During the 2018 World Cup in Russia, a meme circulated among Tunisian Facebook users that imagined the country’s national soccer team lineup as made up entirely of local Muslim saints, long-deceased historical figures
whose spiritual interventions continue to be sought through offerings and rituals performed during communal and individual visits to their shrines (see fig. 1.1w on accompanying website). It provoked humorous online banter, mainly about why certain saints were on offense and why others did not make the starting lineup. The joke and the thread of comments were not aimed specifically at an audience comprised of people who visit saint shrines or for whom the saints play a role in their devotional lives. Rather, the meme resonated widely because the saints are part of fundamental local knowledge: they are household names, historical personalities familiar to all through a web of associations ranging from experience-near knowledge gleaned from participation at shrine rituals to widely recognized legends about saints, praise songs from popular-music and wedding-band repertoires, and the sheer ubiquity of shrines whose physical locations serve as local landmarks in the urban landscape in and around Tunis.