Dimensions of locality : Muslim saints their place and space As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent which its followers establish and celebrate in a seemingly contradictory fashion at very specific sites: Mecca Medina Jerusalem and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent a model for urban planning regional networks imaginary spaces and spiritual hierarchies alike. This importance of saintly places has however become increasingly complicated and troubled by reformist currents within Islam on the one hand and the emergence of modern archeology and anthropology on the other. While they have often tended to posit šthe localŠ in opposition to šthe universalŠ in this volume islamologists anthropologists and sociologists offer new ways of thinking about the local the place and the conceptual landscapes and spaces of saints. In this its eighth volume the Yearbook for the Sociology of Islam looks at different sites and regions around the Muslim world (notably Burkina Faso Egypt Ethiopia and Southeast Asia) not as šlocalizedŠ versions of a universal Islam but as constitutive of one particular outlook of the universalizing order of a world religion.