Islamic Pasts and Futures in Palestine
Located in the geographic middle of the great Islamic empires that once stretched from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Indian subcontinent, Palestine did not become a majority Muslim territory until after the Crusades; that is, some 600 years after its conquest by Arab armies. No great school of Islamic learning existed in Palestine comparable to those that emerged in Cairo, Damascus, Qom, Bukhara, Lucknow. But Islam does not make sense without Palestine. Jerusalem, the heart of Palestine, if not the axis mundi of the entire world, acquires its sanctity from the most esoteric of Qur’anic events—the israa and mi’raj, the Prophet Mohammed’s mystical night journey from Mecca to the masjid al-aqsa “the furthest mosque,” located by Islamic tradition precisely to Jerusalem, and from there his ascent to heaven (Figure 1). Jerusalem thus elicits fantastical imagery. With al-aqsa “the furthest” being the city’s existential precondition, and also the name of the city’s holiest mosque, Jerusalem has long been imagined as the “furthest” city, the last city, the city that the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh calls “the last outpost of human civilization” before the wilderness that is known in Arabic as al-barriyah and by the Israelis as the Judean Desert. After Jerusalem, the Mediterranean world’s olive-terraced landscape suddenly dries up, losing itself in cascading bare hills and sandy dunes, and then dramatically drops to the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. This is the meaning of Jerusalem. It is the city at the end of the world, and the point on earth that is closest to heaven.
Figure 1. The 16th -century Dome of the Prophet, on the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, believed to be where the Prophet Mohammed led the previous prophets and the angels in prayer before ascending to heaven. Photograph by Arpan Roy.
The future of this meaning of Jerusalem, distinct among other possible meanings, is now uncertain. Designated as the “eternal capital of the Jewish people” by Israel (and ratified by American foreign policy), Jewish extremist groups parade through the city convinced of their imminent and decisive triumph. Recent clashes at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound between Palestinian youth and the Israeli military during Ramadan 2021 helped spark the largest international outcry of support for Palestinians in memory, signaling a significant shift of public opinion. Videos shared on social media brought to mind scenes from the intifada, the historic Palestinian uprising against Israel between 1987 and 1993, of stone-throwing Davids against the Goliath of the Israeli military firing bullets and grenades inside the mosque. But what was largely missing from the conversation was that the uprising was not exactly about a mosque. Although this might have been the case with the affectivity shown by many Muslims around the world, for Palestinians it was also about what is left of Arab Jerusalem, Islamic Jerusalem, multi-confessional and multiethnic Jerusalem. Al-Aqsa is a symbol for all of this. Critiques of Jewish colonialism in Palestine often (and correctly) focus on human rights abuses, refugee catastrophes, citizenship issues and water rights, and so forth. Yet, it seems to me that the shorthand “colonialism” somehow does not acutely capture the totality of the pathos in what gets lost as a given territory changes hands from one set of keepers to another.
Taufiq Canaan, a medical doctor but also an energetic folklorist, belonged to a coterie of Palestinian intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian, based in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century. This was the same period in which hundreds of thousands of European Jews had begun pouring into Palestine to build Zionism, and the period in which the British mandate government had all but promised the Holy Land to the Jews. Canaan and his friends must have had a hunch that something was about to be lost. The sociologist Salim Tamari calls the movement “nativism,” in the sense that the raison d'être of the group was to excavate the continuity of Palestinian past to present in the face of what they intuited to be its coming extinction. Yet, Tamari is careful to distinguish Canaan’s nativist movement from presumedly similar twentieth-century movements, like Negritude in West Africa or Rastafarianism. These, according to Tamari, pit the colonizer and the colonized in absolute binaries, feigning an absolute authenticity for the colonized’s traditional customs in mythologized terms. The nativism of Canaan and his coterie, by comparison, was not so much interested in the colonial rupture that separates past from present but in a highly nuanced continuity that does not exclude the colonial intervention. Canaan saw Palestine as a palimpsest of various civilizations, each one adding a trace to the composite figure that is the contemporary Palestinian Arab. Far from rejecting the Orientalizing discourse of colonialism, Canaan’s circle reveled in it, finding an outlet for their research in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, a publication that ran for approximately the period of the British mandate, its articles in English, French, and German—the languages of Orientalism.
In what today would probably be called “salvage anthropology,” the mission of Canaan’s circle was to document traces of the past in their present, with a special emphasis on the fellaheen “peasantry” as the bearers of native authenticity. Studies included meticulous treatises on the architecture of the Palestinian peasant house (still the authoritative study on the topic), tribal conflicts and their resolution, folk psychology, demonology and other superstitions, and a special subset of interest in finding remnants of biblical Palestine in the culture and traditions of the contemporary peasantry that Tamari terms “biblical parallelism.”
One such remarkable study is Canaan’s Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine, published in 1927 after what must have been years of research. It is a study of the Palestinian maqamat “shrines” (sing. maqam), the mostly unspectacular sites of folk worship that formed, it can be argued, the basis of Islamic material culture in Palestine and the wider region for several centuries. Because of its sanctity and history as a destination for pilgrimage, particularly Jerusalem, the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river is believed to have had around eight-hundred saint shrines at the time of the foundation of Israel in 1948. Today less than half of these shrines still stand.
“It is agreed by historians that the culture of saint shrines was the dominant mode of Islamic material practice in Palestine from the medieval period until the twentieth century.”
The shrines were sometimes designated to prophets mentioned in the Qur’an, meaning both their graves and sites commemorating narrative events of their lives. Sometimes they were to prophets not mentioned in the Qur’an but accepted in Islamic tradition. Sometimes they were to Sufi teachers from established orders. Mostly, however, they were to local sheikhs and foreign pilgrims who traveled to the Holy Land from Morocco, Yemen, Afghanistan, India. This latter pantheon of real-life personalities can then be divided into two categories: learned men known for their expertise in the Islamic textual tradition of the Qur’an and hadith, and ascetic spiritual masters more revered for their esoteric practices. In the first case, these were men who had considerable influence over an overwhelmingly illiterate population for whom, according to the historian James Grehan, access to the written word was a kind of magic worthy of awe and wonder. The latter group seems to have inherited their practices from a culture of Byzantine dropouts who dwelled in precisely the same land prior to the arrival of Islam, depicted by the sixth-century traveler John Moschos as maniacs roving the wilderness around Jerusalem; starving, hysterical, naked, mad, subsiding on roots and weeds. This was an awe that likely emerged from a radical othering; the reverence of peasants so inextricably tied to their land for those who have left everything.
In all these cases, it is agreed by historians that the culture of saint shrines was the dominant mode of Islamic material practice in Palestine from the medieval period until the twentieth century. Moreover, from folk worship and other ritual ceremony, the shrines also fulfilled one very practical and important function: they doubled as venues for the Muslim collective prayer for peasants for whom the great urban mosques could not be easily reached. Their decline arrived only as modern industry made possible the construction of a mosque in every village, and mass literacy granted unmediated access to the Islamic textual tradition.
Salim Tamari sees Canaan’s project as having been one of documenting and classifying a culture “threatened” by modernity. Indeed, Canaan, already in 1927, writes movingly in the preface to Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries:
The primitive features of Palestine are disappearing so quickly that before long most of them will be forgotten. Thus it has become the duty of every student of Palestine and the Near East, of Archaeology and of the Bible, to lose no time in collecting as fully and accurately as possible all available material concerning the folklore, customs and superstitions current in the Holy Land. Such material is, as we have begun to learn, of the greatest importance for the study of ancient oriental civilization and for the study of primitive religion.
I, as a son of the country, have felt it my special duty to help in this scientific work.
But the forces of modernity proved to be benign in comparison to the rupture that would come in 1948. Today traveling on Israeli highways, domes of abandoned saint shrines appear on either side. They appear also on the outskirts of towns and villages in Israel, their domes dismantled, as Le Corbusier-esque cubes, and in jungly compounds that announce themselves in the middle of forests planted by the Jewish National Fund to camouflage the damages of 1948 (Figure 2). In the razing of several hundred villages in the aftermath of that year’s events, Israel had a tendency to spare sites of religious ceremony. Whereas homes were mostly reduced to their stone foundations, weed-covered and often unidentifiable from the surrounding rocky landscapes, the ruins of Palestinian villages that flourished before 1948 sometimes remain as shrines, mosques, churches, cemeteries. Canaan could not have known that this would be the fate of so many of his precious shrines.
Figure 2. Tomb of Sultan Badr, camouflaged in a JNF forest in the ruins of Dayr al-Shaykh village. Photograph by Arpan Roy.
In the territories not conquered by Israel in 1948 but later occupied since 1967, the shrines have not met destruction but rather gradual decline. Mosques have now replaced shrines for collective prayer, legal opinions against the worship of mortals (shirk) have permeated across class lines, and the blocking of the flow of pilgrims from surrounding countries into Palestine with newly militarized borders has severed the Holy Land from its dynamic surroundings. For instance, a shrine in Jerusalem to the thirteenth-century Moroccan mystic Ahmad al-Badawi was once a site of pilgrimage for Sufis of various denominations from as far as Egypt. Canaan recounts a myth that al-Badawi himself was fond of traveling: his preferred mode of travel known to have been walking on the sea. Today there are no pilgrims from Egypt, no more sightings of the saint walking on water, and the shrine is today reduced to a room inside a private home later built around the shrine.
Consider also the various shrines in the Jerusalem area commemorating the eighth-century saint Ibrahim al-Adham (Figure 3). Sultan Ibrahim, as he was also known, is revered especially by the Chishti order of Sufis originating in South Asia. Sultan Ibrahim was born a prince in Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan, and went through a Buddha-like process of renunciation, abandoning the throne to adopt a life of ascetic wandering—a theme that also appears in the biographies of numerous Sufi saints. Sultan Ibrahim’s wandering led him to Jerusalem and Gaza, and to Syria, where he is buried. A trail of shrines stands along the routes of his travels, but there are no more travelers.
Figure 3. An ancient tree honoring Ibrahim al-Adham, in Beit Hanina village in the West Bank. Photograph by Arpan Roy.
In the same way that Canaan and his coterie aimed to uncover a continuity of the past into the present through the folklore of the Palestinian peasantry, the now nearly extinct culture of shrines (albeit with some functioning exceptions) constitute a material archive of a lost Islamic past, in a present in which religious practice moves away from a heterogeneity of folk forms of worship to an officialdom that has a propensity towards homogenization. What is important to stress here is that it is not that the saint shrines were an esoteric footnote in an otherwise orthodox Islamic landscape, but, as Canaan argued, they constituted the predominant form of Islamic practice in Palestine at the time of the arrival of Jewish settlers from Europe in the late-nineteenth century.
The shrines themselves, in many cases, are a palimpsest of holy places that were once Byzantine and possibly date even earlier. Canaan observed that the shrines are almost always found near attractive natural features like caves, springs, natural wells, strange-shaped rock formations, or ancient trees. Because of this, Canaan was well-poised to conclude that the shrines are a relic of a long-gone paganism in Palestine, later the birthplace of monotheism, and that the sites were only later adopted by the material cultures of Judaism, Christianity, and ultimately Islam.
“The now nearly extinct culture of shrines (albeit with some functioning exceptions) constitute a material archive of a lost Islamic past, in a present in which religious practice moves away from a heterogeneity of folk forms of worship to an officialdom that has a propensity towards homogenization.”
Scholarship on Islam has long held that “Islam” is both the name of a religion, as well as a broader term for a civilization, a cultural ethos and disposition, that is not necessarily restricted to religious affiliation. If we accept this definition, then there is perhaps no better example of this than Palestine, especially Jerusalem—a city that has retained its “Islamic” character even as its Muslim population has at various points become a minority. As recently as the turn of the twentieth century, Jerusalem briefly enjoyed a Christian majority, owing to a rural-to-urban migration from surrounding Christian villages, while still retaining its status as an Islamic city. Canaan, for all his obsession with Muslim shrines and Islamic superstitions, was himself a Lutheran. He very clearly saw that his own Christian subjectivity was an essential part of what we might call the Islamic civilization of Palestine, or, alternately, Arab Palestine.
Recent years have seen a veritable explosion of Jewish messianism in Israel. Jewish history is rich with charismatic messianic movements, the latest of which is the growing conviction amongst many Jews that the building of the Third Temple in Jerusalem is fast approaching. Once the realm of conspiracy theory, such a conviction now enjoys electoral support in Israel. Temple Movement activists now saturate the seats of the Knesset, and Jewish prayer and ritual on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound has become commonplace. But the Jewish temple can only be built on the site of the Dome of the Rock, the central piece of the al-Aqsa compound, and, thus, can only come into being with the wholesale transfer of the character of the site in one sweeping and destructive gesture. It is difficult to acutely capture the depression and anxiety of Jerusalemite Palestinians living around al-Aqsa, many of whom see such a possibility as increasingly likely, and who fear the confiscation (at best) or destruction (at worst) of their holiest place, and lament what they feel to be their abandonment by the world.
During the Ramadan 2021 mayhem, a video circulated on social media of grainy mobile phone footage filmed near what appears to be the Bab al-Hadid neighborhood of Jerusalem’s medieval walled medina, just outside of al-Aqsa. It does not compare with the spectacular violence of many of the other videos that circulated in the same period, those that stirred the emotions of millions, but, for me, it is the most memorable. In it a handcuffed Palestinian man is being scurried across the scene by Israeli soldiers. He yells: “Long live Arab Jerusalem” (tahiya al-quds al-arabiya). One can only wonder what punishment he later suffered for his three-word poem to his city.
Figure 4. A Dome of the Rock replica at the entrance to the underground shrine of Ahmad al-Huweiss in Biddu village in the West Bank, today a kindergarten. Photograph by Arpan Roy.
Canaan, too, was concerned about the longevity of Arab Jerusalem. But whereas Canaan saw folk religion in Palestine to be the essence of the nation, and the demise of this essence to be the work of modernity, it was, in fact, Zionism that accelerated the demise of Islam, along with its folk elements. One should be careful not to turn history into a speculative enterprise, but it is indeed worth noting that both Sufism and peasant religion, along with their material culture, declined more rapidly in Palestine than in neighboring countries like Syria or Egypt, where the cult of saint shrines and Sufi gatherings in established centers continue to thrive. If the culprit was indeed modernity, as Canaan had feared, then it seems odd that it should singularly strike Palestine.
Canaan passed away in 1964 in the August Victoria Hospital, atop the Mount of Olives, where he had been living after being exiled from West Jerusalem during Israel’s expulsions in 1948. There is an incomparably idyllic view of the Dome of the Rock from the Mount of Olives, a view reproduced on countless postcards and video panoramas of the city, and from where it is believed that Christ first laid eyes on the holy city on Palm Sunday. In Canaan’s study, a work largely focusing on humble sites of folk worship by peasants, Canaan also wrote extensively about al-Aqsa, which he found to be abound with esoteric significance. And it is true: for all the movement from folk worship to orthodoxy that I have been discussing, the holiest Muslim site in Palestine attains its sanctity from the Prophet’s night journey to heaven. It is where esotericism and orthodoxy meet, and which, for the moment, stands as a monument to almost fifteen hundred years of Islam in Palestine (Figure 4).
