Introduction

On Yom Kippur in 2008, Acre became a battleground between its Jewish and Muslim residents. The conflagration, both literally and figuratively, began when a young Muslim driver drove through a distinctly Jewish residential area with his car radio blaring, according to the city’s Jewish residents. For three days, the city was in turmoil, with riots, street battles, and destruction of public property that could have resulted in many casualties if not for the massive police presence. When the storm subsided, the city’s rabbi, Mr. Yosef Yashar, and the imam of the Al-Jazzar Mosque at the time, Sheikh Samir Assi, decided to embark on a joint activity for education and reconciliation. Indeed, for about two years afterward, they appeared together, mainly in schools during holiday periods, to speak about the need to respect religious others and to conduct oneself in an inclusive and non-violent manner. However, when interviewed about this initiative and his choice of partner for this interfaith dialogue as part of a decade-long study I conducted in Acre, Rabbi Yashar did not express any appreciation or acceptance of the “religious other.” He made several comments that reinforced an impression of disdain for his partner and a lack of appreciation for Sheikh Assi’s personality as well as his religious views. It seems that the encounter, which dealt with interfaith dialogue, rapprochement, and acquaintance, did not lead to a change in attitudes, openness, or deep reflection on the religious insights of the other. 

Indeed, any interfaith and multifaith dialogue raises questions about the ability of those who do not share the same religious belief to understand or appreciate the other. How can we even understand the uniqueness of another faith’s tradition when we understand it only from our own perspective? Are believers from a particular religious group capable of understanding, embracing, and willing to appreciate the symbolism, philosophy, and practices of another group? And if so, does this process lead to greater interfaith understanding? Marianne Moyaert challenges us on these issues and touches on the phenomenological aspects of interfaith encounters. She asks, can the self truly change without losing itself in the process of interfaith encounters? What happens to religious identity when the self meets the religious other and the traditions they bring with them? Is it even possible to imagine a religious identity that does not confine us to a polar and binary space but allows for connection, collaboration, and ideological acceptance of the religious other? These critical questions, she argues, are essential for any interpretive attempt at interfaith dialogue. Moreover, they challenge the possibility of conducting a harmonious, inclusive, and respectful non-conflictual interfaith encounter.

Indeed, the study of interfaith and multifaith encounters is marked by an ongoing dispute regarding their nature, character, and significance. In general, there are two schools of thought. One school seeks to emphasize the harmonious aspects and the existence of dialogue in such encounters, while the other school focuses on the confrontational aspects. Before I delve into the confrontational-conflictual components of these encounters and offer a theory and geographic-cultural-political insights for their investigation, I will examine the possibilities available to us encompassed by the term “interfaith encounter” and ponder what we mean by this concept.

On the Nature of Interfaith Encounters

Interfaith encounters refer to interactions and exchanges of opinions/actions between individuals and groups of different religious perspectives. Incidentally (or not), according to the Catholic Church, the term “interreligious” in English specifically refers to encounters between Christian communities, while “interfaith” is used to describe dialogue between different religions. This issue, namely the Anglo-Saxon bias of research, is part of Talal al-Asad’s critique of the study of religion in Western academies and the Christian-centric research. The Latin term “religion” is a faithful expression to describe the relationship between humans and the transcendent. These encounters can take place in many ways, including random conversations, personal meetings, theological debates, sharing sacred spaces, conflicts related to these spaces, changes in the purpose of religious buildings, and the entry of new groups into them, and so on. I will try to define them here in several categories:

Dialogue: A respectful, open, and as equal as possible encounter designed to increase mutual understanding and appreciation of religious diversity. In this context, theological terms can be discussed, personal experiences shared, and shared perceptions examined.

Collaborations: Joint activities for common goals or projects even given religious differences. Thus, for example, groups can unite and address social problems, promote community building processes, or provide assistance in times of crisis.

Learning: Meetings of mixed religious groups to broaden horizons and become acquainted with the other. In this context, one can also include interfaith theological debates, which were prevalent in Europe during the late Middle Ages, as well as less contentious encounters in Islamic lands until the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

Joint or separate worship at the same site: Sharing and participation in religious rituals of members of different faith groups, a phenomenon that often occurs on the periphery. This phenomenon took place in areas where several religions lived together, leading to the blending of worship or the creation of religious syncretism in which similar, sometimes shared rituals of different religions are performed in the same sacred space. Until the modern era, Rachel’s Tomb, located on the northern outskirts of Bethlehem, served as such a space, while the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron functioned similarly during certain periods. The tomb of Pelagia, which is also the tomb of Hulda and later of Rabia al-Adawiyya on the Mount of Olives exemplifies this process. In the Turkish-Greek-Balkan region, there are several places where access is still permitted to members of different religions, allowing for separate but shared worship in the same space. Such is the House of Mary in Ephesus, which is visited by both Christian and Muslim pilgrims. The church of Saint Naum, called Sveti Naum on the border of North Macedonia, Greece, and Albania, serves as a pilgrimage site for Greek Orthodox Christianity. However, since the 18th century, members of the Bektashi Sufi order also began visiting the site, as they consider it the tomb of the holy Sari Saltik, or the Yellow Baba, meaning blonde. 

However, it should be noted that most initiatives for shared worship and encounters of the quieter kind are initiated from the top-down or are external to these polemical spaces and are mainly found in established national spaces devoid of existential conflicts. A recent example is the House of One, a building in Berlin that houses the three monotheistic religions. Nevertheless, these initiatives tend to occur in places where religion is not a polarizing issue in society and where religious affiliation does not necessarily have a political implication for access to shared resources. These issues have been looming over Europe in recent years with the rising number of immigrants, especially among Muslim immigrant communities, and pose a real challenge in the ability to foster understanding and acceptance of the religious other.

Confrontations, Conflicts, Politics of Appropriation, and Takeover

Before the Axial Age and the rise of organized religions and accelerated globalization processes, local religions were more unified and less mobile, resulting in few confrontational encounters. Long-term historical processes, such as the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the expansion of the Chinese and Mongol empires, the entry of Islam into the Eurasian world, and the meeting of different cultures—including between Islam and Christianity in Europe and Central Asia, the Crusaders in the Levant, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire—created more intense encounters, leading to violent confrontations and competition among religious groups. These events and others led to competition for control over sacred spaces, often accompanied by attempts to prove the superiority of one religious belief over others. This trend of interfaith confrontations only intensified with the rise of the national idea and the desire for cultural-religious isomorphism within the borders of the homeland. In many places, one religion becomes dominant, either through open declaration or an undeclared reality. With accelerated globalization processes, the present time has become marked by interfaith encounters in various arenas, escalating conflicts and public discourse, and violent confrontations over control of sacred sites that were previously shared or had belonged to other religious groups. Among these, one can mention the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which was once a church/mosque/museum/ and now is a mosque again, the current attempts to blur the Muslim past of the mosque/cathedral of Cordoba, or the Hindu–Muslim struggle over the Ram Temple/Babri Mosque in Ayodhya that has claimed thousands of victims, mainly Muslim, and certainly the ongoing drama in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif.

In the following, I expand on interfaith encounters as spatial actions and focus on the processes of spatialization of these encounters. While this introduction may seem banal or trivial, it is far from being so: Interfaith encounters, like any human action, transpire in a certain spatial arrangement. They occur in particular places and therefore have a spatial aspect. The social organization of religious life and the encounter with the other are both created and shaped by the space and the spatialization. In other words, the social and the spatial are not separate but rather influence and depend on each other. However, I want to delve further into this theoretical framework and offer an explanation of why interfaith encounters are mostly conflictual and often spill over into other types of violence. To understand this dynamic, we must factor in the spatial turn in social science and the changing relations to place in critical geography.

The Spatial Turn and Place in Critical Geographic Perception

The “spatial turn” refers to a significant paradigmatic change that occurred in the humanities and social sciences in the late twentieth century. This change occurred with the growing understanding that space, place, and geographical context play a significant role in understanding social phenomena. Traditionally, social sciences focused on social structures and abstract processes. The spatial turn emphasizes that these structures and processes do not exist in a vacuum; instead, cultural practices and social interactions are all situated in space, meaning they are anchored to specific locations and cannot exist without them. 

These thoughts greatly influenced the re-theorization that took place in cultural geography in the 1980s and 1990s, which until then had been quite descriptive. From the late 1980s, theorists such as David Harvey, Edward Soja, Peter Jackson, and Doreen Massey created a new critical and reflexive cultural geography, in which place is no longer seen as a passive container but rather as always in flux, shaped by human activity and influenced by socio-political processes.

Below I will expand on this conceptualization of place and from here the way will be paved to understand why places—especially sacred ones that often stand at the heart of interfaith encounters—are conflictual in nature. As such, they constitute a barrier that makes it difficult to conduct fruitful, respectful or peaceful dialogue. Moreover, the sense of place, and certainly sacred ones, makes it very difficult to reach a compromise, whether through division, sharing, or concessions between religious groups.

Places are essential to all human activity—humans cannot act without places and one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens, certainly since the agricultural revolution, is the creation of places. So what is a place? A place is an idea, a phenomenon, a product, and a process in which humans are involved. Carter, Donald, and Squires’s definition summarizes this well: “Place is a space to which meaning has been ascribed.” As a product of human activity, place cannot be conceptually reduced to its physical properties. The creation of places requires extensive human efforts—encounters, politics, memory creation, myth-making, and more. Places are as much social creations as they are spatial, with different forces and competing perceptions constantly operating in them, therefore making them always capable of change. But more importantly, this conceptualization of places highlights that power, or politics, with another name, is a critical component in their creation. Places by their very nature are political entities, especially those that undergo politicization as a result of human activity.

In the process of their ongoing production of places, humans assign meaning to places, which shifts constantly according to changing needs. This process of shaping a place imbues it with symbolism and power, transforming it into a complex system—a network of relationships in which control, subordination, solidarity, and cooperation can coexist. At the same time, places can be closely related to disputes, confrontations, struggles for control, and ongoing dialogue about the meaning, symbolization, and decoding of the past and present of the place. A place becomes a network of symbols, capable of containing different interpretations and ongoing conflicts between all the actors who vie for control, whether through existing power or ambition.

Places are spatial metaphors through which individuals and groups can express themselves and translate their cultural perceptions into concrete, tangible forms. Places provide the material-physical framework for metaphysical cultural work, enabling the production of complex matrices of activity and meaning. Through places, abstract ideas and perceptions become real and indeed spatialized. 

In this theoretical conceptualization, we must recognize that places are not only created spatially but also have a dimension of time. That is, the way we conceptualize place through social relations has a history and is influenced by the changes that time can make in it. Therefore, any claim to establish a certain identity of a place depends on the historical reading we choose to attribute to it. For example, what is the “true” nature of the following places: the Temple of Aphrodite or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Rachel, the wife of Rabbi Akiva in Tiberias, or perhaps Sitt Sukayna in its previous Muslim incarnation before 1948?

On the Confrontational and Controversial Nature of Sacred Places

The discussion so far has revolved around the theoretical conceptualization of place as a space that is continually in the process of becoming and changing. In addition, I emphasized the inherently conflictual nature of places by virtue of their role as the spatialization of relationships and perceptions. Sacred places are first and foremost places, and hence we should not be surprised by the existence of a conflictual component in them. Like other critical cultural geographers, I see sacred places primarily as conflictual spaces. This perception is influenced by Durkheim who believed that the sacred is an empty signifier capable of containing different interpretations and meanings projected by different agents. “The power of a sacred place,” as Eade and Sallnow argue, “stems largely from its being a religious void, a ritual space capable of accommodating diverse meanings and contradictory activities.” A sacred place is not only revealed, founded, or produced, but it is also subject to ongoing claims of ownership, appropriation, and positioning by various people and groups with vested interests. The disputes over sacred places concern not only the process of their creation but also the production of symbolic surpluses that these places generate.

Sacred places often provide fertile ground for processes of mythologization, symbolization, and emotions. Therefore, they become sites of competing interpretations and narratives, with each actor/group attributing great importance to them and which they do not want to lose to a rival group. This is even more true in the current era, where religion has increasingly become central to the perception of nationalism. Consequently, the sacred places of the religious or national groups become focal points for conflict and confrontation. And because of this, interfaith dialogues become confrontations over justifying one group’s perceptions and denying the legitimacy of the rival group. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the nature of sacred places is inherently political, or at least susceptible to politicization by human agents. As such, these places exist within a complex system of relationships, characterized by control and subordination, cooperation and solidarity, as well as confrontation and struggle.

Multi-religious spaces are often sites that have undergone changes of ownership throughout history, coming under the control of different religious groups at various periods and at least two groups perceive these spaces as their own. Consequently, they serve as material-spatial expressions of religious encounters and conflictual interfaith relations. The more central and exclusive a place is to a religious group, the harder it becomes for that group to share it, because no textual and material substitutes can replace its significance. Of course, the reality is more complex than the dichotomy between conflictual and cooperative approaches, and there are more nuanced degrees of interfaith tolerance and coexistence. More complex models also exist, such the designation of sacred sites as heritage sites and the role of tourism, and, in certain cases, the practice of multi-religious pilgrimages. By understanding the synergy between social and spatial processes in sacred places, we can gain a deeper insight into interfaith encounters as they are manifested spatially, socially, ideologically, and theologically.

Place and Scale: A Possible Matrix for Studying Interfaith Encounters

Until now, I have focused on the component of place within the theory I propose for the study of interfaith encounters. I will now complete this discussion with the second component, scale, through which we can more effectively examine the spatial aspects of interfaith encounters. Since the late 1980s, political geographers have produced an excessive amount of research to clarify this term. In its classical definition, scale is the ratio between distance on a map and distance in reality. This view assumes that the scale is fixed and determined a priori, without a human agent. 

However, this perception underwent a radical change as geographers began to explore the relationships between processes operating at different scales, from the personal to the global. Determining the scale or choosing the scale to examine a certain phenomenon is inherently political. According to Smith’s method, this is referred to as the politics of scale, and he described the transition between different stages as a scalar jump. In my research on sacred places, such a scalar understanding is invaluable in interpreting the processes that are spatialized in these places. 

A configuration of scale is not a pre-existing platform on which social life takes place but rather part of the processes that produce social life anew each time and in different forms through socio-political struggles. Scale is created socially; hence, at every stage in the hierarchy we choose as our unit of analysis—whether from the individual body to the global—our understanding of scale is necessarily the result of social processes and political struggles. Scale and scaling are, therefore, not neutral; they are both products of positions and movements related to power. Determining the scale often defines the field of struggle and a scalar jump can allow a subordinate group to blur the spatial limitations imposed at a certain scale. 

For example, the process of transforming al-Haram al-Sharif into both a Palestinian national symbol and a global Islamic symbol enables the subordinate group to repeatedly assert a form of control over this space, challenging the control of the State of Israel and the Jewish majority group at the site.

Towards a Spatial Theory for the Study of Interfaith Encounters

The two central terms I have addressed—place and scale—and the complex theory through which they are understood in contemporary cultural geography and particularly in the geography of religion help explain why interfaith encounters often become conflictual. Before concluding this essay, I will provide an example demonstrating how critical and scalar geographic analysis can shed light on the complexity—and some might argue, the impossibility—of interfaith encounters at the practical, day-to-day level. 

The empirical discussion is taken from a multi-year study on the centrality of the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif in the competing nationalisms of Israel and Palestine. In the early days of the Second Intifada, lawyer Abdulmalik Dahamshe, who was then the head of the Israeli Islamic party in the Knesset, was interviewed about the events, and he replied as follows: 

This is a war that every Muslim should be a part of. There is no Green Line when talking about al-Aqsa—I cannot see how this murderer [in reference to the visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the Israeli opposition] invades the holiest place and remains a passive observer from the margins. Am I not a human being? Don’t I have feelings? Am I not a Muslim? He enters the holiest place for Muslims in order to defile it as a murderer, as a man of force, as a Zionist. Do you really think we won’t react to this when this step threatens our very existence?

Notice how Dahamshe uses spatial language here and engages in scalar politics in his discussion of al-Aqsa—moving from the scale of his own body to the national level and then extending it to the global. Through this use of the politics of scale, he is able to cope with and respond to events in a specific place across different levels, ultimately challenging Israeli control of the site, at least conceptually. 

A more prominent example of these scalar politics and jumps, which further illustrates the confrontational component in the interfaith encounters can be found in the rhetoric of Sheikh Raed Salah. Salah is a highly influential figure who transformed al-Aqsa into an expansive field of activity, establishing his religious and political status not only among Muslims in Israel but, it must be acknowledged, throughout the Muslim world. In an opinion piece published in the Islamic Movement’s publication “Sawt al-Haq wa-l-Hurriya” (Voice of Truth and Freedom) in 2002, he wrote: 

Al-Aqsa Mosque is Islamic, Arab, and Palestinian property and no one else, no matter who they are, has any right to it. Especially the Jews have no right there until the end of days, and whoever agrees that they have a right to a stone there, or antiquities, or anything else, is a traitor. We must say to this person: you are a traitor. This is a betrayal of Allah, and Muhammad and the believers, of the Muslim nation and the Palestinian people. This is a betrayal of the first Qibla and the second mosque and the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad, and this is a betrayal of the al-Haram Mosque in Mecca and the Medina Mosque . . . And we say to anyone who tries to undermine these positions: You will not succeed; al-Aqsa Mosque is ours alone. We still believe that no Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim on the face of the earth, who has a drop of pride in his heart, would allow himself to give up a part, stone, wall, path, memorial site, dome or building in the blessed al-Aqsa, whether inside or outside, and under the ground, before the ground, or above it.

Salah did a masterful job here of creating a new layer of myths that negates the Jewish past of the site, while also producing a spatial-political discourse and scalar jumps that allow him to overcome the current political limitations of the place. He shifts from the personal to the urban, the national, and finally to the global Muslim space. In this way, he has repeatedly succeeded in challenging Israeli policy and framing a scalar spatial context in which the present of the place is not only shaped by its hegemonic power. For example, in the magnetometer incident in 2017, Israel changed its policy in response to Turkish intervention and various threats from global actors.

However, these insights are not limited only to extreme conflict situations, such as those that occur frequently in Jerusalem. In my research in Acre, a multi-religious and multi-ethnic city, one could see how religious leaders like Rabbi Yashar and Imam Assi, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, deal with the other in the urban space. They engage in dialogue about shared existence in the same space across different levels, from the individual (the personal religious experience and interpretation of the interfaith encounters) to the neighborhood and city levels, and certainly, in the current Israeli case, this also extends to the complexity of life in a heterogeneous ethnocratic state. 

As I draw to the end of this rumination, I acknowledge that my perspective on religion, mostly through a Durkheimian lens, viewing it as a socio-political practice and a component of identity, rather than addressing theology, perhaps I have focused too much on the conflictual component and confrontational aspects of the interfaith encounters. However, the approach I propose here—looking at the processes of spatialization in these encounters and considering them at different levels—has proven to be very fruitful as it allows for critical and complex discussion and analysis of the phenomena: the nature, characteristics, and essence of interfaith encounters.