This book explores the place and meaning of ʿAlid shrines in Syrian society from approximately the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries ce (by “ʿAlid”, Mulder means any shrine with a link to an ʿAlid figure, or else one that carries reverence for the ʿAlids). The author also provides documentation of these shrines up to the time she conducted fieldwork before the outbreak of the ongoing civil war. In terms of methodology, the book is characterized by an ambitious combination of the material evidence extant today (standing buildings, archaeological remains, inscriptions, etc.) and contemporaneous textual sources. The substantial use of textual sources plays an important role in this study since not many of the shrines studied retain their medieval structures sufficiently well for us to develop substantive arguments based solely on the architectural or archaeological evidence.

In addition to an introduction and conclusion, the book contains five chapters. The first four present discussions of individual shrines (an excavated mashhad in the vicinity of the ruins of Bālis, two shrines at Aleppo, ten at the Bāb al-Ṣaghīr cemetery in Damascus, and four others in and around the Syrian capital). Chapter 5 is devoted to theoretical considerations on the basis of the preceding empirical investigations.

The argument of the book may be summarized as follows: from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, Syria witnessed the birth of numerous ʿAlid shrines. At the same time as signalling the survival of sizeable Shii communities, this phenomenon indicates that those ʿAlid shrines held supra-sectarian appeal to Muslims in the region, even during the so-called “Sunni revival”. In fact, many of those who patronized the shrines were Sunni. The emergence of these ʿAlid shrines was an important feature of the ongoing Islamization of the sacred landscape of Syria at that time, a trend prompted in part by the Christianization effected by the Crusades. The historical narrative about the transportation of Ḥusayn's head and of his close relatives after the incident at Karbala' played a crucial role in this process. By linking diverse places to past deeds with sacred significance (and thus causing devotees to perform ritual deeds to commemorate them), this narrative contributed to the emergence of a “landscape of deeds”; an Islamic mode of sacred landscape-making to be differentiated from, say, Greek and Roman models that were “topographically grounded” (p. 253).

The detailed documentation regarding the evolution of the architecture of individual ʿAlid shrines and the narratives concerning them presented in this book demonstrate how mutable shrines are both in terms of their physical structures and their devotional significations. A shrine may indeed change its identity over time, or even disappear altogether. Even when its identity remains unchanged, the meaning it holds is not necessarily the same to all people from all eras. The author should be commended for painstakingly reconstructing the intriguing histories of these numerous ʿAlid shrines.

It is, to be sure, challenging to elucidate how ʿAlid shrines were perceived in medieval Syria, especially given the reticence of available evidence in that regard. The physical structures of the shrines' buildings are rather featureless and any mention of such shrines in literary sources is often tantalizingly brief. One inevitably has to rely on deductive reasoning on the basis of one's knowledge from elsewhere about the situation at the time. Our understanding of the socio-religious milieu is thus paramount. One proposal I would like to make here is to consider more seriously the possibility of some kind of “confessional ambiguity” (J. Woods) or even “Twelver Sunnism” (M.-T. Danishpazhūh and R. Jaʿfariyān) behind the Sunni patronage (Mulder is not entirely unaware of such syncretic trends, see p. 144). Mulder repeatedly remarks that the ʿAlid shrines had supra-sectarian appeal to Muslims in general, but does not elaborate on the nature of the shrines' specific appeal to Sunnis. Envisaging some kind of syncretic trend might prove helpful in reinforcing her argument in this regard.

Such religious trends are, admittedly, typically associated with the Persianate world in later centuries. It is, however, interesting to note that Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 654/1256) who, the author tells us, regularly held preaching sessions at the Mashhad ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn in Damascus's Umayyad Mosque (p. 215), was also the author of the Tadhkirat al-khawāṣṣ, a book on the merits of ʿAlī and the ʿAlids. Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī not only devotes many pages to Ḥusayn (the narrative of the transportation of his head is also there) but discusses all twelve imams in his book. It would be interesting to see how the consideration of this kind of “confessional ambiguity” among Syrian Sunnis might add nuance to the author's interpretations, especially to that concerning the inscriptions on the portal of the Ayyubid Sultan al-Ẓāhir erected at the Mashhad al-Ḥusayn at Aleppo (chapter 2). The combination of the twelve imams and the first four caliphs as the desired recipients of God's blessing in the inscriptions may indeed mirror, as the author argues, al-Ẓāhir's attempt to bring about “conciliation and coexistence” (p. 97) between his Sunni and Shii subjects. Even in that case, would it not be interesting to suppose that it also mirrored al-Ẓāhir's sincere belief in the holy status of all those who were mentioned?

Some readers may be distracted by the inaccurate handling of certain names and concepts concerning the Prophet's family, Shiism, and early Islamic history in more general terms. For example, al-ʿitra al-ṭāhira is a common term used to denote the Prophet's family (p. 61, n. 33); “People of (ʿubayy?)” (p. 156) should most probably be “People of the Mantle (ʿabā [for ʿabāʾ])”; ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz must always be differentiated from each other (pp. 208, 219–220). Some readers might desire further clarification before accepting some of Mulder's arguments: for example, how can you eliminate the possibility that the name Muḥammad interpreted to denote the twelfth imam (p. 36) is not in fact being used to denote the ninth imam? The author, however, should be thanked for sharing the fruits of such a challenging project, one that only those scholars with the necessary versatility, perseverance and passion can carry through to the end. The Shrines of the ʿAlids in Medieval Syria forces us to recognize the historical value of the ʿAlid shrines in Syria at this moment in time when such recognition is needed more urgently than ever before.