The bodies of nations: A comparative study of religious violence in Jerusalem and Ayo00dhya

History of Religions

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 101-149

  Friedland, Roger ^a   Hecht, Richard ^a  

^a University of Caflfornia   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0011537994     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/463530     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht, To Rule Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
2. Edward A. Gargan, "Hindu Militants Destroy Mosque, Setting off a New Crisis in India" and "Crowd's Religious Zeal Turns to Physical Abuse," New York Times (December 7, 1992).
3. Stanley J. Tambiah, in Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 253-55, notes the spatial and temporal vectors in the January rioting. While the press referred to the violence taking place in shanty towns, these areas in reality contained the majority of Bombay's urban population, its poor and lower-middle-class and white-collar communities.
4. See the postscript "December 1992" to Ainslie T. Embree, "The Function of the Rash-triya Swayamsevak Sangh: To Define the Hindu Nation," in Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 645-49
5. R. Thakur, "Ayodhya and the Politics of India's Secularism: A Double Standard Discourse," Asian Survey: A Monthly Review of Contemporary Asian Affairs 33 (July 1993): 645-64
6. Y. Ghimire and R. Pathak, "Too Much, Too Late," India Today (January 31, 1993), pp. 50-53
7. and Y. Ghimire, "The Rise of the Saddhus," India Today (January 31, 1993), pp. 49-51.
8. Daniel Williams, "Israelis Slay Nineteen Arabs in Clash in Jerusalem," Los Angeles Times (October 9, 1990).
9. See, e. g. , Sabra Chartrand, "Nineteen Arabs Killed in Battle with Jerusalem Police," New York Times (October 9, 1990)
10. Ron Kampeas, "Twenty-one Arabs Die as the Police Quell Temple Mount Riot," Jerusalem Post (October 9, 1990)
11. Williams, "Israelis Slay Nineteen Arabs in Clash in Jerusalem"; and Peter Arnett, Cable News Network (October 9, 1990).
12. See "Special File: The Haram al-sharif (Temple Mount) Killings," Journal of Palestine Studies 20 (Winter 1991): 134-59.
13. Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre, London School of Economics, Monographs on Social Anthropology, no. 59 (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 10. This narrative also helps to explain local Muslim tradition that believes that Noah was buried in Ayodhya as the result of conflation of the Quranic narrative of Noah and the narrative of Manu.
14. The classical Hindu cosmos was divided into three worlds. Here, golok, "the world of sacred cows," provides the fourth world. The addition of golok may reflect the support in Uttar Pradesh during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for the Gorakshini Sabha, the Cow Protection Society. The society was created in order to protect cows from Muslim slaughter, which became one of the prime causes for intercommunal violence. See Anand A. Yang, "Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the 'Anti-Cow Killing' Riot of 1893," Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (October 1980): 576-96. It is then very significant that Ayodhya is the origin of the sacred world of cows, which immediately inverts the Muslim claim to Ayodhya.
15. Neeladri Battacharya, "Myth, History, and the Politics of Ramjanmabhumi," in Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhumi Issue, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1991), pp. 134-35
16. The Hindi term sitapak is an abbreviation for the Sanskrit, sitapakasthana, "the kitchen of Sita. " According to Hans Bakker, Ayodhya: The History of Ayodhya from the Seventh Century BC to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century-Its Development into a Sacred Centre with Special Reference to the Ayodhyamahatmya and to the Worship of Rama according to the Agastyasamhita (Gronin-gen: Egbert Forsten, 1986), pt. 2, pp. 173-75, the Sita kitchen presumably formed a part of the Janmasthana temple complex before its destruction. Within the outer enclosure of the present mosque in the northwest corner there is an altar on which lie stone kitchen utensils. This area is venerated as Sita's kitchen.
17. Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters (Chicago: Aldine, 1971).
18. MirceaEliade,Traité d'histoire des religions (1948; reprint,Paris: Payot, 1970),p. 20.
19. For a critique of Eliade's celestial reading of Australian aboriginal narratives as another instance of the sacred pole as cosmic axis connecting the lived topography with cosmogony, see Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. pp. 1-23.
20. See, e. g. , the important distinctions drawn by Robert Redfield and Milton Singer between "orthogenetic" and "heterogenetic" cities in "The Cultural Role of Cities," Economic Development and Cultural Change 3 (1954): 53-77
21. Stein Rokkan, "Dimensions of State Formation and Nation Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe," in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 562-600
22. and Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), esp. pp. 3-16.
23. See also the important collection of essays exploring Shils's theory, Liah Greenfield and Michel Martin, eds. , Center: Ideas and Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Shils's review of the history of the idea of "center and periphery" (pp. 250-82).
24. See esp. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
25. An example of this approach is Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod, Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1991).
26. Peter van der Veer, "'God Must Be Liberated!' A Hindu Liberation Movement in Ayodhya," Modern Asian Studies 21 (1987): 292-97.
27. Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmanas of Tulsidas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).
28. In the Mahabharata, Bharata is the celebrated hero and monarch of India, the son of Dushyanta and Sakuntala, and the first of twelve cakravartins and sarvabhaumas, or universal emperors.
29. Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaīsm and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 159.
30. Hans Bakker, "Ayodhya: A Hindu Jerusalem," Nvmen 37 (June 1991): 90, cites Ramayana 1. 1. 2-4 as an example of Rama's perfection as king and warrior.
31. Presentation by Mary Hancock, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, to the Cultural Analysis Colloquium, Winter 1995. See also Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 8.
32. In transcendent systems, representation of the divine either is forbidden or unthinkable, making it dangerous or idolatrous. In the former case, it is centralized; in the latter, it takes place in the disciplined imagination of the believer. It is for this reason, we would argue, that Protestantism, an eminently transcendent tradition, has been associated with the early formation of nation-states given the relative ease with which emergent states could re-sacralize the ground around the telos of the nation. In immanent traditions, in contrast, there are a multiplicity of sites through which individuals can approach the divine, making both for unruly and expansive spatiality and making it difficult for the state to counter or harness religīon as a cultural force in the making of the nation-state.
33. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 19-23.
34. Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht, "The Nebi Musa Pilgrimage and the Origins of Palestinian Nationalism," in Pilgrims and Travelers to the Holy Land, ed. Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha, Nebr. : Creighton University Press, 1996), pp. 89-118.
35. JafTrelot, p. 57.
36. We are grateful to Mark Juergensmeyer for pointing this out to us.
37. See the recent discussion by Cynthia Kepley Mahmood, "Ayodhya and the Hindu Resurgence," Religion 24 (1994): 73-80.
38. Gerald James Larson, India's Agony over Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), esp. p. 141.
39. Menachem Friedman, "The State of Israel as a Theological Dilemma," in The Israeli Slate and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Baruch Kimmerling (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), esp. pp. 203-4. Friedman argues that the 1948 war effectively severed Israel from its holy places and from the historic land of the patriarchs.
40. Uzi Narkis, The Liberation of Jerusalem: The Battle of 1967 (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1983), pp. 252-56.
41. Menachem Begin, The Revolt (1948; reprint, Los Angeles: Nash, 1972), p. 88.
42. For a description of Rabbi Goren's activity immediately after the Six Day War, see Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem: The Torn City (Jerusalem: Isratypset, 1976), pp. 287-90.
43. On the early years of this group and its first national conventions, see Janet Aviad, "Israel: New Fanatics and Old-the Temple Mount Becomes a Political Issue," Dissent (Summer 1984), p. 342.
44. Haim Shapiro, "Kach Challenges 'Temple Faithful,'" Jerusalem Post (July 29, 1985).
45. David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988), pp. 47-48.
46. For a discussion of this photograph, see Ian Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988), p. 224, n. 44.
47. See, e. g. , Motti Nachmani, "What Is Going on with the Temple Mount," Nekudah, no. 47 (September 3, 1989), p. 7 [Hebrew]
48. Yigal Ariel, "The Temple Mount as waqf Property," Nekudah, no. 58 (May 17, 1983), pp. 18-19 [Hebrew]
49. Shabbatai Ben-Dov, "Fasts of the Temple Destruction," Nekudah, no. 61 (July 18, 1983), pp. 8-9
50. Yisrael Eldad, "In the Den of Numerologists," Nekudah, no. 78 (September 21, 1984), p. 14
51. Baruch Lior, "To Prepare the Generations for Prayer and War," Nekudah, no. 85 (April 5, 1985), pp. 12-13
52. Yisrael Medad, "Battle on the Temple Mount," Counterpoint 3 (February 1986): 8-9
53. Moshe Ben-Yosef, "Prelude to the Mount," Nekudah, no. 96 (February 21, 1986), p. 19
54. and Moshe Levinger, "We Must Not Discard the Old Banners," Nekudah, no. 97 (March 25, 1986), p. 8
55. as well as the following editorials, "The Temple Mount Is Not in Our Hands," Nekudah, no. 87 (May 24, 1985), p. 4
56. "The Fuse," Nekudah, no. 95 (January 21, 1986), p. 4
57. and "Messiah Now," Nekudah, no. 105 (September 5, 1986), p. 5.
58. Lustick, pp. 170-71.
59. quot;Israeli Police, Arabs Clash in Jerusalem: Jewish Group's Plan to Pray at Temple Mount Sparks Violence," Los Angeles Times (October 12, 1987).
60. New York Times (April 12-15, 1982)
61. See also Bernard Wasserstein, "Trouble on the Temple Mount," Midstream (August and September 1982): 5-9
62. A complete chronology of incidents at the haram al-sharif since 1967 through fall 1983 is in Robert Rosenberg and Myra Noveck, "Target Temple Mount," Jerusalem Post: In Jerusalem (September 30, 1983).
63. Quoted in Yisrael Medad, "Inside the Temple Mount," Counterpoint: Perspectives on Israel and the Jewish People 1 (February 1984): 8
64. On the issue of the destruction of archaeological materials on the Temple Mount, see Herschel Shanks, "Ancient Remains on the Temple Mount Must Not Be Destroyed," Biblical Archaeology Review 9 (March/April 1983): 61.
65. See Dan Fisher, "Ten Israeli Lawmakers, Arabs Clash at Holy Site," Los Angeles Times (January 9, 1986)
66. Thomas L. Friedman, "Another Incident on Temple Mount," New York Times (January 15, 1986)
67. and "Left, Right Trade Charges over Mount," Jerusalem Post (January 25, 1986), international edition.
68. Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 285.
69. Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 50-51.
70. Muhammed K. Shadid, "The Muslim Brotherhood Movement in the West Bank and Gaza," Third World Quarterly 10 (1988): 668-69.
71. Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 267.
72. Yusuf al-'Azm, one of the brotherhood leaders in Jordan, noted in an interview in 1989: "The Muslim Brotherhood did not provoke the king. We had a truce with him, because we were unable to open fronts with all sides at one time ⋯ We agreed with the king because Nasir [the Egyptian President, Gamel Abdul Nasser] was irrational in his attacks against him. We were skeptical about Nasir's relations with America⋯ We stood with the king in order to protect ourselves, because if Nasir's followers had risen to power, or a pro-Nasir government had been established in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood would have been liquidated, as they were liquidated in Egypt. " Ziad Abu-Amr, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 5.
73. See also Amnon Cohen, Political Parties in the West Bank under the Jordanian Regime, 1949-1967 (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1982).
74. The brotherhood was involved in every Jordanian election between 1951 and 1967. In 1957, when King Hussein faced his first real crisis, pitting him against his own prime minister, Suleiman al-Nabulsi, it was the brotherhood who came to his aid, organizing mass rallies in his support, often praising his stand on matters of Islam. In 1962, Palestinian nationalist groups boycotted elections, but the brotherhood supported them. Nevertheless, despite its open politics and its mass support, the brotherhood rarely won more than two seats in the Jordanian Parliament of the twenty-five that were allotted to the West Bank. One observer of their role throughout this period characterized them as the "loyal opposition. " See Shadid, p. 662.
75. Osman Hallak, editor of Al-Nahar, interview with author, December 15, 1991.
76. A number of the brotherhood-dominated Jerusalem waqf's properties were located close to the Old City's walls, prime locations for commercial development even under the restrictive terms set down by Amman in the Jordanian city. Yitzhak Reiter, Islamic Awqafin Jerusalem, 1948-1990 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1991), pp. 13-14.
77. On Hamas, see Don Peretz, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising (Boulder, Colo. : West-view, 1990), pp. 104-6
78. and Lisa Taraki, "The Islamic Resistance Movement in the Palestinian Uprising," in Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation, ed. Zachary Lochman and Joel Beinin (Boston: South End Press for the Middle East Research and Information Project, 1989), pp. 171-77. We do not agree with Taraki's conclusion that "Hamas' active participating in the uprising, then, should best be seen as part of the campaign of a prospective opposition Islamist party in the future Palestinian state" (p. 177).
79. Daniel Williams, "Muslims, Israel Police Clash at Islamic Holy Site," Los Angeles Times (April 8, 1989).
80. Sabra Chartrand, "For the First Time, Israel Restricts Palestinians' Freedom of Worship," New York Times (April 15, 1989).
81. Dan Izenberg, "Moslems Urged to Flock to al-Aksa," Jerusalem Post (April 21, 1989).
82. Ifrah Zilberman, "Jordan's Temple Mount Role," Jerusalem Post (November 17, 1990), international edition.
83. On the transformation of the symbolism of Hanuman in contemporary Hindu nationalism, see Philip Lutgendorf, "My Hanuman Is Bigger Than Yours," History of Religions 33 (February 1994): 211-45
84. and "Monkey in the Middle: The Status of Hanuman in Popular Hinduism," Religion 27 (October 1997): 311-32, where he argues that devotion to Hanuman is strongly associated with the Indian middle class.
85. Embree (n. 4 above), p. 619. The most comprehensive study of the RSS is Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, Colo. , and London: Westview, 1987). On their treatment of the early history of the RSS and its social organization, see pp. 26-70,71-107.
86. Jaffrelot (p. 44) writes: "Since the explicit purpose of the RSS is to unite Hindus, above and beyond caste divisions, in a nationalist perspective, the RSS finds in the Hindu sect a sociological model for the nation. "
87. Jaffrelot, pp. 330-37.
88. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 40-46.
89. Philip Lutgendorf, "All in the (Raghu) Family: A Video Epic in Cultural Context," in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, ed. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), esp. pp. 218-26.
90. "Ending Corruption Main Plank: BJP," Times of India (June 19, 1993).
91. P. K. Datta, "VHP's Ram: The Hindutva Movement in Ayodhya," in Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, ed. Gyanendra Pandey (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), p. 47.
92. Mark Fineman, "The Wrath of Rama: A Fight over a Mosque on Ground Holy to Hindus Has Reignited India's Ancient Feud," Los Angeles Times Magazine (May 19, 1991).
93. Katherine K. Young, "Women in Hinduism," in Today's Woman in World Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma (Albany, 1994), pp. 99-100
94. Jan Platvoet, "Ritual as Confrontation: The Ayodhya Conflict," in Pluralism and Identity: Studies in Ritual Behavior, ed. Jan Platvoet and Karel van der Toorn (Leiden, 1995), pp. 217-18. Platvoet notes that in the contemporary appropriation of the Ramayana, the roles of Rama and Sita were reversed in the most powerful way, forcing the nation to act in order to save Rama from the hands of the Muslims. In the Ramayana, Rama had to liberate Sita, but now in contemporary India, Sita had to set him free. Platvoet writes that throughout the campaign to liberate the Ramjanmabhumi in the 1980s and early 1990s, each political ritual orchestrated by the Hindu nationalist parties was intended to replicate the mythological history of the Ramayana. He writes that the "equation of the secular government and the Muslim community with Ravana, the king of the ashuras, demons, was clearly implied, as was the comparison of their manner of rule and political influence with the forest, Ravana's kingdom, as the realm of chaos and the inversion of the Ramrajya⋯ The rituals of the Hindu nationalist served as the consonant and redundant spatio-temporal frames for focusing experience on part of the mythological and historical past: those in which Hindus, and particularly Hindu temples and ascetics, had suffered at the hands of Muslims in power; others in which Hindus had fought Muslim rulers; and again others in which the monkey army of Hanuman assisted Ram in defeating Ravana. They also marked Muslims, whether or not in power, as alien intruders, and Indians who had converted to Islam as traitors. "
95. David Harvey, "Monument and Myth: The Building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart," in Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 221-50.
96. A parallel study is by Mona Ozouf, "Le Panthéon," in Les lieiix de mémoire, vol. 1, La République, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 139-66.
97. See, e. g. , Romila Thapar, "Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity," Modern Asian Studies 23 (May 1989): 209-31
98. and Subrata Kumar Mitra, "Desecularising the State: Religion and Politics in India after Independence," Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (October, 1991): 755-77.
99. Ashis Nandi, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 78.
100. JafTrelot, pp. 86-87.
101. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Uday Singh Mehta, and Usha Thakkar, "The Rebirth of Shiv Sena: The Symbiosis of Discursive and Organizational Power," Journal of Asian Studies 56 (May 1997): 371-90.
102. Atul Kohli, "Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? Rise and Decline of Self-Determination Movements in India," Journal of Asian Studies 56 (May 1997): 325-44.
103. On the interpretation of Bhindranwale's violence, see Mark Juergensmeyer, "Sacrifice and Cosmic War," in Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 101-17.
104. See also the very important discussion of the Sikh violence and Indian rituals intended to maintain the nation in David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, Conn. , and London: Yale University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 125-50.
105. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1980)
106. and "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic, 1983), pp. 121-46
107. and most recently, James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
108. Elaine Chan, "Socialization and Center Displacement: The 1989 Chinese Student Movement," Ph. D. diss. , University of California, Los Angeles, 1995.
109. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Palo Alto, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 66-79.
110. See Margaret Somers's analysis of the Leviathan in "Fear and Loathing of the Public Sphere and the Privatization of Citizenship: How to Deconstruct a Knowledge Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: History and Sociology in an Age of Paradigm Breakdown, ed. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).