The literature on conflict and sacred space has grown in leaps and bounds in recent years yet continues to display significant gaps. Both cooperation optimists and pessimists (myself included) have privileged religious forces at the expense of political forces and have overemphasized stasis (be it violent or peaceful) over a more dynamic account in which conflicts at holy places ebb and flow. It is these important lacunae that Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites seeks to fill, and it does so with some success.
The volume seeks to emphasize the role that politics plays at holy sites and to document the resulting flux between competition and sharing. The key concept around which this task is framed is “choreography,” an implicitly defined term that seems to take on two distinct meanings, one more benign than the other. Some of the contributors to the volume take choreography to evoke a multilayered interplay among the forces acting on sacred sites, a dance of sorts in which political and religious actors, local, state and global, including small religious communities and large religious movements, government agencies, and courts, push and pull in an effort to influence these spaces. This complex interaction produces a range of outcomes, shifting from uneasy coexistence, tolerance, and submission to coercion. The contributors who espouse this approach draw on careful fieldwork to produce a balanced account of daily routines in sacred places.
The second implied meaning of the term “choreography” is darker by far. It reduces choreography to the nefarious machinations of a choreographer exclusively responsible for producing conflict, namely, the modern state. Contrary to the initial promise, “to understand whether sharing and contestation are politically or religiously motivated” (p. 1), proponents of this approach reach a quick and simple conclusion: “Conflict depends less on the religious centrality of the site and more on political choreography. … Religion is a political ideology and religious violence is a byproduct of politics” (pp. 14, 236). The emphasis of these chapters thus turns to identifying the political culprits who orchestrate conflicts to suit their purposes. Insofar as choreography ought to require an interaction between choreographer and dancers, the political malefactors identified in these chapters are not choreographers at all but puppeteers, holding all the strings.
The resulting finger pointing at some of the most religiously pluralistic and inclusive democracies in the Mediterranean space (France, Israel and Turkey) is unpersuasive. The decision, in Karen Barkey’s first chapter of the book, to hold the Ottoman Empire up as an alternative model of religious toleration is surprising given that empire’s record of desecration, destruction, or expropriation of Christian sacred sites, which eclipses by far any contemporary efforts by states to influence their sacred sites. The decision to focus blame on specific states is also less helpful, for if particular state policies drive conflict, it is not clear why religious sites deserve particular attention or how these findings can be generalized to other parts of the globe. Indeed, the editors exclude some of the most violent conflicts over sacred places worldwide, including conflicts in Saudi Arabia, the former Yugoslavia, India, or East Asia, that have religious underpinnings that simply cannot be squared with a power-politics model. Several of these omitted conflicts dwarf in impact and destructiveness all the incidents of tense sharing explored in this volume put together.
In sum, this second interpretation takes the important task of the volume a step too far: Rather than supplement existing accounts with a crucial layer of political interest that was heretofore absent, Choreographies drops religion out of these chapters altogether: “Religion is … not doctrinally driven but politically shaped” (p. 11). The case studies that espouse this approach place little emphasis on religious ideas, practices, rhetoric, or experiences. Terms like “ritual,” “prayer,” “devotion,” or “faith,” let alone “healing,” “miracle,” “blessing,” or “epiphany”—in other words, the very essence that makes a place sacred to those who hold it to be sacred—are absent from these analyses.
For example, a chapter by Dionigi Albera on a Catholic sanctuary in Algeria at which Muslims and Christians pray together misses an opportunity to explore the fascinating conundrums posed (and overcome) by this syncretism. Instead, it takes a cynical stance, exposes the “fictitious” pedigree of the church that was produced by French “ecclesiastical entrepreneurs” as a colonial tool of domination and conversion (pp. 100–106). A chapter by Wendy Pullan on a street market and archaeological site in Jerusalem identifies “radical Jewish settlers” as the sole instigators of conflict in the city. This involves discredited claims, like the suggestion that the archaeological exploration along the Western Wall were designed to undermine the Haram (p. 183), or the notion that access to sacred sites in Jerusalem is “restricted to their own religious adherents” (p. 164). In actuality, there are only two sacred sites in Jerusalem at which such religious discrimination is practiced, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, due to a Palestinian refusal to admit non-Muslims. Elazar Barkan’s chapter takes the theme of state-as-villain to its extreme by accusing Israel of benefiting from religious strife (p. 235), requiring a tortured interpretation of events. This approach, exemplified by the unsubstantiated claim that the deadly Palestinian desecration of the Tomb of Joseph, its destruction, and conversion into a mosque “may well have been in the Israeli interest” (p. 259) adds little to the substance of the volume.
Other chapters manage to avoid such political prejudice by balancing the influence of the state against a gamut of other actors, secular and religious. Glenn Bowman is critical of Israeli policies in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem but is equally cognizant of the corrupt priests and powerful church movements outside the region that vie for influence in this space. In Rassem Khamaisi’s chapter on Muslim—Christian conflicts in Nazareth, the state is joined by local religious communities, Arab states, the Vatican, and the United States as significant stakeholders. This allows the author to investigate economic and class interests alongside political interests. More importantly, it permits the author to display a sensitivity toward religious history, narrative, and faith that is missing from the politicized segments of the volume. David Henig notes the Bosnian state’s efforts to politicize sacred sites yet shows how religious communities resist efforts at state regulation by designing innovative rituals. The results are multivocal and contradictory practices in which intracommunal strife, such as tensions between worshippers and their imams, are just as significant as top-down interference by the state.
The most compelling chapters in this collection are the most faithful to the primary thesis of the volume, the interplay between religion and politics. Naturally, they lack an obvious malefactor. Mete Hatay unveils the many different forms that coexistence has assumed at religious sites in Cyprus, demonstrating that not all “sharing” is equal, principled, or enduring. Instead, Hatay exposes a grassroots coexistence that is often pragmatic, adaptive, and constrained. Rabia Harmansah, Tugba Tanyeri-Erdemir, and Robert M. Hayden defy the editors’ claim that political power can shape sacred space at will by showcasing the failure of Turkish efforts at the “museumification” of heterodox Muslim shrines. Through a fascinating exploration of rites in all their minutiae, the authors demonstrate how believers resist state efforts at “secularizing the unsecularizeable” (p. 339).
Yitzhak Reiter beautifully describes the tensions among interest groups, with crosscutting religious and political interests, over the misguided construction of a Museum of Tolerance on an old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem. The result of this interplay among architects, religious leaders, the courts (secular and religious alike), scholars, business entrepreneurs, and local community members is best described as a tragedy: None of these parties seek conflict, none benefit from it, yet the religious, legal, and political implications of their actions in this sacred site produce a waxing and waning friction. This chapter and others like it offer the most authentic tribute to the concept of choreography that underpins this significant collection.
