About six months after Edith Szanto finished her fieldwork in Syria the Arab Spring swept over the region and changed everything. While she has not been able to go back to Syria, she has been observing on-going events from nearby Iraq, where she is currently a lecturer at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. “Isn’t it ironic,” Ms. Szanto notes, “that I was studying Iraqi refugees in Syria and now, there are Syrian refugees in Iraq?”
The back-story, however, starts much earlier. Edith Szanto inherited a deep and enduring interest in the Middle East from her father, which whom she travelled extensively as a child. As an undergraduate student, she attended AUC (the American University in Cairo) for a semester and ended up writing her MA thesis about Muslim women’s piety in Egypt. After obtaining her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas in Austin in May 2004, Ms. Szanto was awarded a Fulbright to Syria. There, she became interested in the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab, which was also known as “Little Baghdad.” At first, she mainly visited the shrine and town during Shi‘i holidays. Then, she came to know the shrine-town from a non-governmental administrative point of view when she interned at UNHCR in Damascus. As she learned more about the plight of Iraqi refugees, she became interested in anthropological questions of identity, alienation, exile, and piety.
Since the fall of 2006, when Ms. Szanto started the PhD program in Religious Studies at the University of Toronto, she has spent more than thirteen months in Syria doing fieldwork in the shrine-town of Sayyida Zaynab. For her fieldwork, she regularly attended several seminaries, half a dozen weekly ritual mourning gatherings (majālis ‘aza’), and interviewed numerous Iraqi refugees, as well as other long-term residents (including Iranian and Shi‘i Afghans, who had to flee Iraq in the 1970s). At the height of her fieldwork, there were roughly two million Iraqis in Syria. Today, most of them have been either resettled to Europe or North America or they have returned to Iraq (though many remain internally displaced).
While in Syria, Iraqi women expressed their grief and their loss ritually and discursively via the framework of religion. The particular modes they engaged in have been deemed ‘traditional’ in the academic study of Shi‘ism. However, as Ms. Szanto shows in her dissertation, Shi‘i rituals and discourses in Syria are anything but ‘traditional.’
Ms. Szanto is grateful to the University of Toronto: “Shi‘ism in Syria is an understudied field in Islamic Studies, however, fortunately the University of Toronto has all the resources one could ever want with regard to this topic.”
Ms. Szanto’s publications include:
“Sayyida Zaynab in the State of Exception: Shi‘i Sainthood as ‘Qualified Life’ in Contemporary Syria,” International Journal for Middle Eastern Studies 44.2 (2012): 285-299.
“Pedagogies of Piety: Shi‘i Children’s Books, Ethics and the Emergence of the Pious Subject,” Symposia: The Graduate Student Journal of the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto 1.1 (2009): 62-78.
“Inter-Religious Dialogue in Syria: Politics, Ethics and Miscommunication,” Political Theology 9.1 (2008): 93-113.
“A Scholar of Popular Contemporary Islam on the Quest for ‘Truth’ in Damascus,” Syrian Studies Association Newsletter 13.2 (2008): 8-9, 15.
“Muharram in and around Sayyeda Zaynab,” Syrian Studies Association Newsletter 13.1 (2007): 4-5.
You can read an interview Ms. Szanto gave for the The American University of Iraq – Sulaimani Voice here: http://www.auisvoice.org/node/333 and you can see her faculty profile here: http://auis.edu.iq/faculty_profile_edith_szanto