Pilgrimages are a feature of all major world religions, spiritual movements and more secular realms (Digance, 2003; Margry, 2008). Pilgrimages have attracted a substantial scholarly interest from various traditions and disciplines including anthropology (e.g. Turner and Turner, 1978), sociology (e.g. MacCannell, 1976), religious studies (e.g. Gesler, 1996), and tourism and hospitality (e.g. Collins-Kreiner and Gatrell, 2006; Digance, 2003; Murray and Graham, 1997). Research has focused on aspects as diverse as their institutional and geopolitical implications (see Holloway and Valins, 2002) to the phenomenon of migration (see Hannam et al., 2006). Pilgrims’ sociological characteristics, their reasons for undergoing a pilgrimage and their experiences have also been the focus of a number of studies (see Collins-Kreiner and Gatrell, 2006; Fleischer, 2000; Murray and Graham, 1997; Turner and Turner, 1978). More recently, marketing and consumer studies have produced insightful pieces of research on pilgrimage (e.g. Croft, 2012; Scott and Maclaran, 2012; Turley, 2012;). The sacred sites of pilgrimages are often important commercial centres featuring vibrant marketplaces, where spiritual goods and services are sold (Scott and Maclaran, 2012). The particular nature of pilgrimage makes them interesting to study in our discipline because “the experiential character of pilgrimage entices the demand for objects and images that can embody the memory of the emotions and sensations produced by the physical and symbolic activities connected to the pilgrimage, such as traveling, performing rituals and being in contact with sacred objects and beings” (Pinto, 2007: 110). As such, pilgrimages and pilgrims’ consumption behaviours provide rich sites of inquiry into symbolic, spiritual and material consumption. The purpose of my research is to understand the ritualistic consumption of water in a type of Muslim pilgrimage called ziyara (i.e. visit). There is a need to study pilgrimage in new contexts, in particular in non-Western contexts where the political and religious domains are intricately connected (Cohen, 1992: 47). The context of this study is a pilgrimage to a holy shrine in Mashhad (Iran) in September 2017, during an important Shi’a festival called Ashura.