Cities of God and Nationalism

Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem as Contested Sacred World Cities

Khaldoun Samman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317262435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

"A tour-de-force in different fields of knowledge. It takes world-city and world-history literatures to a higher level of depth and understanding. It is difficult to imagine a more pioneering, in-depth study of world cities." Ramon Grosfoguel, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley "A remarkable and original discussion of three great sacred cities across time, and their transformation by nationalism in the modern world." Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University Far from spawning an age of tolerance, modernity has created the social basis of division and exclusion. This book elaborates this provocative claim as it explores the rich but divided histories of three cities located at the crossroads of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Many observers presume that violence is built into these sacred cities because their citizens cling to religious or cultural ideals of some archaic age; only when this history is overcome can citizens enter a new age of brotherhood. Samman persuades us to refocus our attention on modernity, which has instilled troubling dilemmas from the outside. He shows how these sacred places long ago entered the modern world where global political and economic forces exacerbate nationalism and regional divisions. If we are to resolve deep conflicts we must re-imagine the institutional basis on which modernity, rather than religion, is built.

1

MODERNITY, RELIGION, AND VIOLENCE: SACRED CITIES AND THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT

It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed. Even as I write this, I feel the tremour that accompanies the sense of blasphemy. I fear the wrath of the gods, for I have been moulded in the same ideological forge as all my compeers and have worshipped at the same shrines.

Immanuel Wallerstein, 1983

There is a Mr. Hyde inside each one of us. What we have to do is prevent the conditions occurring that will bring the monster forth.

Amin Maalouf, 1996

I
Liberating Sacred Cities from Religion or Modernity?

As of April 2006, the Israeli government continues its construction of a Separation Wall through Jerusalem on the grounds, according to Israeli officials, of halting terrorism. After some concern by Jerusalem residents over the practicality of the Wall, Ariel Sharon publicly stated, “You know who built the fence? Terror built the fence.”¹ As Virginia Tilley observes, the Israeli government has characterized its struggle as that of a “beleaguered Jewish people trying to build a homeland in a tiny country huddled on the Mediterranean while fending off irrational/Islamic Arab hostility.”² Following suit, Haim Ramon, the Jerusalem cabinet minister, echoes the assertion that the purpose of building the Wall in Jerusalem has been “first and foremost to prevent [terrorism].”³ Such national security claims of protecting Jews from fanatical Muslims have been regularly used in defense of Israeli policies intended to segregate and remove Palestinians from the Jewish state and particularly from Jerusalem.

The building of the Separation Wall, which Israeli officials prefer to call a security “fence,” follows a continuous effort by elements of the Israeli government to de-Arabize Jerusalem. Indeed, accompanying this discourse of protecting Jews from Islamic religious terror, the very same cabinet minister cited above states unequivocally that, security issues aside, the barrier “also makes [Jerusalem] more Jewish. The safer and more Jewish Jerusalem will be, the more it can serve as a true capital of the state of Israel.”⁴ This is unlikely to change with the election victory of Ehud Olmert’s Kadima Party in March 2006. As a matter of fact, immediately after his victory, Olmert announced that during his administration he will ensure Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” character, and just like he did in his Likud days, he continues to use the nationalist language of ethnic purity as the basis of his platform.⁵

Since the 1967 occupation of Jerusalem, the Israeli government has pursued a demographic purge aimed at “Judaizing” the city by “de-Arabizing” it.⁶ This effort begins with the demolition of the Maghrebi Quarter of the Old City, which took place immediately after occupation, and arrives at a recently proposed demolition of the Arab neighborhood, Silwan, in East Jerusalem. In the first instance, 6,000 were made homeless in order to create a space for what is called the Wailing Wall Plaza, while in the case of Silwan, the construction of an Israeli archeological park has been suggested. From 1967 to the present, Israel has “revoked Palestinian residencies, demolished Palestinian homes, and stringently limited building permits given to Palestinians.”⁷

These examples are not intended to single out Israel, for similar ethnic cleansing policies can be found elsewhere, to varied degrees of intensity. Rather, the current illustration is offered to introduce a discussion of how nationalism as an expression of modernity has affected the lives of people and communities connected to sacred cities. In this respect, two issues of concern emerge from the case in view. First is the usefulness of a discourse suggesting the immediate dangers of religious fanaticism, behind which nationalist officials advance national agendas, whether overtly or covertly. Second is the attempt to nationalize a city that has historically been a hybrid demographically, culturally, and religiously—to subordinate such a city to the will of one particular nationalist vision intended to effectively erase notions of difference occurring on sacred land that traditionally belongs to no one single group.

While many Israeli national elites choose to justify repressive policies through a political claim of defense from religious fanaticism, a parallel discourse can be found among contemporary academics that target religion as the root cause of many modern-day acts of politically motivated violence. Within the Western world of academia, a renewed interest has emerged among a sector of intellectuals who have called for the need to secularize societies, using examples of contemporary violence as proof that a religious worldview is opposed to modernity, progress, pluralism, tolerance, development, rationality, and science. While the current debate seems to revolve in response to violent outbursts and attacks attributed to fanatical religious fundamentalists, both in the Middle East and in the West, many authors are taking clear aim at the heart of religious identity, disregarding the extremity of fundamentalist interpretations and attributing an essentialist perspective in describing an inherent religious bias toward conflict. This radical secularist point of view characterizes religious resurgence, especially of the Islamic variant, as negating a peaceful modernist project. As one such commentator has proposed, “September 11th was an attack on modernity by Islamic fascists,”⁸ paradoxically implying, as fascism is an aspect of the modern political landscape, that such a movement as Al-Qaeda is not itself a modernist project. Thus, hugely lacking in this discussion is the examination of a much broader spectrum of the human imagination within which we may consider the possibility that current conflicts are systemic to the modern world and to the way we, as its inventors and participants, construct our identities as peoples, nations, and religions.

In order to illustrate the nature of this debate, the three sacred cities of Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome will largely comprise the focus of this study. Central to it is the notion that current characterizations of religion as archaic, time-immemorial, and pre-modern, assuming a natural evolution toward the more advanced social construct of modernity, offer little by way of understanding the violence that occurs around major sacred spaces today, such as in the case of Jerusalem. The extreme logic at one end of the spectrum of this debate suggests “desacralizing sacred space” with an authoritarian project designed to produce secularized peoples the world over.⁹ The perspective offered here presents the view that such ideas represent major and dangerous distortions of the problems we face today and suggests, by contrast, that contemporary conflicts are largely the creation of what many have perceived to be their antidote: a modern, secular concept of national spaces.

The integration of contemporary sacred spaces into the modern world has most often occurred with great difficulty and controversy. Rigid conceptions of national spaces and subsequent recent forcing of nationalized communities upon such sacred spaces have contributed to the modern dilemma of civilizational identities that span a transnational spatial scheme. In this sense, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome represent examples of how modernity, through the apparatus of nationalism and the nation-state, has redefined constructs of Self and Other in fundamental ways, with major implications for the way these cities are conceived by the inhabitants of the world who identify with them. Therefore, from the perspective of this study, the cataclysmic transformations produced by modernity are an essential component in understanding the contemporary plight of these three cities and resolution of such conflicts as those over Jerusalem requires an exiting of modernity and a re-imagining of the institutional basis upon which it is built.

Over the past two centuries, Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem have been sites of nationalist activities that have attempted to appropriate these holy cities and incorporate them into territorialist projects. Such attempts have invariably been met with resistance and have become major issues on the international scene, creating political crises known as “the Question of Rome,” “the Question of Mecca,” and “the Question of Jerusalem.” In each case, the right of the nationalist movement to appropriate the sacred city within its newly defined territorial boundaries has been hotly debated, at times spilling over into major clashes. As these three cities have long served as sacred centers of the Islamic and Christian empires of the Middle Ages, such status as they have been afforded continues to resist attempts to appropriate them by nationalist movements in the modern period. This is so primarily because the symbolic status these cities share expresses the universalistic religious and spiritual aspirations of civilizational imagined communities,¹⁰ which comprises a far more complex and inclusive system than any nationalist imagination can produce, exceeding the spatial machinery of states on which they are located. Furthermore, the conflicts over these cities are tied to contradictory notions of community embodied by the concepts of nation on the one hand and of civilization on the other. In the case of Jerusalem, this tension is exacerbated by the fact that three different communities make sacred claims on the city.

A quick introductory sketch here may be useful in illustrating the process by which these three sacred centers became world cities. The Christian and Islamic imperial conquests of Jerusalem in the first and seventh century mark a significant turning point in the city’s history. Prior to this period, Jerusalem’s sacredness belonged to a religious community, the ancient Israelites, that was staunchly particularistic in its worldview and highly defensive against the universalistic pretensions of the surrounding ancient empires. It is only with the introduction of Christianity and Islam (in the first and seventh centuries, respectively), through the medium of powerful world empires, that Jerusalem became a sacred world city. This is largely due to the fact that Islam and Christianity, while incorporating many elements of the Jewish religion, broke off decisively from their parent faith by creating a universalistic vision of the world. They created communities that, from inception, negated all of the particularistic aspects of Judaism and developed a new notion of community that was open to humankind as a whole.

Although Rome and Mecca differ historically from Jerusalem, they are important in that they also represent sacred centers that, in contrast to national identities, have engendered civilizational identities, ummas of a pan-Islamic type. Their histories extend far back into the pre-modern world and their developments are shaped by the rise and fall of empires. Both cities have experienced major structural transformations as a result of their empires having fractured into a multitude of nation-states, which has had a tremendous effect upon the way in which they have articulated systems of identity to their respective communities. Under the new system of states, Rome and Mecca have had to adapt to an age in which identity, space, and belief function differently from the premises on which they were first structurally developed. As a result, great tensions have emerged between nationalist aspirations and the universalistic, transnational characteristics of these two cities, resulting in “the questions of Rome and Mecca.” Both the Italian nationalist movement and the Wahabi/Saudi movement have attempted to appropriate these universalistic cities and make them their own, only to encounter resistance.

Thus, the source of conflicts in these three sacred world cities is not simply the product of some grand narrative found in religion and the sacred, as many employing an essentialist, time-immemorial perspective have argued, but indeed lies in the projection of nationalist projects into urban sacred spaces whose sacred quality is imagined as belonging to no one political authority. The Italian nationalists’ attempt to seize Rome and Vatican City in the mid-nineteenth century, the Wahabis’/Saudis’ seizure of the Hijaz and the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the early part of the twentieth century, and, finally, the attempt of the Zionist movement to make Jerusalem “the eternal capital of the Jews” today are all of this type. These sacred cities are mental structures that, according to Fernand Braudel, “get in the way of history,” a lesson that all the nationalists in these three states have learned and, in the case of Israel/Palestine, are still learning.¹¹ Limitations that arise from a narrow nationalist and sanitized imagination fail to encompass sacred grounds that envision the world and beyond on a far grander scale and with much greater profundity. In the words of Ali Shari...