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Call for participation &#38; for papers on "Holy Places in Islam"Although Muslim theologians generally condemned the belief in the intercessory power of images, places, or objects, the Islamic world was nonetheless filled with dozens of *loca* considered to be holy. These were places in which people sought a privileged contact with the sacred. The project „Holy Places in Islam“ will investigate the modalities through which a specific Muslim society made holy a determinate place or, alternatively, dismissed it. In order to analyse these processes the project seeks to integrate both material culture and literary texts. Texts, such as pilgrimage guides and geographical descriptions, in fact not only carry important information to locate and identify holy places, but also help to reconstruct the discourse which was created around a specific place. At the same time material culture reflects how the sense of holiness was embodied and given substance. The same material will also be interrogated in order to explain how a site was forgotten or erased by societies.The project, established by Andreas Görke, Mattia Guidetti and Alan Walmsley is supported by the AHRC (UK), MIRI (Copenhagen) and CASAW (Edinburgh). It is designed as an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars. Over the duration of the project of 18 months (September 2013 – March 2015), participants will come together for three workshops and contribute to a database - only accessible to the participants in the network - which aims at bringing together information on specific holy sites in order to facilitate the research and allow for a better overview and comparison.Participants are expected to take part in one or more of the workshops, to pre-circulate their papers before the workshops and eventually to publish one contribution in a final edited volume. Ideally, participants should also be willing to share material and contribute to the database.  We are therefore looking for scholars willing to become part of this network.  The three workshops are roughly scheduled to focus on, respectively: “Early Islam and the search for a model”; “The expansion of Islam and the emergence of regional patterns” and “Re-interpreting holy sites in the  medieval period and beyond”.  The first meeting will take place in Edinburgh from 4 to 7 December 2013, the second meeting is provisionally scheduled to June 2014 in Copenhagen, and the third to September or October 2014 in Edinburgh.Board and lodging will be provided. Travel expenses will be partially or fully refunded depending on the number of participants in each single workshop.  Scholars interested in participating in the network should send an abstract of their research (max. 500 words) and a short CV to the following addresses by 22 July 2013. Applicants will be notified by mid-August.  a.goerke@ed.ac.uk AND mattiaguidetti@staffmail.ed.ac.uk