Transformations in Islamic Pilgrimage Patterns and Meanings: Piety, Politics, Resistance, and Places of Memory in Islamic Pilgrimage Sites in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This paper explores recent transformations in Islamic pilgrimage patterns in Israel/Palestine. The meanings assigned to traditional Muslim sites, and the conduct and practices of the dwindling number of pilgrims who visit them, are the struggling victims of strategic socio-political erasures caused by dramatic geo-political changes. Since 1948, the hegemony of the State of Israel has perversely politicized sacred Islamic sites beyond their traditional religious functions. Muslim pilgrims, for their part, engage in rituals that have become a counterweight to Israeli ethnocratic imperatives. The reconstruction of an Islamic pilgrimage map presents a shared imaginative landscape as lieux de mémoire that undergird political and social resistance. The dogged survival of Islamic pilgrimage comprises a counterweight to state power. Muslims fight to affirm Palestinian identity, reclaim heritage spaces as anchors for identity, and actively engage with land claiming.