Material Encounters and the Aesthetics of Muslim Belonging

Sufi tomb shrines in India are among the most visible interactive spaces for the regular encounter of Muslims and non-Muslims. In these spaces that are both inside and outside of daily life, embodied practices and physical objects materialize the markers and vectors of belonging, unbelonging, and futurity. In the middle of Bangalore, a relatively small tomb shrine is a space of possibility for multiple marginalized groups, facilitating futural imaginings that include Muslims, Dalits, and hijras as full citizens of the Indian polity, and as full human beings.

Anna Bigelow is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Bigelow's current book project is a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey, exploring how everyday devotional life in shared spaces illuminates the shifting terrain of these ambivalently secular states. Another project traces the lives of devotional objects circulated by Muslims, Hindus, and others around a Sufi tomb shrine in India. She is editor and contributor to a volume on material objects in Islamic cultures, Islam through Objects (Bloomsbury, 2021). Bigelow’s earlier work Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community.