Praying and Witnessing
Praying and Witnessing
This chapter examines the role of prayer (dova) in Muslim life. The act of prayer belongs to the villagers’ repertoires of vital exchange whereby blessing, prosperity, and vitality are accessed, and relations between life and the afterlife, and between the living, the dead, and the divine are maintained and cultivated. Prayer is thus crucial in villagers’ temporal orientations toward the past, present, and the future. The chapter focuses on two major forms of prayer. First, it explores how prayer is deployed to address matters here and now, and/or prospectively by introducing examples of Islamic healing, and dream visions and divination. Second, it analyzes how acts of prayer intersect with and shape the ethics of memory. It shows how the idiom of dova provides village Muslims with a vocabulary with which to engage with the critical events of the past and becomes a mode of historical experience. Specifically, it focuses on how prayer is performed by the living for the souls of the dead, including war martyrs from the 1992-95 war, as well as from the Ottoman era.
Keywords: commemoration, dreams, fortune, historicity, martyrdom, misfortune, politics of memory, prayer, prayers for rain, sorcery
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