Abstract

This article is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal’s subscribers. Introduction Religious Rituals’ Ree fl ction of Current Social Conditions in the Middle East Ingvild Flaskerud Abstract: Peoples’ practising of religious ritual is never isolated from the social and political setting in which it takes place. It is therefore inevitable that ritual practice somehow contends with the current social context. Examining Muslim ritual practices across the Middle East, the authors of the articles in this special issue discuss religious ritual as a tool for accomplishing something in the real world. They provide examples of which social concerns are addressed in ritual practice, who is involved and how the ritual practice is ae ff cted. The studies show that current ritual practices are embedded in multi-actor social spaces, and they also ree fl ct on the ritual as a multi-actor space where the power to define ritual form, meaning and importance shifts between different categories of actors. Keywords: Arba’yin, Ashura, COVID-19, funeral prayers, Islam, Middle East, Nowruz, pilgrimage, ritual As Guest Editor of this special issue of Anthropology of