examining how material things and less thing-like materialities make the praesentia and potentia of the Sacred tangible, how they cultivate intimate relations between human and more-than-human beings, and how they act as gateways and links to the Elsewhere and Otherworldly, Religion That Matters makes several propositions that push the frontiers of the social and anthropological study of religion. The volume also examines how materialities are integral to the politics of heritagization through processes that are shaped by competing social and political actors involved in the construction and canonization of religious — in this case Shiʿi — heritage.

Religion That Matters has been described as a “rich conversation partner and meeting ground for researchers working at the intersection of religious studies, Islamic studies, anthropology, and material culture studies” and its introductory chapter has been praised as “programmatic intervention and significant contribution towards analyzing complex aesthetic formations and religious spaces and atmospheres, and the material and rather mundane techniques and technologies that might involve.”

The eBook can be downloaded (open access, free of charge) and print copies can be ordered from the publisher’s website: https://brill.com/display/title/69727.