POWER
PIETY AND
PEOPLE The Politics of Holy Cities in the Twenty-First Century
MICHAEL DUMPER
Introduction
C
ordoba, November 22, 2015: I was not sure what to expect on this visit. My preparation had been cursory, limited to a few recent newspaper reports and readings in Arab and Spanish history from quite some time ago. The trip was just a probing visit to see if a longer one would be useful for my project. Sitting on the high-speed train from Madrid, I thought about possible signs of conflict to look out for: offensive graffiti on walls, self-censorship in official signage and information material, tension regarding dress, monitoring or surveillance based on crude demographic profiling, police patrols, and so on. Fired up as I was by two days of meetings in Madrid held under the auspices of a Spanish think-tank, perhaps I was oversensitized to the possible problems I thought I would encounter. These meetings had been devoted to the conflict in Jerusalem, specifically over the question of access to the Haram al-Sharif by Israeli Jews, which was once again spilling over into the wider Arab– Israeli conflict. The Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian academics and security advisers there had been discussing the Haram al-Sharif ’s security and trying to work out the optimum balance between respecting religious sensitivities and the logistics of containing the conflict. Daily quotas, the allocation of designated physical spaces and time slots to each side, the installation of closed-circuit TV cameras, and a heightened police and intelligence presence were options floating around my head as the train to Cordoba sped south. [1]
In Jerusalem, the autumn of 2015 presented a period of fragile and increasingly intense stand-offs on the Haram al-Sharif enclosure. It is the site of some of the holiest shrines in Islam, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, beneath which is also the most likely site of the great temple of the ancient Israelite King Herod. These stand-offs were between, on one hand, Palestinians and Jordanian officials who struggled to maintain control over access to the site and, on the other hand, the increasing numbers of Jewish religious radicals seeking to pray on the site. The Israeli government, through its acquiescence in the actions of these zealous outriders of the state, seemed to be on the point of finally establishing direct Israeli control over the Haram al- Sharif— a goal that had eluded it ever since the Israeli army had occupied East Jerusalem in 1967. At the same time, the recognized custodian of the shrines, King Abdullah of Jordan, identified the threat that these changes to the previously agreed arrangements posed for his kingdom and his regime. In October and November, he had made it very clear to U.S. secretary of state John Kerry that if the United States were concerned with the rise of the extremist group Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria, just across Jordan’s northern border, then it was misdirecting its concerns. Unless the United States pressed Israel to hold in check its zealots entering the Haram al-Sharif, King Abdullah’s kingdom would be swept away by Muslims’ reaction to his perceived inactivity or powerlessness. If this were to occur, then the United States would have to deal with ISIS not only inside Jordan but also in Jerusalem. During all this time leading up to the Madrid workshop, daily reports and videos on YouTube showed groups of Jews attempting to pray in the Haram in violation of previously agreed arrangements. They were surrounded by Israeli armed paramilitary police, who were in turn surrounded by crowds of Palestinians demonstrating their objections and fears by chanting and sometimes spitting and shoving. This was “hard-core” religious conflict being managed very poorly. In addition, it was being managed poorly under the unrelenting gaze of both social and international media, which was simultaneously fanning the anxieties of the region and the wider Muslim world. On the day of my trip to Cordoba in late November, it appeared that the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, had finally blinked in this contest over control of the site. By agreeing to a series of security arrangements with Jordanian officials and Palestinian leaders, which to a large degree restored the status quo ante, he had, in effect, backed down. Yet the agreements were ad hoc, comprising personal [ 2 ] I N T RO D U C T I O N
assurances between Prime Minister Netanyahu, King Abdullah, and Secretary of State Kerry, and had not been based on any legal framework or United Nations (UN) resolutions.1 The questions we all were asking ourselves during our meetings in Madrid were, Would the agreement hold, and had Israel let its moment to secure the holy site slip from its grasp? Furthermore, would the tensions begin to seep away, or, more likely, was this the lull before the next storm, and would the tensions reemerge more dramatically at a later date? I gazed out the window of my train as the flat lands surrounding Madrid flashed past me. The train rounded a wide sweeping bend, and from my seat I watched the engine and the front coaches slowly climb over the mountains of the Sierra Morena before descending into the valley of the Río Guadalquivir, beside which the ancient Roman, Visigothic, and Moorish city of Cordoba stands. Further questions came to mind. Were the tensions surrounding the mosque in Cordoba anything like those I had witnessed in Jerusalem, and what could they tell us about what to do and what not to do in order to resolve the situation in Jerusalem? Happily, as I found out later that day, the tensions in the two cities were not, of course, the same— not by a long, long shot. Nevertheless, the visit was a revelation in other unexpected ways: I learned instead a great deal about the extent to which the past continues to play a role in the present, merging with current events either to stoke up tensions or to soften and dissipate them. Despite the lack of overt conflict in and around the site, the MezquitaCathedral of Cordoba (also known as the Mosque- Cathedral) still blew me away for other reasons. Soon after entering the interior, I had to sit down in a quiet place along one of the darkened arcades to take in the overall impact. The eruption of the monumental, almost brutalist sixteenthcentury Gothic cathedral into the center of the delicate eighth- century mosque form is astonishing. It is an assault on your visual sense. The effect is both mesmerizing and jangling. You need time to get your bearings. The composite structure, compressing a huge, high, and heavy nave and chancel inside the mosque’s fragile and slender structure, is quite a miraculous feat of engineering. Putting aside the rupture to your sense of proportion, you cannot help but ponder how all that weight is spread without huge supporting buttresses or deep foundations. Aerial views of the site and views from the minaret (now a bell tower) show how the buttresses were constructed in such a way as to disguise them and minimize their impact on the more delicate mosque arcades of the interior. What struck home to me I N T RO D U C T I O N
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was that this apparent contradiction—between a brutal intervention and its complementariness— summed up one of the messages of the Mezquita for this book. It is both a break with the past yet also a recognition and acknowledgment of the splendor of that past. And it is a contradiction that continues to play a part in the present. In chapter 2, I discuss the question of non- Christian access to the Mezquita in Cordoba in further detail. The controversy regarding Muslims currently wishing to pray in the building has been subsumed into a number of wider contests: between secularists and the Roman Catholic Church, between the extreme Right and the progressive Left in Spanish politics over the control over heritage sites and the narrative that accompanies them, and between the regional identities of Andalusia and the centralizing Castilian state in Madrid. But at this early stage of my research, in November 2015, I was struck by the thought of how the past in Cordoba delineated possible patterns for the present in Jerusalem. The Christian takeover of the Mezquita in the thirteenth century and the Mezquita’s gradual and partial reconstruction as a cathedral can be seen as a possible trajectory of what is taking place in Jerusalem currently. In Jerusalem, you have a possible future scenario in which the Israeli government in Jerusalem gradually erodes Muslim control over the Haram al- Sharif, which leads, first, to the precedent of Jews praying there and then later to these collective prayers being accompanied by various religious paraphernalia and equipment, until, finally, a portion of the site is acquired by the Israeli state and a Jewish synagogue is built either on top of the al-Aqsa Mosque or beside it. All this is very reminiscent of what took place in 1992 in the Indian city of Ayodhya, where Hindu zealots destroyed the Babri Mosque in order to build a temple to the god Ram. Are we witnessing the start of this trajectory in Jerusalem? At the same time, I was confronted with a parallel observation: that the present fraught situation in Jerusalem was a possible indication of the future trajectory of the controversy in Cordoba. Unless resolved, the issue of Muslims praying in the Mezquita-Cathedral threatens to escalate into something more destabilizing. If the pressure, which is at the moment contained, is not handled well, and if the numbers of Muslims wishing to pray there start to increase dramatically, then the controversy may be transformed into a more complex conflict. The controversy in Cordoba is, perhaps, only a few years away from the current situation in the Haram al-Sharif, replete with the armed guards accompanying Jewish worshippers. It is also, possibly, only a [ 4 ] I N T RO D U C T I O N
few years away from where a discussion on the monitoring of behavior, the introduction of quotas, and the allocation of designated spaces and time slots will be on the agenda of Spanish think-tank discussions concerning the future not of Jerusalem but of the Mezquita-Cathedral of Cordoba.
Why Study Cities and Religious Conflict? This book is the product of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.2 In 2015, I received a Major Research Fellowship from the trust to carry out a comparative study of conflicts in “holy cities” and embarked upon a study of Jerusalem; Cordoba, Spain; Banaras, India; Lhasa, Tibet; and George Town, Malaysia. The purpose of the project, entitled “Power, Piety and People: The Politics of Holy Cities in the 21st Century,” was to examine the relationship between the urban form and religious conflict in order to see which, if any, aspects of city life exacerbated religious tensions and transformed them into conflicts. At the same time, the project sought to identify those religious practices that also had a major influence on the development of the shape, structure, and uses of the city. The purpose was not to try and resolve the “chicken and the egg” dilemma—that is, to see which came first or which of the two was the main driver in creating conflicts. Rather, the purpose was more to identify the nature of the osmotic relationship between religion and cities and to draw out the reasons why conflicts arose in order to suggest ways in which they might be better managed or resolved. The project is a reflection of how the study of religious conflicts in cities is emerging as a subfield in the social sciences. There are a number of reasons for this emergence. First, the rapid urbanization of the global population is a prime factor. Cities are already home to more than half the world’s population, and by 2035 they are expected to absorb 95 percent of the global projected population growth.3 At the same time, a specific urban character to violent conflict has prompted greater studies on the links between urbanization and conflict.4 High population density, poor infrastructure, the unequal distribution of public resources, unemployment, weak governance, limited state capacity, and the absence of effective mediating institutions have combined to create conditions where violent conflict emerges as a common mode of action by competing social groups. Second, instead of modernity and technological innovation leading to the decline I N T RO D U C T I O N
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of religion, the twenty-first century has a seen instead a remarkable resurgence in religiosity, which necessarily has an urban dimension because it is in cities where most people now live. Currently, 84 percent of the world’s population identify with a religious group: Christians constituting 33 percent, Muslims 25 percent, Hindus 15 percent, and Buddhists 7 percent. However, by 2060 the world’s population is expected to increase to 9.6 billion people (a rise of 34 percent from 2015). According to the Pew Research Center, all religious groups will decline as a proportion of the global population except for Christians and Muslims, who will surpass or match the global growth rate. Indeed, due to high birth rates and a younger demographic, the increase in membership in these two religions will lead to an increase in the total number of adherents to religion in general. The growth in the number of Muslims will be twice as fast as the increase in the Christian population, so that by 2060 there will be roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians across the globe.5 Thus, in this context of increased urbanization and increased religiosity, the prospect of increasing numbers of religious conflicts in cities is not really in doubt—hence the need for more studies on the reasons why and how such conflicts emerge and how they are best resolved or managed. It is important to establish from the outset that although this project starts with the contention that all cities are arenas of contestation, only some cities exhibit specific forms of conflict arising from the salience of religious activity within them. This project focuses on the latter cities. Powerful religious hierarchies, the generation of often unregulated revenues from donations and endowments, the presence of holy sites, and the enactment of ritualistic activities in public spaces combine together to create forms of conflict that are arguably more intense and more intractable than other forms of conflicts in cities.6 The question at the heart of the project, therefore, is: Do cities ameliorate or exacerbate religious conflicts? To answer it, we should recognize some key features of religion that bring about urban conflicts. For example, religious sites are recognized as important markers of group identities. Contestation over them, therefore, can be used to mobilize resistance and to inflame disputes. Another key feature is the way religious leaders are revered, can call upon nontangible forms of legitimacy, and are often unaccountable to state authorities. All of these qualities allow them a degree of political autonomy and, consequently, of influence that makes them significant actors when there is competition or disputes over
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the allocation of space and other resources inside a city. Similarly, religious communities often have revenue streams (via donations, endowments, and tithes) that offer them a degree of financial autonomy and therefore freedom from the constraints that other political parties and civil societies operate under, which, again, gives them some advantages in the arena of political contestation. Finally, religious communities are often supported by a diaspora comprising satellite communities of adherents as well as by international networks resulting from pilgrimages and outreach activities. These communities and networks together can combine to offer a degree of protection from state intervention in their activities. When we add these elements to the elements making up the urban form, we can begin to see how the evidence starts to point strongly toward an answer to the question posed earlier: Yes, cities do exacerbate religious conflicts. At the same time, as this book discovers, ethnic and religious diversity within a city does not inevitably lead to conflict. As I explore in more detail chapter 1, cities are places where people live in large numbers, over a wide area, and in close proximity. These elements in themselves exacerbate tensions in intercommunal relations. For example, religious communities often own extensive properties in cities, so they can be segregated and form enclaves, which adds a territorial component to a conflict between religious groups. Cities that have strong religious associations are often premodern in form and layout. This usually means that access to important holy sites is often difficult, providing ample occasions for flashpoints at gateways, bottlenecks, and junctions. Another urban dimension that can exacerbate tensions is the way religious sites belonging to one community are not always located in the areas where that community resides. Over time, changes in property ownership and employment and even dispossession result in the adherents of one religion living in an enclave that is not even adjacent to their religious sites. In these circumstances, important rituals such as processions or other public demonstrations of devotion can cut across segregated residential areas or may occur at the same time as the rituals of another religion. These place and time complications can lead to disputes over precedence or other logistical inconveniences that trigger a conflict. In sum, the close proximity of large numbers of people means that incidents can very quickly be transformed from minor disputes into major confrontations. Multiethnicity and multiconfessionalism
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in cities can sometimes dilute tensions that build up around specific religious issues or sites, as we will see in George Town, Malaysia, but in other cities, such as Jerusalem, Banaras, and Lhasa, simple religious and ethnic binaries will exacerbate those tensions. Clearly, this interaction between the use of and control over religious sites and the ebb and flow of political power is important in understanding conflicts in cities. It lies at the heart of the discussions in this book.
Ways and Means Before I explore these premises in more depth, I should establish what my “positionality” is, given the ethnographic material this research has encompassed. In essence, I should make explicit where am I coming from and how it affects my approach to this study. My interest in religion and its role in politics has a long genealogy. The son of an Anglican clergyman and a former Roman Catholic mother, I was born and brought up in Malaysia and Singapore. In addition to the medley of races, languages, and dress that made up parish life in Ipoh, Penang, and Singapore, there were also other colorful and dramatic influences: outside my back gate in Penang were two Buddhist monasteries, the saffron- and burgundy-robed Thai and Sri Lankan monks smiling and waving their hellos; in front of our house passed the long Hindu Deepavali and Thaipusam night processions, dramatically lit with flaming brands and with men dragging huge statues of gods and goddesses by myriad strings hooked into their bare skin; in a side street nearby, we used to watch popular Chinese opera, the wayang, redolent with ancient myths and legends punctuated with gongs and long high-pitched wails; Chinese New Year was a noisy school holiday engulfed by the thundering sounds of exploding red firecrackers. Our domestic and church staff were Indian and Malay Muslims, Tamil-speaking Christian and Hindu Indians, and Buddhist and Confucian Chinese. Our summer holidays were spent either trekking in the rain forests of the Malaysian interior, where we met the indigenous animistic orang asli in jungle clearings, or snorkeling off island reefs beside small Malay fishing villages, where the muezzin’s call to prayer drew us out of the water for our supper. Comparative religion was my daily life, and so it is unsurprising that my first degree, in the late 1970s, was in religious studies at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom under Professors Ninian Smart, John [ 8 ] I N T RO D U C T I O N
Power, Piety, and People explores the causes and consequences of contemporary conflicts in holy cities. Michael Dumper offers five case studies of important disputes, beginning with Jerusalem, often seen as the paradigmatic example of a holy city in conflict, and then discussing Córdoba, Banaras, Lhasa, and George Town in Malaysia. Applying the lessons drawn from these cities to a broader global urban landscape, this book offers scholars and policy makers new insights into a pervasive category of conflict that often appears intractable. “Highly original and fascinating empirical research, combined with theoretical depth, positions this book on high ground. Dumper adroitly and expertly examines the nexus between religion and urbanity in five holy cities in Israel/Palestine, Spain, India, the People’s Republic of China, and Malaysia. The book foregrounds the intersection of structural determinants and street-level phenomena as key to understanding whether dominance or tolerance takes hold in urban space.” —SCOTT BOLLENS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE
“Power, Piety, and People brings together sharp political insights into the key dynamics of religious conflicts in cities and detailed studies of relevant cases across two continents. Dumper examines the patterns of urban conflict that flow from the way key religious sites are used and how they are managed, financed, and protected. The result is a fascinating and informative analysis of the complexity and the intractability of religious conflicts.” —LYNN MESKELL, AUTHOR OF A FUTURE IN RUINS: UNESCO, WORLD HERITAGE, AND THE DREAM OF PEACE
“Power, Piety, and People is a tour de force. Dumper explores the politics of contemporary holy cities through rich and thoughtful case studies. His analysis highlights the complex ways belief, institutions, politics, and economies can interact to support exclusionary claims of communal priority or encourage more pluralist and integrative urban societies.” —REX BRYNEN, M C GILL UNIVERSITY
MICHAEL DUMPER is professor of Middle East politics at the University of Exeter. His many books include Jerusalem Unbound: Geography, History, and the Future of the Holy City (Columbia, 2014). His most recent edited volume is Contested Holy Cities: The Urban Dimension of Religious Conflicts (2019).
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