Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries ed. by Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli (review)

In contemporary discourse on the Mediterranean, relations between the major monotheistic religions, particularly between Islam and Christianity, are often painted as a "clash of civilizations," leading us to think of members of different ethnoreligious communities as historically and inherently distinct and oppositional. But as the contributors and editors of Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries point out, this state of existence is neither homogenous across communities nor historically accurate. Using a combination of ethnographic and historical research, this unprecedented volume pulls together a comparative anthropology of religious traditions and shared sanctuaries in the Mediterranean using the long durée perspective to highlight how relations and mixing between religions have shifted throughout history and under changing political regimes. Although the authors carefully shy away from making grand theoretical claims or political statements, the many accounts in the book allow readers to understand that religious conflict is not intrinsic to the region, and, perhaps, help us to imagine a tolerant and pluralistic future for the Mediterranean.

In the book's introduction, Maria Couroucli outlines a history of ethnoreligious relations in the Mediterranean. As many scholars before have done, she describes the relatively recent nationalistic projects of the southeastern Mediterranean that have put an emphasis on the creation of homogenous populations with "one language, one religion, one—collective—identity." As a result, ethnoreligious minorities have been banned from particular territories time and again throughout the past hundred years, and national culture and politics have increasingly coalesced around religious values and identities. Under both the Byzantine (fourth to fifteenth centuries) and Ottoman (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries) Empires, however, communities across the region were quite often composed of members of more than one religious group. Though relations in these communities were not always strictly egalitarian or communal, there were instances, such as in Ottoman Crête, in which religious boundaries were "porous" and members of different religions coexisted as neighbors and even lived together in mixed families. Couroucli notes that this coexistence was ruptured following the arrival in Crête of French merchants and diplomats, who encouraged the separation of the population into communities of homogenous, well-defined religious affiliation. This division was replicated across the Mediterranean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as religion became wrapped up in ethnic politics and territorial claims leading to the present situation, which is "marked by the ultimate separation of ethnoreligious communities."

But even within this "ultimate separation," the authors of this volume find examples of shared sacred spaces that still persist, even if they are less prevalent or mainstream than they once were. Couroucli suggests that religious intermingling is born from a long Byzantine and Ottoman tradition of coexistence under one ruler. This collective history has led to a shared culture for members of different religious groups. Even if people do not subscribe to the same religious ideologies or doctrines, they may share a penchant for certain celebratory festivals, traditional recognition of local spaces and shrines as sacred, and belief in the spiritual or magical powers of the same saints, particularly in moments of poor health or economic precariousness.

Several of the cases presented in the book demonstrate how religious intermixing can result from shared celebrations of a common national or territorial history. In contrast to contemporary nationalistic movements that create rigid territorial boundaries between ethnoreligious groups, many mixed religious communities, particularly rural ones, shared in a sense of territorial identity as late as the twentieth century. Couroucli's chapter on Saint George recounts how Christians and Muslims in Anatolian villages traditionally came together in celebration on festival days. During these festivities, she highlights, villagers rejoiced in a shared "feeling of belonging to a village community." Similarly, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen discusses the notion of "civic" or "local" religion in Egypt as seen through Christian...