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Social Science and Public Policy

Shrines Under Siege: (De)Colonizing Sacred Spaces and Temporalities in Occupied Palestine

October 9, 2024 at 3:45pm – 5:00pm

Hall of Languages, 500

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Shrines Under Siege: (De)Colonizing Sacred Spaces and Temporalities in Occupied Palestine

Dr. Sandy Marshall, Elon University

Throughout historic Palestine, hundreds of shrines once served as vibrant spaces of multi-religious devotion, centers of women’s everyday spiritual practice, and nodes within wider networks of mobility and pilgrimage. Today, access to these sites has largely been cut off by the Israeli occupation, and many of these shrines have been destroyed or otherwise transformed into sites of settler colonial conquest, occupation, and resistance. This talk explores the shifting significance of such sites in the northern West Bank near Nablus, including the maqamat (shrines) of Sheikh Bilal, Salman al-Farsi, and Nabi Uzair. Through multi-generational oral history interviews, this research documents the ongoing fracturing and desacralization of the cultural landscape in Palestine. At the same time, these narratives, deeply rooted in the physical terrain of sacred springs and holy trees, in the deep time of religious folk memory, and in the cyclical temporalities of seasonal change, also provide vantage points from which to imagine the land of Palestine outside of lineal chronologies of conflict and linear boundaries of territorial demarcation.

 

This event was first published on September 3, 2024 and last updated on September 27, 2024.

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