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Punjab is often treated in both media and scholarship as a perennially conflicted region, but this is only a fraction of a more complex story of coexistence between multiple religious groups. Among the stages upon which interreligious interaction takes place are the myriad shared sacred sites that proliferate from Multan to Malerkotla. This chapter is an examination of effective interactive choreography at three shared sites, illuminating modes, systems, and strategies of exchange that substantively contribute to, or detract from, the production and perpetuation of peace. It focuses on the ritual, narrative, and administrative arenas of exchange that are produced and grounded in shared sacred sites. All three sites are in Punjab with clientele and custodians who are from various religious backgrounds: one is a dargah (tomb shrine of a Sufi saint), another is a shrine memorializing a Sufi saint's presence in the region, and the last is a maseet (mosque).

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the politics of the “choreography of sacred spaces” within the framework of state-society relations and to examine the positions, roles, and agency of various actors and institutions in an attempt to differentiate between the political and the religious features of the shared or contested space. It seeks to understand whether sharing and contestation are politically or religiously motivated. The chapter then discusses the three main areas of research that this book explores. It starts with issues of coexistence that are fundamental to understanding the kinds of arrangements that can be found within shared sacred sites and the consequences of those arrangements. It then examines characteristics of shared sacred sites, including narratives, centrality, and indivisibility, to underscore how such features are theorized in the literature. Finally, it discusses the various ways in which state-society relations, state structures, and the impact of state policies contribute to sharing sacred sites.

This chapter seeks to document the complex nature and choreography of Bosnian Muslims' relations with holy sites in the context of debates on sacred landscapes in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. It shows that these sacred sites are not necessarily venerated, worshiped, or shared by Muslims strictly as members of an ethnoreligious group. On the contrary, these sites in Muslim Bosnia entail a complex nexus of (power) relations cutting across multiple scales. The sacred sites in the Central Bosnian highlands assemble female and male, village and urban Muslims, or Sunni Muslims and dervishes of divergent cults. Yet the sites are intricately entangled in the state-level bureaucratic field as their administration, and thus their appropriation, involves the Islamic Community (IC), international Islamic organizations, and the state.

In Jerusalem's walled Old City, the Muslim and Jewish site of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount is central to both religions, and to the conflict. In addition to religious institutions, the area is filled with residential and commercial structures, places of everyday life; Tariq al-Wad, or al-Wad Street, is an active example. This chapter explores how al-Wad Street has become a new arena of conflict in Jerusalem. It concentrates less upon political policy than upon the cultural construction of the various sites and artifacts in the market street that both emerge from and enable intense levels of popular partisan political participation. It reflects not a polarization of sacred and profane but more nuanced conditions at the boundaries of the sacred, where religious practices and beliefs permeate mundane situations and everyday acts. In contrast to this environment, the chapter also considers a recent attempt to interpret an archaeological site, known as the Western Wall Tunnel, as a holy place. This relatively new creation has been isolated from these quotidian settings and delineated from the world of the street. There we find a contrasting mode of intervention for asserting religious and national claims beneath the major holy places.

This chapter explains the dramatically different outcomes of two sieges conducted in the course of combating India's Kashmir insurgency: one of a historic mosque in an urban setting, and the other of an ancient shrine in a rural milieu. The first siege, that at the Hazratbal mosque in the capital city of Indian-controlled Kashmir, ended peacefully. The siege of the shrine of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, a Sufi saint, however, ended in a bloody conflagration culminating in the destruction of the shrine. It is argued that the markedly different locations of the two religious sites partially explain the different outcomes of the two sieges. The Hazratbal mosque, located in the heart of Srinagar, promptly attracted the attention of the national government in New Delhi, which granted an able civilian administrator to handle the negotiations while allowing the military to maintain a vigilant posture. The Charar-e-Sharief shrine, on the other hand, was located near the Line of Control (the de facto international border) in Kashmir and therefore was removed from significant political attention. This situation led the military and local police forces to adopt a more unyielding posture toward the insurgents. The demographic composition of the insurgents in the two sites also played a vital role in shaping the final outcomes.

This chapter explores toleration and coexistence in three interrelated sections. First, it rethinks the conceptual language of coexistence, toleration, and violence in order to apply them to the long history of Ottoman pluralism, where toleration set the stage for centuries of coexistence in various religious, legal, and social contexts. Second, it explores key debates on the sharing of sacred sites and discusses how to bring some of the analytic dimensions used in the toleration discussions to bear on sacred sites. Third, it analyzes the historical circumstances that provided the context for the sharing of sacred spaces in the Ottoman Empire. The chapter then demonstrates that during the reign of the Seljuk and Ottoman empires the larger context of toleration and accommodation to diversity, especially of Christians across the frontiers, promoted the sharing of sacred sites between Muslims and Christians. While churches and monasteries were often converted to Islamic buildings, mixed worship became the rule in many places as openness to the other was encouraged by state authorities. Ottomans made a concerted effort to build institutions that were inclusive of the diversity of the empire, often positioning their foundations within reach of Christians and Jews.

This chapter explores political riots in Jerusalem and the West Bank surrounding religious sites and the role played by the state in creating space for the riot and in responding to it. It argues that the riots serve a larger political agenda of aggravating the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and are intentionally manipulated by the political entities that have the capacity to either inflame or contain the level of violence. It further claims that popular religious violence serves as an informal political tool that is used by formal governing bodies. In Jerusalem, the chapter looks specifically at three incidents instigated by Israeli government action. These involve the opening of the 1996 Temple Mount tunnels, the 2000 “visit” by Ariel Sharon to the al-Aqsa, and the inclusion of three sites located in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem in the Israeli heritage sites in 2010. In the West Bank there are four major “joint” religious sites and numerous minor ones. The four major sites are the Cave of the Patriarchs (Hebron), Rachel's Tomb (Bethlehem), Joseph Tomb's (Nablus), and Nebi Samuel (north of Jerusalem).

This chapter examines two important operations waged by Indian security forces to counter Sikh insurgents operating in India's northern state of Punjab, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The first operation was a military as well as a public-relations debacle. The Indian Army had inadequate and flawed intelligence about the strength and capabilities of the insurgents who had entered and occupied the Golden Temple, and they failed to forge a viable public-relations strategy and ultimately used excessive force to prevail. Fortunately, the Indian state was capable of learning from its initial errors. When Sikh militants again attempted to use the temple as a sanctuary, the Indian security forces launched a second assault, which involved a prolonged siege, but one marked by careful attention to the sentiments of religious authorities and by a deft public-relations strategy. The two contrasting episodes underscore how the same regime, under different circumstances, can cope with and respond to the requirements of a counterinsurgency operation in a sacred site.

This chapter focuses on the Holy Sepulchre or Church of the Anastasis, the “mother church” of Christianity, in an attempt to shift the analytic logic away from the identities of communities that cohabit sites toward institutions that attempt to own, or at least control, those sites. Pilgrims and celebrants in Jerusalem's holy places come to the places as guests; the Anastasis, like all of the other sites falling under the regimen of the status quo agreements, is not a parish church and hence has neither parishioners nor parochial duties. The situation is very different for the clergy affiliated with the monasteries of the authorities who hold possessory rights over the status quo holy places. The three major communities within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—the Greek Orthodox, the Latin Franciscans, and the Armenian Orthodox—all claim exclusive praedominium to [preeminence over] the places they believe they own. However, such claims are always mediated through structures of state power, and these shape choreographies of conflict or of sharing.

This chapter examines religious sites in Cyprus where the everyday practices of “peaceful coexistence” always threatened to break down. It considers three basic types of sites: spaces of (temporary) submission, where members of both communities knew of and believed in the efficacious power associated with the site, but where the site clearly “belonged” to one community and its clergy; contested shared spaces, where members of both communities believed in the power of the site but where there was an unresolved dispute, usually based on competing accounts of the site's origins, over which community could legitimately claim authority; and economic spaces, or those sites believed by only one community to have efficacy but which may have been tolerated by the other community for pragmatic reasons, usually the economic benefit that their presence brought. The chapter concludes by using these sites to reflect on how the variety of practices and attitudes toward them can help us think about debates over tolerance and its varieties.

This chapter presents a comparative study of the Turkish shrine complexes of Hacı Bektaş Veli in Hacıbektaş and Mevlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi in Konya. Both sites were major focal points of so-called heterodox or Sufi practices during the Ottoman period, both were closed by the early Republican government in 1925, and both were later reopened as museums. It is argued that the transformation of the Hacı Bektaş and Mevlana sites into museums actually manifests several forms of control by the state. In certain ways the state protects and preserves the complexes, but in others it limits and even prohibits the ritual use of the shrines by non-Sunni Muslims while subtly facilitating Sunni practices within them.

This chapter discusses how sacred sites are also built through cooperation. At sites of parallel pilgrimage, people may negotiate with others and form alliances that allow them access to otherwise denied resources. In addition, people who form alliances benefit from a multiplier effect—meaning the resources of a group are greater than the sum of its parts. Group membership carries with it a form of power, or social capital that can only be established and maintained by “reacknowledgement of proximity”—that is, “relations of proximity in physical (geographical) space or even in economic and social space.” The chapter then looks at the changing proximal relationships in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints around the Kirtland Temple.

This concluding chapter argues that individuals “build” sacred sites through varied discourse on what a site means. Indeed, each pilgrim and each site guide are best seen as building the Kirtland Temple and contributing to its collective meaning. Despite the relatively fixed location of the site, the agents who build the Kirtland Temple are actually in the process of constructing confessional and ideological sites rather than a singular site, temples rather than a singular temple. The physical temple itself simply provides the finite set of terms out of which groups have created many different variations. As such, the physical site itself has become a platform for improvised ecclesiastical performance and contestation. Moreover, various Mormon groups use the temple as a place to shape, transform, and justify their particular group commitments.

Chapter 1 presents the conceptual and methodological tools that are required for this study. Section A examines the prevailing definitions of toleration in order to identify one that is specifically suitable for our subject matter—that is, contested sacred sites. This examination leads us to suggest a novel political definition of toleration. Section B situates our discussion of toleration at contested sacred sites within the framework of political and legal debates over the place of religion in public spaces. Section C proposes the concept of “thick sites” as a tool for encapsulating and investigating the distinct features of contested sacred sites. By using this concept, we aim to clarify the nature of such sites and the reasons for intractable conflicts that are often associated with them. Section D presents our contextual methodology and the rationale for developing a typology of governance models for contested sacred sites.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of “parallel pilgrimage”—the dynamics of cooperation and contestation by rival religious groups at a common pilgrimage site. Contestation, whether covert or overt, often charges the shared sacred site with a heightened importance since the shrine is seen as a scarce resource, in danger of appropriation by a religious other. In this way, a contested sacred site may become a supra-sacred site. The Kirtland Temple, a site owned by a minority—a moderately liberal faith community—and patronized mainly by a much larger, conservative religious community, serves as an opportune case study for parallel pilgrimage and its attendant rituals of cooperation and contestation. Beyond the relatively liberal Community of Christ and the more conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least a half dozen smaller Mormon groups also currently patronize the sacred shrine.

Chapter 2 explores the non-interference model in contested sacred sites through the examination of the struggle over rock climbing at the Devils Tower National Monument/Bear Lodge (Wyoming). It begins (section A) with an examination of the voluntary coordination between climbers and indigenous community members, assisted by a “nudge” from the authorities, aiming to bring about, but not legally force, the reduction of climbing activities at the site. The chapter then turns (section B) to a succinct description and analysis of the general approach of the separation between religion and state. Section C turns to a critical examination of the non-interference model upon its structure, justifications, advantages, and weaknesses. The final section (D), moves to map out and differentiate among three subtle policy variations of the non-interference model: “signaling,” “nudging,” and “ushering,” all of which aim to achieve successful coordination of activities at such sites between competing groups.

Chapter 4 examines the state preference model of religion–state relations at contested sacred sites. Section A explores the case of the Women of the Wall as a case in which the state of Israel adopts the preference model—favoring ultra-Orthodox Judaism—in managing the contestation over prayer arrangements at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Section B explores the general religion-majoritarian approach which serves as the framework for the model of state preference at contested sites. Section C presents the specific techniques and policy tools, as well as the advantages and main weaknesses, of the third model of governing contested sacred sites examined in the current study: the model of “preference.” The last section (D) presents several arguments for the undesirability of state support for religion from the perspective of religious interests, emphasizing the applicability of this undesirability to the category of contested sacred sites.