The End of Praying Together? Jewish-Muslim Relations at Shrines and Tombs in the Levant from the Crusades to the Present Day (original) (raw)
'Reconstructing the Past: The Creation of Jewish Sacred Space in the State of Israel
The outcome of Israel's War of Independence was the main catalyst for the creation of a new map of Jewish pilgrimage sites. Places of only secondary importance before the war now turned into central cult centers. Several categories of the sacred sites are discussed herein: sites in the possession of Jews before the 1948 war that were developed during the 1950s as central cult centers; sacred sites owned by Muslims prior to the war, which were "converted" into Jewish sacred sites during the 1950s; and new Jewish pilgrimage sites created only after the establishment of the State of Israel, whose importance relied exclusively on newly created sacred traditions. The research demonstrates how various official, semi-official, and popular powers took part in the shaping of the Jewish sacred space. Veneration of saints is a universal phenomenon in both monotheistic and polytheistic creeds.³ e saints were perceived as intermediaries between a petitioner and god-and in this sense Judaism was not different. From at least the Crusader period until today, Jewish pilgrims venerated the different sacred sites, most of them tombs of Jewish saints. e graves functioned as cairns, claim stakes to assert Judaism's historical presence in this region. ey were also perceived as tangible evidence that Judaism once flourished in this holy landscape.
2009
Ayyubid rule marks a new beginning for Islamic Jerusalem, after almost a century of Crusader domination, and it served as a curtain-raiser for the thorough transformation which the city experienced under the Mamluks. This renewed interest in Jerusalem was triggered by the Crusader presence and by the supreme effort that it took to dislodge them from the city. Nevertheless, it proved problematic to sustain the momentum generated by Saladin's victory at Hattin in July 1187 and his capture of Jerusalem a few months later. This was a time of transition, when-after the shock administered by the Crusaders-Jerusalem reclaimed its Islamic identity once more. This work, edited by Robert Hillenbrand and Sylvia Auld, looks at the city, its history and its monuments, and at Ayyubid art in general during this critical period; it examines their context and what influenced them. It draws on the expertise of a wide range of disciplines represented by internationally acknowledged academics and specialists who have produced a corpus of material which will serve as a standard work on the subject for the foreseeable future. This monumental work stands as the third element in a great trilogy on the Islamic heritage of Jerusalem which the Altajir Trust (and its predecessor The World of Islam Festival Trust) has published in the last 25 years. Thus Ayyubid Jerusalem takes its place alongside Mamluk Jerusalem (1987) and Ottoman Jerusalem (2000)-three works which will endure as a magisterial record of the fortunes and achievements of the city from the 12th to the 20th centuries.
Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, 2023
The outstanding feature of Jerusalem, in terms of religious aspects, is its shared, yet contested, sacredness to many diverse Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups and subgroups. This sacredness is expressed in a number of intertwined discourses on the Temple of Jerusalem and on pilgrimage and travelling to, settlement and burial in, and ruling over Jerusalem. The real challenge is how these many groups can combine, on the ground, their cherished but di fering conceptions of the ideal Jerusalem-how each group might accommodate the others while still remaining distinct. 1. The background: Pre-Islamic and Qurʾānic Jerusalem (until 635 C.E.) 2. Jerusalem in early Islam (13-492/635-1099) 3. The Crusader interlude and the Sunnī reconquest of Jerusalem (492-583/1099-1187) 4. Jerusalem in fully articulated Islam (583-1247/1187-1832) 5. Jerusalem in the age of nationalism (1832-present) Bibliography
Religions
Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th century Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem shared holy sites, religious beliefs and feasts. Jewish–Muslim encounters of that period went much beyond pre-modern practices of cohabitation, to the extent of developing joint local patriotism. On the other hand, religious and other holy sites were instrumental in the Jewish and Palestinian exclusive nation building process rather than an inclusive one, thus contributing to escalate the national conflict.
2005
The time is June 1119; twenty years have passed since the warriors of the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem and established the Frankish – or Latin, or crusader – kingdom of Jerusalem. The place is Hebron, about 25 miles south of Jerusalem. A huge rectangular shrine, built by King Herod the Great a few years before the birth of Jesus, dominates the small, hilly town. According to Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition, the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their wives, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, are buried in the Cave of Machpela, the Double Cave of the Book of Genesis situated somewhere underneath the massively walled shrine, but no one knows the cave’s location. The Byzantines, who ruled the area until 638, endeavored to discover it, but failed to do so. The Muslims, who ruled Hebron from 638 until the arrival of the crusaders, or Franks in 1099, erected a mosque within the shrine and allowed Jews to build a synagogue in front of it; but neither Muslims nor Jews knew t...
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.
City as Liminal Space: Pilgrimage and Muslim Holy Sites in Jerusalem During the Mamluk Period
in The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics, eds. Hilâl Ugurlu and Suzan Yalman, 75-122 (Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2020)., 2020
in The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics, eds. Hilâl Ugurlu and Suzan Yalman, 75-122 (Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2020). (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo68884202.html) This chapter investigates Islamic pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the network of Islamic holy sites in the city during the Mamlūk period. Using the Faḍā’il al-Quds pilgrimage guides on Jerusalem dating from the Mamlūk period, the study will first enumerate the holy sites visited by Muslim pilgrims on the Ḥaram al-Sharif complex. Second, the study will delineate the Islamic holy sites existing outside the Ḥaram and in and around the city. Third, the intensive building of Islamic religious institutions undertaken by Mamlūk authorities in Jerusalem will be examined to reveal how the sacred sphere further extended beyond the Haram complex and into the city and its environs, thus blurring the liminal spaces separating the sacred from the urban. Finally, the study will demonstrate how this phenomenon of blurred liminal spaces in Mamlūk Jerusalem also existed in another important Islamic holy city – Mecca. Research will demonstrate how medieval Mecca’s holy sites were also not restricted to al-Masjid al-Ḥarām complex and its Ka‘ba, but, rather, numerous secondary holy sites were scattered throughout Mecca city and its surrounding mountains, resulting in the blurring of liminal spaces in Mecca as well. This chapter will thus attempt to show how, just like in medieval Mecca, the sacred in Mamlūk Jerusalem transcended beyond the Ḥaram al-Sharīf complex, and that the presence of Islamic holy sites and religious buildings both inside and outside the Ḥaram rendered the boundaries delimiting the sacred from the urban more fluent. The city of Jerusalem, it will be argued, thus became one wider liminal space during the Mamlūk period.
The Fatimid Holy City: Rebuilding Jerusalem in the Eleventh Century
This essay explores the architectural history of Jerusalem in the Abbasid (751– 970) and Fatimid (970– 1036) periods. Compared to the time of the Umayyads (661– 750), Abbasid-era Jerusalem was characterized by a caliphal disinterest in the monuments of the holy city. However, it also saw growth in the identification between local populations and their respective religious monuments. This contest over sacred space culminated under the Fatimid dynasty, in the cataclysmic reign of al- Hakim bi- Amr Allah (r. 985– 1021), who is infamous today because he called for the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre. Indeed, al- Hakim’s incursion into the city was predominantly destructive. Nevertheless, his attention to the city would have productive results for eleventh- century Jerusalem. His successor, al- Zahir, was deeply invested in renovating the structures of the Haram al- Sharif, ushering in a chapter of architectural patronage and a resurgence of imperial interest in the structure. This essay argues that this patronage was carried out with the goal of undoing the excesses of al- Hakim’s reign. In al-Zahir’s reimagining of the sacred space, the platform’s architecture emphasized the orthodox Islamic tales of the Prophet’s night journey and ascension to heaven, in direct contrast to the perceived heresies of the later years of al- Hakim’s reign.
The changing identity of Muslim Jewish holy places in the State of Israel 1948 2018
Middle Eastern Studies, 2023
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.
One of the most intriguing phenomena in the study of sacred space and pilgrimage to holy places is how believers of different faiths may share sanctity. Scholars and historians of religion have not infrequently noticed that the nature of a holy place retains its sanctity when it changes hands. Once a site has been recognized as holy, the sanctity adheres to it, irrespective of political and religious vicissitudes. 1 Nowhere else, perhaps, is this rule more applicable than in the Holy Land. Over the past two thousand years, the country has changed hands repeatedly, generally in major wars of conquest that brought new rulers into power. These wars have also changed the official religion of the country. During the first millennium CE, it passed from Jewish to pagan rule, then becoming Christian and Muslim; in the second millennium it was successively Muslim, Christian, again Muslim, and finally Jewish. The changing religion of the rulers did not necessarily affect the inhabitants' faith; in fact, members of different religions were always living side by side, practicing different degrees of coexistence. While some of their holy places and the sacred traditions associated with them are exclusive to one religion, many others are shared by two of the three faiths or even by all three. Unfortunately, only rarely has the sharing of traditions become a foundation for dialogue and amity. For the most part, it has become a bone of contention; dialectically, in fact, the greater the similarity and the reciprocity, the greater the argument, rivalry, and competition, each group of believers straining to confirm its own exclusivity and prove its absolute right to the tradition and the holy place. Such tensions are particularly prominent in Jerusalem. The city as a whole is sacred to the three religions, and certain areas in it are venerated by all three, sometimes for very similar ideological reasons. The Temple Mount -the site of the Temple -and the Mount of Olives -the site of the resurrection and the Last Judgment -are obvious examples. In addition, several holy places in and around Jerusalem are venerated by members of more than one religion. Prominent examples are David's Tomb on Mount Zion, Samuel's Tomb north of Jerusalem, Rachel's Tomb between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and the Tomb of the Prophetess Huldah on the Mount of Olives. 2 The