388 maria couroucli
of the Jewish saint’s tomb are local Muslims (Driessen, 2012), in Bosnia neighbors
have been taking care of the “others’” ancestral graves since the Yugoslav war (Baskar,
2012). In the Punjab in India, the Muslim Khalifahs are the descendants of the saint
who sit at the tomb and collect offerings as owners of the shrine. They help visitors
with their devotions around the tomb and let them touch their feet or knees to it to
receive some of the saint’s grace (baraka). The Chela, itinerant devotees possessed by
the spirit of the saint, also perform rituals during festivals, in chaunki, satellite sacred
spaces set up for the occasion; they are overwhelmingly Sikh and Hindu but this does
not create any tension between them and the owners/caretakers of the main shrine
(Bigelow, 2012: 32).
The challenges and stakes of shared sacred
spaces: the politics of sacraShared sacred places in the Mediterranean and the activities that take place in and
around them have been interpreted in two opposite ways. The “clash of civilizations”
stance maintains that the existence of inherent competition for domination of one
religious group over the others in sacred spaces makes violence inevitable and finally
peaceful coexistence of diverse populations in multi-religious societies impossible.
This idea is contested by those arguing that, on the contrary, holy places are tangible
proof of the reality of such coexistence in the past and therefore the possibility of
cohabitation in the future. Today, many of these holy places attract great numbers
of visitors, pilgrims and religious tourists alike, and as such have been the concern of
national authorities, concerned with both the security of the participants and the
politics of communication. Official narratives proposed to tourists visiting historical
monuments like the Ghriba on the island of Jerba in Tunisia nostalgically depict an
idealized multicultural or cosmopolitan past when different linguistic, cultural and
religious groups lived happily together (Carpenter-Latiri, 2012). While holy places
shared by more than one religious denomination offer unique opportunities for pro-
moting ideal images of the past, they also question national historical discourses about
the specific traditions of each nation-state. The development of memory tourism,
involving descendants of the “old” inhabitants visiting their or their ancestors’ home-
lands, adds to the complexity of the political agenda involved with shared shrines
(Driessen, 2012; Baskar, 2012).
European or international policies concerning the Mediterranean as a region, from
the Barcelona Process to the Union for the Mediterranean project, were elaborated in
an effort to address major social issues like illegal migration and cross-border smug-
gling of men, services and goods arising from the existence of quasi-permanent zones
of conflict in its eastern shores. But new configurations of conflict in the region are
not due to ancestral hatred or natural incompatibility (Brown, 2003). Political and
religious violence is neither new nor endemic; it arises as a consequence of the break-
ing up of traditional mechanisms that allowed for multiple expressions of otherness at
the local level in many different situations. For example, the phenomenon of mixed
shrines considered until lately as related to “pagan” or, more mildly, “popular” reli-
gions, concerns local practices including festive activities and processes of healing
involving interactions between holy men and common people. The existence of these