Sacred geography overlays a buried and materially different Jerusalem

Evidence

Bishop Arculf went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem around the year 700. Since he was possessed by the desire to walk and worship in the place where Christ had once walked, the Muslims (who had been in occupation of Jerusalem since 637) were all but invisible to him. He merely noted that in the Temple area, ‘the Saracens have now erected a square house of prayer, in a rough manner, by raising planks and beams upon some remains of old ruins, and it is said that it will hold about three thousand men’, before he went on to write about the Christian holy places. Similarly, the Venerable Bede in his History mentioned the attacks of Saracen pirates on the British Isles, without troubling to enquire as to their religion. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 51 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Cairo and Mecca were beginning to be visualized in a strange new way, no longer simply as sites in a sacred Muslim geography, but also as dots on paper sheets which included dots for Paris, Moscow, Manila and Caracas; and the plane relationship between these indifferently profane and sacred dots was determined by nothing beyond the mathematically calculated flight of the crow. The Mercatorian map, brought in by the European colonizers, was beginning, via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast Asians. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 653 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Medieval geography interpreted physical space through biblical narrative — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 599; Renaming Palestinian places in Hebrew fabricates an ancient biblical claim to the land; The secular map flattened sacred Muslim geography into profane coordinate space — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 653 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Early medieval pilgrims could walk through Muslim Jerusalem unseeing #exemplifies (0.92) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 51
• The secular map flattened sacred Muslim geography into profane coordinate space #complicates (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 653