Beyond Sacred Space: The Struggle for al-Aqsa and the Islamic Movement in Israel

Abstract

The Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif, also known as al-Aqsa, has been a site of continuous conflict between Palestinian Muslims and Israeli security forces in the past several decades. Violent flareups and tense relations have made it one of the most analyzed sites to understand conflict at religious space. Many studies have taken either the approach that religions are inherently destined to clash at sites of deep spiritual significance, or that religion has been commandeered by political and national agendas producing the conflict. This thesis looks past these opposing narratives and argues that the conflict produced at al-Haram al-Sharif results from the state’s attempts to de-spatialize Islam at the site. By this I mean that bodily practices in space are critical to Islam and the cultivation of Islamic piety. I argue that the spatial ordering of space, particularly religious space, is disciplined by the state with the express purpose of reducing its affective capacity and ability to shape the potentialities of subject formation. Therefore, modernizing and secularizing logics of the state produce religious space as a representation of a belief system or identity that can be semantically and cognitively translated. The reduction of religious space to a mental space divorced from embodied knowledge and practice reduces the threat of religious space to cultivate subjects with dispositions, ethics, and capacities that may not align with the state’s aims. The final chapter of this thesis turns to analyze the Islamic Movement in Israel. I conceptualize the Islamic Movement as a mode of resistance against the Israeli state’s spatial control, by re-establishing Islamic practices and asserting the primacy of Islamic authority rather than state authority.