Terra Incogniita/JPost..
05 September 12..
A week ago it was reported that political leaders among the Israeli-Arab and Beduin community were gearing up to protest a wine festival in Beersheba.
Both Adalah, a legal aid center for Arabs, and the southern branch of the Islamic Movement petitioned courts to intervene to stop the festival. In the end the municipality caved and moved the festival slightly to accommodate the protesters.
Ostensibly the dispute was about the location of the event: In proximity to an old Ottoman-era Mosque. But throughout the discussion about the event there was always a hidden current of a larger struggle. According to reports, Adalah claimed that not only the wine festival was a problem but other events at the site, which is a museum, “constitute a continuous offense to local Muslim residents, Beduin in particular.”
Background to the current issue is a court ruling from 2011 that declared that the mosque could not be used by Muslims for prayers but should be a museum related to the Islamic culture of the Negev.
The battle has to be understood as a struggle to re-Islamify unused sites in Israel.This is actually part of a global struggle by Muslims to re-assert their claims to former places of worship that were once in the Dar al-Islam, or the “domain of Islam.” Bernard Lewis in his most recent book, Notes on a Century, recalls visiting Spain with Turkish Muslims for a conference in the 1970s. After going to see the Cathedral of Cordoba, which had once been a mosque in the 13th century, a colleague confided to him “when I come into this ancient shrine I feel that I should recite the afternoon prayer.”
But one of the other Turkish scholars cautioned the man, reminding him how it would hurt Turkish sensibilities if a Greek Christian came into Hagia Sophia, a former church that became a mosque, and wanted to pray. The Turk gave up.
However in April of 2010 things turned violent when Muslim tourists entered the church and began to pray.
Guards were called by the Catholic priests and the Muslim worshipers attacked the guards, two of whom suffered serious injury. The status quo has been maintained at Cordoba’s cathedral, but at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul a different sort of story has played itself out.
The secularist Turkish government turned the giant mosque into a museum in 1934. As Turkey has become more religious, numerous radical groups have held group prayers outside the museum, demanding that it be used as a mosque.
In Israel the campaign to ignite a religious struggle has included attempts to Islamicize other sites. There have been claims and petitions against Tel Aviv University for supposedly building dorms atop a Muslim cemetery that once belonged to the Arab village of Sheikh Muannis.
In Jerusalem protests and petitions have been signed against the Museum of Tolerance, which was likewise accused of unearthing Muslim graves. In Nazareth Muslims miraculously discovered the holy grave of Shihab A-Din, a nephew of Saladin, in the 1990s and demanded the right to build a giant mosque next to the Church of the Annunciation. The tensions resulted in anti-Christian riots in 1999 until an Israeli court ruled that the illegally constructed mosque be torn down.
THE SUDDEN interest in the Beersheba mosque is similar to these other battles. Does it reflect a true feeling that the mosque is being threatened with desecration and that it is a site that is deeply connected to the Beduin population, or is the mosque simply an issue that politicians know they can get people to rally around to whip up sentiment and world opinion in order to expand their power base and test the commitment of the state to maintaining a free and secular environment in the public space? Let’s examine some of the particulars of this case to weigh the claims.
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