by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
HOW CAN THERE BE AN ORIENT THAT IS NOT HOLY?
“Within thy gates, O Jerusalem”—where everything is wonderful! No other city has a similar place in history, no other has an equally tenacious hold on the heart of the world. Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians, numbering many millions of our race, peoples widely differing in every respect, alike turn their eyes thither with peculiar affection.
—Selah Merrill, “Within Thy Gates, O Jerusalem”
Notably absent from Edward Said’s Orientalism is the discursive tradition of a “holy land,” one that is emphatically not a unique creation of the European imagination.10 In reviewing the “Near Orient” as the “complementary opposite since antiquity” of the West, Said sums up a “restricted number of typical encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation.”11 Oddly, but perhaps not ironically so for an avowed secular humanist using clever Whiggish hindsight, the most widespread and arguably the most shared view of this same region is missing: the Holy Land as the devotional focus of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Said is so focused on how medieval Christian polemicists, not to mention Renaissance detractors such as Dante, skewed Islam and skewered Muhammad that he neglects both the religious discourse of the devout in the West and the Christian and Jewish populations within the region. Surely the ruins of Solomon’s temple and the birthplace of Jesus rather than a Western desire to dominate the Muslim others who gained political control over most of the Holy Land by the end of the seventh century were a greater inspiration and incentive for pilgrims, travelers, and settlers.
My point is not that Said is wrong to identify an ethnocentric, and often blatantly racist, ideology that accompanied European expansion into the Middle East and other parts of Asia, just as it did, vae victis, to the departed souls of the New World. His important polemic has facilitated a profound rethinking among scholars across disciplines about the way significant others are represented. In criticizing the excesses of Said’s polemic, I do not defend Orientalism as an academic field above the subjective fray of realpolitik, nor do I downplay the discursive complicity that rationalizes oppression under the guise of an imperially minded superiority complex. The problem is that before the Orient was imagined as an inferior surrogate for Western authors, it was discursively appropriated as the Holy Land via the mythical and historical sacra articulated in scriptures. The Holy Land served as a religious symbol of origins, a communal utopia, and future apocalypse long before Napoleon’s French troops shelled al-Azhar and Englishman William Jones discovered Sanskrit. Indeed for the Christian West, including its Jewish minority, as well as the diversity of inhabitants of the region referred to as the “Near Orient” by Said, the land where God chose to reveal himself and sent his prophets is the ultimate “holy” land. Like it or not, the assumption that this is the Promised Land, Holy Land, Terra Sancta, or Armageddon has generated more interest, devotion, travel, and outright bloodshed than any notion of the Orient as inferior or the object of worldly imperial vision.
One thing should be clear from the start: if we assume along with Said that “the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority,” then his thesis cannot account for the Orient as the Holy Land in the eyes of adherents to all three major monotheisms.12 Whether it is called “Near Orient,” “Near East,” “Middle East,” or simply “Holy Land,” this is the sacred geographical space where Yahweh/Almighty God/Allah created Adam and Eve, lifted Enoch into the heavens, suffered Nimrod to build the Tower of Babel, sent the flood to destroy all but Noah and his family, set the Table of Nations, and called Abraham to go to the Land of Promise. Substitute Ishmael for Isaac and much of the subsequent Jewish and Christian history is accepted as real and correctable for Muslims through the Quran. Substitute Jesus of Nazareth for the Jewish Messiah foretold by the Hebrew prophets, and Christianity becomes but a supernatural gentile extension of Judaism. The sacred scriptures of these three faiths all reverberate around a specific geographic region as their point of origin and pivot of final judgment for the whole world.
Throughout much of recorded history this part of the world has been regarded not only as holy but also as the focus of attention. How could it be otherwise?13 There is little rational terra firma to go on for the claims of Genesis regarding sacred history other than some form of faith in the texts themselves. No earthly paradise, whether referred to as Dilmun, Eden, or simply the “Garden,” has been unearthed for historical scrutiny; Noah’s ark has not been salvaged, despite the best efforts of an American astronaut who once pranced on the moon. But faith must have something tangible, even if only imagined, to grasp. God showed himself to Moses in a burning bush and revealed the glow of his Shekinah glory in the tabernacle and temple of ancient Israel. Jesus, for Christians, is the word made flesh. Muhammad, for Muslims, was told to recite the literal words of God as recorded in the eternal Arabic Quran. But more than anything else, these faiths have a hallowed section of land still identifiable despite all the artificial man-made borders, and thus it is venerable. In Jerusalem Jews today pray at the Wailing Wall; Christians follow the stations of the cross where Jesus himself is said to have trod; Muslims enact the sacrificial act of Abraham each year at Mecca. For Jews, Jerusalem is Zion in all its anticipated restorative glory; for Christians, Jerusalem is Golgotha and the promise of an empty tomb; and for Muslims, Jerusalem is where Muhammad began his spiritual night journey to commune with God.
HOW DID THE HOLY LAND BECOME HOLY?
Whether viewed as the source of our religious faith, or as the most ancient fountain of our historical knowledge, this singular spot of earth has at all times been regarded with feelings of the deepest interest and curiosity. Inhabited for many ages by a people entitled above all others to the distinction of peculiar, it presents a record of events such as have not come to pass in any other land, monuments of a belief denied to all other nations, hopes not elsewhere cherished, but which, nevertheless, are connected with the destiny of the whole human race, and stretch forward to the consummation of all terrestrial things.
—Michael Russell, Palestine, or the Holy Land from the Earliest Period to the Present Time
The importance of Jerusalem and Mecca as the most significant locations on God’s earth for the adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths is so obvious that the implications of such a truism may escape notice. But myth, for me, is not credible history. Continental drift and the evolutionary heritage that sent an early species of Homo sapiens into what we now refer to as the Middle East did not project this region as holy or special from the start. The idea that a certain area of land, a geographical feature, or even a man-made monument could be considered holy and special and touched by the gods is not an invention of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Geographical space can become holy whenever a religious rationale accompanies social and political life. Historians and anthropologists alike can attest to this as essentially true for the entire scope of human habitation. Holy land does not have to be owned in our modern sense of private or state control; it simply has to be revered by association with a highly symbolic event or sacred being.
Here it is useful to return to Said’s characterization of Orientalism. If we were to isolate a distinct discourse around the notion of the “Holy Land,” we would have to admit that it was purely an invention of those who subscribed to an evolving scriptural corpus and says far more about the one viewing land as holy than any material aspect of geography or culturally unique characteristic of the human inhabitants. I hesitate to introduce a mangled moniker such as “Holy Landism” into the crowded ismic sphere of academic linguistic play, and I do not think a sanctimonious “Terra Sanctism” fits our present need for a suitable nomenclature. “The Idea of the Holy” has too much religious baggage and “Biblicity” (a simple but highly biased reduction) misses the point. However, lacking a suitable shorthand term for the notion of the Holy Land as discourse does not excuse the need to define wh
at criteria delineate the notion. A natural wariness of trinities, including Said’s own threefold working definition of Orientalism, leads me to propose four criteria that best define my own approach to the contemporary Middle East as the successor of an ascribable “Holy Land” designation in all three relevant faiths.
First, land becomes holy when it is a greater recipient of divine largesse than land elsewhere. The Middle East was made holy by its association with the gods of its conquerors, ultimately the amalgamated universal God of the Abrahamic faiths. Remove the Hebrew scriptures, Christian Bible, and Muslim Quran (and the unwritten lore that informed these sacred texts) and there remains little specifically holy about the area. Whatever the gods touch, that becomes holy. In this sense the Holy Land can be profaned, as its bloody history demonstrates with a vengeance, but it can never be desacralized. Consider the Gospels retort of Jesus to the money changers: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. But he spoke of the temple of his body” (John 2:19– 21). In 135 C.E, in retaliation for the Bar Kochba revolt, the Romans plowed over the site of the architecturally sacred temple, relegating the holy site to a dung heap.14 Neither temple has stayed buried in the minds of the faithful. More pragmatically, the apocalyptic force of a New Jerusalem resonates because of the assumed holy presence of the earthly site. In sum, the Holy Land is what it is because it is the actionable playing field of the God self identified as “I am who I am.” (We need not worry here about the meaning of “am.”.)
Second, land becomes holy when it is not wholly a matter of mud and bricks, despite the material benefits from exporting wooden bits of the “true” cross or barrels of consumable oil. Like the God whose ascribable presence makes the area holy, the Holy Land’s symbolic capital makes the region a matter of historical impact. Being there, in the literal sense, brings one closer to the God who is acknowledged to be everywhere. Here, for example, consider the mental template of the American missionary Reverend William M. Thomson, whose 1859 The Land and the Book remains one of the most widely influential Protestant meditations on the illustrative Bible lands (still under the yoke of the unconverted Turks at the time) ever written.15 “In a word,” begins Thomson, “Palestine is one vast tablet whereupon God’s messages to men have been drawn, and graven deep in living characters by the Great Publisher of glad tidings, to be seen and read of all to the end of time.”16 The land that gave spiritual birth to the scriptures is the best witness to what God wants the faithful readers to take from the sacred texts. “Broken columns and prostrate temples, cities in ruin, must bear testimony to the inspiration of prophecy; and ravens and sparrows, and cedars and brambles, and fruits and flowers, will preach sermons and utter parables, and we shall not hesitate to listen when they begin to teach.”17 Being in the very land that animates biblical characters was, in a symbolic sense, a foretaste of the kingdom to come.
After rowing on the Sea of Galilee under the “solemn mysteries of night,” Reverend Thomson exclaimed:
Mystery of mysteries! the God-man, the Divine Logos, by whom all things were made which are in heaven and which are on earth, did actually sail over this identical sea in a boat, and by night, as we have done; and not stars only, but angels also beheld and wondered, and still do gaze, and ever will, “designing earnestly to look into those things.” This is not fancy, but fact; and shadowy indeed must be his faith in whose breast these sacred shores awaken no holier emotions than such as spring from common earth and ordinary lakes.18
Above all else the experience of being in the Holy Land was an emotional journey, one that pilgrims struggled to account for in mere words after the fact. Friar Felix Fabri, whose massive devotional missive followed a pilgrimage in 1483–84, described his rapture at kneeling in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:
O my brother! hadst thou been with me in that court at that hour, thou wouldst have seen such plenteous tears, such bitter heartfelt groans, such sweet wailings, such deep sighs, such true sorrow, such sobs from the inmost breast, such peaceful and gladsome silence, that hadst thou a heart of stone it must have melted, and thou wouldst have burst into a flood of tears together with the weeping pilgrims.19
A Jew at the Western (Wailing) Wall and a Muslim hurling stones at the pillar of Iblis during the hajj can empathize with the spirit of this devotional rhetoric.20 Such is the generative imaginative power of this shared Holy Land.
Third, the holiness that infuses the Holy Land in this region is a spiritual panacea for all the ills of the faithful; at the same time it is perhaps more acutely diagnosed by nonbelievers as a communicable disease. That which defines the geographical space of the Holy Land has no fixed rational borders. Like the Big Bang scenario, this origin point radiates meaning for the expanding generations of believers. In the words of the prophet Ezekiel, redefining Jerusalem from the state of exile, “This is the law of the house: Upon the top of the mountain its whole limit round about shall be most holy” (Ezek. 43:12). Ezekiel’s rhetoric cuts no corners, nor does it view east or west as relevant markers of political aspirations. Just as God is present everywhere, even in exile, land can be holy when it is attached to the central point of the faith. Historian of Christianity Robert Wilken considers Ezekiel one of the first instances in which the biblically constituted Holy Land becomes holy in a universally symbolic sense. “Yet, as traditional as much of his language is, there is something new: the land has a center, and God’s glory radiates out from its axis to envelop and sanctify everything that surrounds it.”21 Holy land can be extended in a symbolic sense to other geographical areas. Thus the Land of Promise can be conquered as easily in a recently discovered continent, America for instance, as it can be across the trickle of the Jordan River. This does not make the primal Holy Land any less holy, nor prevent partisan politics and economic greed from profaning it any more than the manifest destination of a frontier. However, it does mean that there is never a definable border for the Holy Land, no matter how tall the walls of separation any particular generation may build.
Fourth, but not necessarily a final point of relevance for my working set of definitional criteria, I suggest that the most fertile literary corpus for understanding how the Holy Land has been appropriated across borders is through the narratives of religiously motivated travelers and pilgrims. Texts abound in multiple languages, and examples of relevant rationales for what makes the Middle East especially holy can be chosen almost at random from any time period. The quote above, from Protestant Michael Russell’s reflections on an 1830 trip, serves the genre well. The Holy Land, Palestine in particular, is where faith meets history; it is an object of deep curiosity, a distinctively “Promised Land” for the select, and the prophetic site of the ultimate destiny for the human race. I suggest that the writings of the Hebrew prophets (or their redactors), Christian pilgrims, and generations of hajjis about their experience of returning to the physical symbol of their respective faiths are as relevant for unraveling the extensive discourse on “Orient” as are the writings of libertine tourists such as Gustave Flaubert, racist philosophers such as Ernest Renan, swashbuckling rapscallions such as Sir Richard Burton, and historians such as Bernard Lewis.
WHAT MAKES A HOLY LAND TRAVELER HOLY?
Now the situation is enriched by the fact that during the entire nineteenth century the Orient, and especially the Near Orient, was a favorite place for Europeans to travel in and write about. Moreover, there developed a fairly large body of Oriental-style European literature very frequently based on experiences in the Orient. Flaubert comes to mind immediately as one prominent source of such literature; Disraeli, Mark Twain, and Kinglake are three other obvious examples.
—Edward Said, Orientalism
Edward Said’s estimate, in the statement above, of the volume of Near Orient travel accounts is perhaps too modest. The number of texts in European languages no doubt reaches the tens of thousands, not counting accounts in the indigenous languages.22 By the fourth century, with the crucial Constantinian conversion of Rom
e to Christianity, Palestine became a site for ascetic desert fathers, communities of Christian settlers, local bishops, and eventually pilgrims. More than 525 Western-language Christian pilgrimage accounts about Jerusalem, handwritten pre-Gutenberg between 1100 and 1500, have survived.23 At least two thousand individuals recorded their visits to Palestine between 1800 and 1870, before this area was under European control.24 Despite the masculine bias of the genre, women also wrote down their experiences. Billy Melman notes that 187 female travelers between 1821 and 1914 published English-language travel accounts on the Holy Land.25 Not all these accounts revere the space as holy, but all must take account of that unique status.
As a geographic focus, Palestine had long been a primary destination for pilgrims and devouts of holy orders. The first known Latin pilgrim text, the Itinerarium Burdigalense, records the itinerary of a Bordeaux Christian who arrived in Palestine in 333 C.E.26 Some medieval European travel accounts rivaled the famous account of Marco Polo. Among these is the semi-legendary travelogue attributed to Sir John Mandeville, which was first written in French about 1346 C.E. and within half a century became available in every major European language.27 Allegedly an English knight back from the crusades, the redactable Sir John begins by acknowledging that “the Land of Promise which men call the Holy Land, among all other lands is the most worthy land and mistress over all others.”28 Mandeville as pious narrator, far from being a Eurocentric or Orientalist dominator, filters his itinerary through a biblical lens that isolates a sacred spot with every step. There is no generic “Oriental” here, but rather there is a mass of diversity. Ironically, his account presents one of the most objective treatments of Islam available up to that time, albeit as a foil for criticizing the lax morals of his own Christian society.29 Like the many travelers whose accounts are incorporated into this novel travel account, Mandeville comes across as gullible, susceptible to a mania for shrines and relics.
