Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean

Description

Crossing religious frontiers at shared holy places

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While devotional practices are usually viewed as mechanisms for reinforcing religious boundaries, in the multicultural, multiconfessional world of the Eastern Mediterranean, shared shrines sustain intercommunal and interreligious contact among groups. Heterodox, marginal, and largely ignored by central authorities, these practices persist despite aggressive, homogenizing nationalist movements. This volume challenges much of the received wisdom concerning the three major monotheistic religions and the "clash of civilizations." Contributors examine intertwined religious traditions along the shores of the Near East from North Africa to the Balkans.

Introduction: Sharing Sacred Places—A Mediterranean Tradition / Maria Couroucli
1. Identification and Identity Formation around Shared Shrines in West Bank Palestine and Western Macedonia / Glenn Bowman
2. The Vakëf: Sharing Religious Space in Albania / Gilles de Rapper
3. Komšiluk and Taking Care of the Neighbor'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 Benoît 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 the Saints: Pluridenominational Visits to the Christian Monasteries in Syria / Anna Poujeau
Conclusion: Crossing the Frontiers between the Monotheistic Religions, an Anthropological Approach / Dionigi Albera
References
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Middle Eastern Studies
• Comparative Religion
• Middle Est
• Jewish Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Religión
• Sociology
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• Eastern Europe
• Russian
• Middle East
• Anthropology
• Religion
• General
• Eurasia
• Islam
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 20 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253016904
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE
Matti Bunzl and Michael Herzfeld, editors
Founding editors Daphne Berdahl Matti Bunzl Michael Herzfeld
Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean
Chri s ians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and San c uaries
EDITED BY DIONIGI ALBERA AND MARIA COUROUCLI
First published in French as Religions travers es: Lieux saints partag s entre chr tiens, musulmans et juifs en M diterran e , 2009 Actes Sud.
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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2012 by Indiana University Press and Maison M diterran enne des Sciences de l Homme (MMSH)
All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Religions travers es. English.
Sharing sacred spaces in the Mediterranean : Christians, Muslims, and Jews at shrines and sanctuaries / edited by Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli.
p. cm. - (New anthropologies of Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35633-8 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22317-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Religious pluralism-Mediterranean Region. 2. Mediterranean Region-Religion.
3. Christianity-Mediterranean Region. 4. Judaism-Mediterranean Region. 5. Islam-Mediterranean Region. I. Albera, Dionigi. II. Couroucli, Maria. III. Title.
BL687.R46713 2012
201 .5091822-dc23
2011020226
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
This volume is published with the support of the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission, in the framework of the RAMSES 2 Network of Excellence, funded by the 6th Framework Programme (contract CIT3-CT-2005-513366), under the coordination of the National Book Centre of Greece. This volume is solely the responsibility of the publisher and the authors; the European Commission cannot be held responsible for its content or for any use which may be made of it.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Sharing Sacred Places-A Mediterranean Tradition / Maria Couroucli
1 Identification and Identity Formations around Shared Shrines in West Bank Palestine and Western Macedonia / Glenn Bowman
2 The Vak f: Sharing Religious Space in Albania / Gilles de Rapper
3 Kom iluk and Taking Care of the Neighbor 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 Beno t 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 the Saints: Pluridenominational Visits to the Christian Monasteries in Syria / Anna Poujeau
Conclusion: Crossing the Frontiers between the Monotheistic Religions, an Anthropological Approach / Dionigi Albera
References
Contributors
Index
Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean
INTRODUCTION
Sharing Sacred Places-A Mediterranean Tradition
MARIA COUROUCLI
The presence of shared or mixed sanctuaries, sacred places where several religious groups perform devotional practices, often within the same space and at the same time, is a well-established phenomenon in the Mediterranean. This book outlines a comparative anthropology of these pious traditions from the longue dur e perspective, combining ethnographic and historical analysis. Eastern Mediterranean societies have experienced a revival of the religious domain in recent years: in many places, religion, often accompanied by the rise of religious fundamentalism, has invaded everyday social and political life-all relatively recent phenomena of the postcolonial era. The present context is thus marked by the ultimate separation of ethnoreligious communities within most circum-Mediterranean nation-states, a victorious outcome of a long strife that began in the nineteenth century: Christians, Jews, and Muslims have finally achieved religious homogeneity within political territories, putting an end to a long history of living side by side. This happened progressively, as independent countries adopted the model of a homogeneous nation-state (one language, one religion, one-collective-identity) imported from Western Europe. We tend to forget that this was a monochrome model: photographs from Paris, London, Amsterdam, or Berlin in the 1950s still remind us that not so long ago Western European capitals were inhabited almost exclusively by white Europeans. Less than three generations later, the model is obsolete: globalization and massive migration to the metropolitan cities have transformed Western democracies into multicultural spaces.
Not so in the southeastern Mediterranean, where nation building is more recent and where memories of ethnic and religious wars have been revived by recent-or ongoing-conflicts. In this post-Ottoman space, ethnoreligious minorities have been banned from national territories many times over the last hundred years: for example, memories of three important events, the Balkan wars (1912 and 1913) and exodus of the Muslim population from the Balkans, the Armenian massacre in Ottoman Anatolia (1915), and the massive exodus of the Greek orthodox population from Kemalist Turkey (1924) were still recalled during the most recent wars and ethnoreligious cleansing in the former Yugoslavia (1990s). During such conflicts, entire communities were forced to abandon their homes and holy sanctuaries, to leave room as it were for the construction of homogeneous national territories. In the Balkans, the Muslim population almost disappeared at the beginning of the twentieth century (except in Bosnia, in the Albanian central and western regions, and in Greek Thrace). At the same time, Near Eastern Christian minorities in Muslim countries (from Turkey through Syria to Egypt) kept declining. All through the twentieth century, as nationalisms were rising in the Middle East and North Africa, Western European powers became less efficient at protecting Christian communities, now minorities often fearing persecutions.
The weakening of the Christian communities and power in the Arab and Muslim modern world has been described as the reverse of the Reconquista (when Christian Catholic power gradually reestablished itself in the Iberian Peninsula between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries). Toward the end of the Middle Ages, it had become impossible for a Muslim to settle in the Western Christian kingdoms and territories. Thus, as Western Christianity lived confined in monocultural and monochromatic societies, the culture of sharing, multiculturalism, and coexistence, once pan-Mediterranean, survived only on its eastern shores.
Sharing and Mixing as Common Mediterranean Experience
Both the Byzantine (4th-15th centuries) and Ottoman (14th-19th) Empires were multiconfessional political constructs, and were culturally less homogeneous than their Western counterparts. From Morocco to the Middle East and from the Balkans to Anatolia, local communities often consisted of more than one religious group. Here the Other was the neighbor with whom one exchanged, not always peacefully and never on an egalitarian basis (Lory 1985; Anagnostopoulou 1997; Weyl Carr 2002). Ottoman religious plurality or tolerance was related to a specific political system, sometimes called ottoman despotism, a reference to Wittfogel s oriental despotism, a model of agrarian empires that combined absolutist political organization and strong state structures. Within these societies, ethnicity and religion constitute social markers defining different social status for each group, while minorities, excluded from both power and honor, form specialized groups, socially mobile and politically privileged (Gellner 1983:103). In other words, social segregation and modes of cohabitation between majority and minorities were related to the presence or absence of privileges and implied important differences in social status; a situation quite far from modern Western conceptions of human rights, which stem from traditions related to individual freedom, such as the Habeas Corpus Act (1679). Historical case studies provide wonderful insights into the different ways of dealing with individual and social liberties in pre-national societies. In seventeenth-century Crete, for example, the three religious communities, Latin Christians (Roman Catholics), Oriental Christians, and Muslims, lived side by side (Greene 2000:5). The ways in which the two Christian communities coexisted during the first five centuries of Venetian domination were neither forgotten nor abandoned. When the Latins left, the urban orthodox population continued to interact with the Other in much the same ways, only this time these were Muslim settlers or Christians co