Nationalising and Denationalising the sacred: shrines and shifting identities in the Israeli-occupied territories.(In Arabic) (original) (raw)
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Religion Compass Volume 7, Issue 3, pages 69–78, March 2013
A long history of intercommunal relations around local holy places in historic Palestine (a history which sadly seems to be coming to a close in the current day) draws attention to what precisely is the character of the attachment felt by local residents to sacred sites. Muslim-Christian ‘sharing’ of holy places (maqam, plural maqamat) can be seen to express a dependency on powers perceived of as resident in a site, and the nominal affiliation of these powers to one religion or another is often not a matter of great concern to those frequenting the shrines. It is, however, a focal concern of the officiants of the respective religions who lay claim to the sites and who seek to expunge heterodox practices and traces of ambiguous affiliation (cf. Hayden 2002 and 2011). I here investigate records of local usages of religious sites, largely rural, in Palestine up through the Mandate Period in order to argue that shared shrines, as opposed to those which appear to be communally homogeneous, foreground issues of agency obscured in those sites under the control of religious authorities.
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Over the past seven decades, dozens of Muslim holy places in Israel have undergone a process of Judaization, becoming an integral part of the Israeli-Jewish sacred landscape. The current paper compares three waves of Judaization that followed the 1948 and 1967 wars, emphasizing the institutional and popular character of this process. The appropriation of Muslim holy places and their conversion is tied to the political, social, and religious changes that Israeli society underwent during its seventy years of existence. During these decades, Jewish holy spaces gained social, cultural, and religious importance; visiting them became a popular pastime. As the demand for holy places grew, former Muslim sites were converted and became part of Jewish sacred space. The process of transformation took place in parallel on two planes – the institutional and the popular – as both Israeli governmental bodies and worshipers converted Muslim holy places into Jewish sacred sites. The outcome of the process was the expansion of sacred space in the State of Israel and the inclusion of the periphery, which in many cases contained former Muslim holy places, as an integral part of the Jewish map of holy places.
The paper intends to explore some insufficiently studied but increasingly important patterns of the interaction between traditional Palestinian Christian identities and new local religious and religio-poltical developments, ranging from the impact of Russian Christian immigration in Israel to recently ideologized sacral heritage policies and politics and archaeological and pseudo-archaeological ventures in the Holy Land. While mostly under the radar of current scholarly and theological exploration, these interactions betray some novel types of religious dynamics on both elite and popular levels which deserve closer attention. The fluctuating and sometimes unpredictable outcomes of these processes have a direct impact on Palestinian Christian educational concepts and practices and new initiatives in this sphere such as those introduced through Russian ecclesiastical channels. These processes also affect a variety of Palestinian Christian attitudes (general, idiosyncratic and reformist-leaning) to ancient and medieval Christian heritage and continuities in the Holy Land against the background of latest shifts on the religious arena in Israel, Palestine and the Middle East.
Between al-Khader and Nabi Rubeen: Religious Pilgrimage and Palestinian Shared Worlds of Meaning
Just south of Jaffa is the shrine of Nabi Rubeen, once the site of a boisterous Palestinian religious festival that combined the Christian and Muslim, the spiritual and the profane. Today, the shrine sits amid the sand dunes, a reminder of a pre-Zionist cosmopolitanism forcibly uprooted from the land. This essay explores religious practices and formations associated with shrine worship in Palestine that are or were shared between members of different religions (namely Islam, Christianity, and Judaism). It examines the history of such shared worship as well as the reasons for its decline, tracing the rise of colonial understandings of religious identity, Zionism, and religious fundamentalism of all stripes.
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Jerusalem is a city of many contrasts. It is a historical-symbolic city, revered by Muslims, Christians and Jews. However, its citizens segregate ethno-nationally, culturally and socially, into different identity groups: Jews and Arabs, Haredi ('ultra-Orthodox') and secular Jews, and lower and upper class socioeconomic groups. This essay focuses on how political and social struggles over territories reshape the nature of the identities of four distinct groups in Jerusalem. These are ethnonational groups (Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs), cultural groups (ultra-Orthodox Jews, in Hebrew Haredim (zealots), and non-Orthodox Jews), ethno-social groups (disadvantaged groups mainly of oriental descent, in Hebrew Mizrahim and advantaged groups) and economic and ecological groups (the business sector and inhabitants of private residential areas of the city). Thus, long-term historical processes have produced distinct ethno-national, cultural and social identity groups, which occupy specific territories within Jerusalem. The different groups have endowed their territory with dissimilar geopolitical, cultural, and economic meanings and played a major role in the reconstruction of national, cultural, social and ecological identities in the city. The city of Jerusalem is not only a spiritual centre associated with age-long dreams for peace and justice, it is also a violent city, rife with tensions and conflicts, a symbol of national, cultural, economic and ecological struggles. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing all those concerned about its future is whether Jerusalem's universal image of a spiritual, tolerant and just city can overcome its current, particularistic and conflict ridden image.
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Below I discuss two models of Jerusalem's holy sites and religious costumes: joint Jewish-Muslim shrines and the divided one. The joint model emerged in the late 19 th century in direct relation to endorsing modernization and developing local patriotism. The escalating Zionist-Palestinian conflict since the late 1920s produced the separated holy sites model. Jerusalem is the arena where the two models expressed forcefully due to its high religious status and national centrality.
Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries
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Introduction by Maria Couroucli 1. Identification and Identity Formation around Shared Shrines in West Bank Palestine and Western Macedonia / Glenn Bowman 2. The Vakef: Sharing Religious Space in Albania / Gilles de Rapper 3. Kom iluk and Taking Care of the Neighbour's Shrine in Bosnia-Herzegovina / Bojan Baskar 4. The Mount of the Cross: Sharing and Contesting Barriers on a Balkan Pilgrimage Site / Galia Valtchinova 5. Muslim Devotional Practices in Christian Shrines: the Case of Istanbul / Dionigi Albera and Benoit Fliche 6. Saint George the Anatolian: Master of Frontiers / Maria Couroucli 7. A Jewish-Muslim Shrine in North Morocco: Echoes of an Ambiguous Past / Henk Driessen 8. What Do Egypt's Copts and Muslims Share? The Issue of Shrines / Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen 9. Apparitions of the Virgin in Egypt: Improving Relations between Copts and Muslims? / Sandrine Keriakos 10. Sharing the Baraka of Saints: Pluridenominational Visits to the Christian Monasteries in Syria / Anna...