The project "Holy Places in Islam" aims to investigate the modalities through which holy places in the Islamic world were established, became famous, or eventually vanished. In order to analyse these processes both material culture and literary texts are worthy of consideration. Texts help to reconstruct the discourse that was created around a specific place, whereas material culture reflects how the sense of holiness was physically rooted in the landscape. Although the concept of holy in Islam has been addressed in some publications, the aim of this specific project is to fill a gap in the scholarship by focusing on the strategies developed within Islam in order to make a site a holy place and legitimise its holiness and on the factors that led to places eventually losing their fame. Our approach, therefore, not only will engage theoretically with the notion of holiness in Islam but will also research how the sense of holiness activated specific sites and places. Within the project "Islam" is understood in a broad sense as the religious practice of the totality of Muslim elites, scholars, and commoners throughout Islamic history. The network, based at the University of Edinburgh, will benefit from the active participation of the second main partner, the MIRI (Materiality in Islam research Initiative) directed by Professor Alan Walmsley at the University of Copenhagen. The project will be developed in three different meetings, each one addressing different issues. An initial conference (Edinburgh, September 2013) will focus on the early Islamic period and will try to establish the strategies and models of making sites holy in Islam and the factors facilitating or impeding the process. A follow-up workshop (Copenhagen, December 2013/January 2014) will produce a close analysis of specific case studies. The third and concluding conference (Edinburgh, June 2014) will address the possible recurrence of specific patterns throughout Islamic history or the occurrence of regional or temporal characteristics.