Journal of Law, Religion and State - Special Issue: Sacred Places, Mar 2021

Proposals abound in Israel to address the question of pluralistic access to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Each of these proposals has been a source of great controversy. In this article, we propose a Swiftian solution of privatization. We propose that the government of Israel sell the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and many other holy sites to specific faith groups that will then operate them as private property, with the ability to restrict various rights within them. This proposal is based on a model adopted and implemented in Salt Lake City, Utah, to address various questions regarding access to property purchased by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This article explores the neglected topic of the value of sacred places of various religions. The great value that adherents of these religions ascribe to these places cannot account for their public political value, given that the duty to treat such places with respect falls on all citizens, whatever their faith. The article considers and rejects three views regarding the value of sacred places: that they are protected by cultural rights, that damaging them would hurt the feelings of religious believers, and that they are the collective property of religious groups. It then considers the right to religious liberty, which has been argued in recent scholarship on religious accommodation to be best defended through the value of integrity and by honoring one’s religious commitments. Although integrity is too individualistic a concept to explain the value of sacred places directly, the way in which these places embody sacredness here on earth helps enable integrity by showing what one’s commitments are invested in. This view of the value of sacred places can account for the value of non-religious sacred places and for the duty to respect them all.

This paper analyzes the conditions under which the sharing of sacred sites in Turkey is still possible despite the serious Sunnification campaign of the akp regime. I argue that ideological, cultural, and pragmatic motivations led the Turkish state to refrain from interfering in practices the ruling party deems sacrilegious and distasteful.

The main argument of this paper is that the sacred time and space of the nation has displaced the meaning of sacredness of the religious sites, and legitimized the national community. By comparing the Temple Mount and Ayodhya disputes, the paper exposes the tensions between two polarities, sacred/profane and religious/political, which helps explain the influence of national identities on the contested sacredness of religious sites. The competition over the Temple Mount is nested within a “thicker” context of conflicting political claims over Jerusalem and national territory between Jewish groups on one hand and between Jews and Muslims on the other. The Ayodhya disagreement is related to the political tensions between the dominant and the minority religions, which have turned the religious dispute over a holy site into a debate on the sacredness of the national community.

Since 1988 a group of Jewish women in Israel, who later organized as the “Women of the Wall,” have been battling to realize what they see as their right to hold a public prayer service, while wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries and reading from a Torah scroll, in the women’s section of the Western Wall Plaza. Some of the Orthodox are fiercely opposed to the WoW and its project. This issue has reached the Israeli courts several times and has repeatedly engaged the political system. This article examines whether one of the two positions can draw on constitutional arguments that would justify a ruling in its favor.