Intercommunal Relations around Religious Shrines used by both Muslims and Christians in Macedonia and West Bank Palestine
Principal Investigator: Glenn Bowman
Project dates: 2006-2007
Funding: AHRC, British Academy
The current obsession with the ‘clash of civilizations’ has tended to obscure the long history of Christianity and Islam sharing places and practices — a history continuing up to the present day. Engaging both historical data and contemporary ethnography, this research approaches shared religious sites on two of the front lines of that alleged conflict (Macedonia [FYROM] and the West Bank [Israel\Palestine]) to assess how Christians and Muslims (as well as at times Jews) have come together around places each group respectively considers holy.
‘Sharing’ or ‘mixing’ at shrines is neither a simple matter of syncretism nor a moment in a trajectory towards conversion, although in certain circumstances it has been one or the other. By examining the history of shared sites in the two regions from the period of the Ottoman Empire through its collapse and into the present day when ethno-nationalisms have made the regions ‘front lines’ of the clash of civilisations, this research examines how communal identities have been shaped by the relation between the local and the state and how changes in discourses of governance and identity impact upon peoples’ relations with the sacred and those who approach it. It looks closely at inter-communal interactions at a number of ‘shared shrines’ around Bethlehem on the West Bank and in Macedonia to map the choreography of inter-communal relations within and in the environs of those sites and to examine what promotes or disrupts mixing and sharing. Here the religious and the political intermesh, demonstrating the ways in which shared religious sites and practices can variously become fields of violent contention or the foundations for solidarities stretching beyond the ritual.