Holy Places: Unholy rows (The Economist)

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Holy places - Unholy rows​

Holy places should unite humanity. Too often, they have the opposite effect



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ACROSS northern India, householders who were braced for a bout of violent sectarian strife are sighing with relief. The people most affected by one of the world’s biggest arguments over sacred turf, in the town of Ayodhya, seemed to accept the verdict, even if it was not quite what they wanted. On September 30th judges in the state of Uttar Pradesh ruled that the contested site should be split between Hindus and Muslims, with the latter getting a third.

“We must abide by the court’s decision and move on,” declared Mohammed Hashim Ansari, a 90-year-old Muslim who has been involved in litigation over the site since 1961. Such stoicism is impressive. As a boy, he had prayed in a fine sandstone mosque, the Babri Masjid, which had stood on the site since the 16th century. In 1992 Hindus tore it down. They believe their god-king Ram was born there. About 2,000 people died in the ensuing violence. In the run-up to the latest verdict, many feared more bloodshed. But India’s prime minister and other public figures hailed the compromise ruling and the calm reaction as a sign of maturing attitudes.

The news is less encouraging in the holy land, where amid floundering peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, acrimony over sacred turf is surging to new extremes. In a West Bank village near Bethlehem, locals say that on October 4th hard-line Jewish settlers set fire to their mosque and torched copies of the Koran. Tempers cooled a little a day later when a group of settler rabbis delivered replacement copies of the holy book, in an unusual gesture of reconciliation.

Elsewhere in Jerusalem and the West Bank, the mood is at its bleakest in places which more than one faith deems sacred. Take the site in Nablus that many Jews revere as the grave of Joseph, the biblical patriarch. Muslims associate the place with an Islamic holy man who died 200 years ago. In the 19th century, it was amicably frequented by Muslims, Jews and Christians. Recently it has become a battleground. From the 1980s a zealous Jewish group developed a study centre and synagogue, even though the surrounding area was run by the Palestinians. In October 2000, after much bitter fighting, the Israelis ceded the site to Palestinian control; the Jewish synagogue was immediately trashed.



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In recent months, as a goodwill gesture, the Palestinians agreed to restore the place and give renewed access to Jews. But they may be ruing their decision. Within hours of the restoration’s completion, about 1,000 Israeli pilgrims arrived in armoured vehicles and bulletproof buses. Israeli military jeeps closed the roads and imposed a curfew on local Palestinians. In the alleys next to the Balata refugee camp, Jewish worshippers danced the night away to a raucous beat. Such night-time incursions are planned at least once a month.

The renovation was meant to mark a new era of co-operation over holy places. A few weeks ago Israel’s chief rabbis went to Nablus to rededicate the shrine. The tomb’s dome is again whitewashed, despite requests by Muslims to paint it green, the colour of Islam.

Religious conflict, not rapprochement, seems to be the aim of some hotheads. The rabbinic circle of Israel’s main settler council, Yesha, has denounced the hiring of an Arab to restore the shrine. Tzipi Hotobelli, a parliamentary ally of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, added her voice to calls for a full Jewish takeover. “The tomb should be under Jewish sovereignty,” she said. Students who had once studied the Torah in the tomb have ambitious ideas for another kind of two-state solution: a Torah-compliant state in Judea, as they call the main bit of the West Bank, and a sinful secular state of Israel nearby.

In more liberal circles, dedicated to interfaith harmony, the point is often made that the figure of Abraham or Ibrahim unites all three monotheistic faiths. But the burial-place in Hebron of Abraham and his wife Sarah is perhaps the region’s most contested place after Jerusalem. After Israel’s takeover in 1967, access to the place was at first divided carefully between Jews and Muslims. But especially since 1994, when a Jewish extremist killed 29 Muslims, the mood has grown ever-darker. The need to control the tomb is one of the reasons Israelis give for holding on to Hebron, where 160,000 Palestinians live at odds with 500 hardline settlers. A little to the north, the tomb of the biblical matriarch, Rachel, is now surrounded by an Israeli garrison with an eight-metre-high wall jutting into Bethlehem. This prevents nearby Christians and Muslims from visiting the place, as they used to.

Muslims complain of being kept from other places as well. In the heart of Yitzhar settlement, in the hills above Nablus, the dome-topped shrine of Sheikh Salman al-Farisi is now barred to Muslims. A spokesman for Yitzhar says that, for security reasons, “Arabs are not allowed in Jewish settlements.” Many of Yitzhar’s residents are raised on the teachings of Yitzchak Ginsburgh, an American rabbi, who ran a Torah school at Joseph’s tomb before Palestinians chased it out. Israel jailed him after he praised the Hebron massacre. But his disciples are undeterred. This year Jewish radicals have vandalised or assaulted four mosques. One is in Silwan in East Jerusalem, a poor Arab area that settlers covet.

For all the rhetoric of ancient hatred, religious rows have grown worse in modern times. Across the Ottoman empire, from the Balkans to Anatolia to Palestine, Christians and Muslims mingled peaceably at shared sacred places. That survives in some locations: on the island of Buyukada near Istanbul, where Muslim pilgrims climb a steep hill to a Greek monastery; in the Christian convent of Seidnaya near Damascus, popular with Muslim women who long to conceive; and at the ancient monastery on Mount Sinai, where Muslim Bedouins revere St Catherine.

Scholars of religion argue intensely about this. Glenn Bowman of the University of Kent sees the sharing of holy places as a natural state of affairs which can be undermined only by political or religious elites. His research demonstrates the roles of Israeli officials, Islamists and Greek bishops in marring the harmony between Christians and Muslims who frequented a monastic site near Bethlehem.

Robert Hayden of the University of Pittsburgh is more pessimistic. He sees site-sharing as a temporary truce between a dominant and subordinate faith, or else an arrangement imposed by an imperial power, say Ottoman or British, for the sake of social peace. Among the best-known sharing regimes is the one for the six Christian communities that vie for control of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre. With precise allocations for every side-chapel and every lamp, the system was devised by the Ottomans, inherited by the British, and is now run by the Israelis.

Indians sometimes claim that Hindus and Muslims mingled happily in the era before British rule. Mr Hayden points to cases where the British just held the ring, until independence allowed a local group, usually Hindu, to gain the upper hand.

A contrasting and more optimistic historical perspective comes from Acharya Satyendra Das, the chief Hindu priest at a makeshift temple to Ram built where the mosque once stood. Until the site was politicised by Hindu hardliners, both faiths had rubbed along, he insists. Hindus and Muslims prayed inside the complex for many years, and he hopes that they will do so again. “Local people wouldn’t have any problem with a mosque and a temple being built on the site now the verdict has come,” declares the priest. Perhaps he should visit Israel.