ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the saint mediation and the stories of saintly intervention in people's lives in southern Jordan. The grave of the saint known as Ghannam in the area of Gerendal in Wadi Arabah is another powerful example of this. The saint graves offer what Giorgio Agamben has called the hardest and bitterest experience possible: the experience of potentiality. Even in the cases where people no longer visit the graves, they are highly critical of the new scholarly regime, as life has deteriorated since the pilgrimages stopped; there is an uncanny feeling of the saint's retaliation. Death may offer a different status to a person, such as sainthood, but it is the practices of the people at the saint grave that lead to the moral judgments by those who believe that they practice a properly informed Islam. Sainthood, it seems, is articulated and dealt with, with a high degree of precariousness.