“In so little room as the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, there is entirely too much hatred,” said Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. “Notice that I call all three of these territories the Holy Land. We must keep in mind that all three of these territorial divisions are holy for Jews, holy for Christians, and holy for Muslims, but holy for each faith community in a different way.”

The history of religious ties to the area and how they impact the present-day conflicts were the central themes of the fall McGinley lecture titled, “Faith and Conflict in the Holy Land: Peacemaking Among Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

The lecture and panel discussion, which took place on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13 at the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses, respectively, featured a keynote speech from Father Ryan followed by two respondents—Ebru Turan, Ph.D., history professor at Fordham, and Abraham Unger, Ph.D., GSAS ’92, ’07, campus rabbi and associate professor of government and politics at Wagner College.

‘Perpetual Migrants’

Father Ryan highlighted in his lecture that “nobody comes from nowhere” and that “all of us are both native and immigrant.”

Unger, who delivered the Jewish response, emphasized the fact that Jewish people, in particular, have been considered “perpetual migrants” and that this view of their history needs to be taken into account when thinking about present-day Israel and Palestine.

“I suggest the conflict reaches into the existential nature of the Jewish people itself, both for Jews and for the rest of the world when thinking about Jews,” Unger said.

The Jewish identity, according to Unger, has always included a sense of being a “marginalized outsider” or watching for the next wave of oppression. That’s why the desire for a homeland is so essential, he said.

If the conflict is looked at under that lens, Unger said, it can be seen as bigger than simply “how much area Jews and Arabs ought to respectively get out of the Holy Land.”

Sacred Sites of Significance

For Christians, the Holy Land is not “a major theme in Christian scriptural sources,” Father Ryan said, although Christians as early as the second century took an interest in the area, and that interest grew following the reign of Constantine.

“To Constantine we owe the location of the place in Jerusalem where Jesus died, was buried, and rose again—now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” Ryan said, noting that the Roman emperor commissioned the church. “Helena [Constantine’s mother] is said to have built the original Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem and an oratory on the Mount of Olives, marking the locale where the disciples witnessed the ascension of Jesus.”

In the Islamic tradition, the “sanctity of the Holy Land in Islam is concentrated in one particular spot in Jerusalem called the Noble Sanctuary,” said Turan, who delivered the Islamic response.

“The Noble Sanctuary houses two of the most sanctified and majestic monuments of Islam—the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque,” she said, identified by Islamic authorities as the site of the Prophet Mohammad’s night journey and heavenly ascension.

Present-Day Challenges

Understanding these diverse religious ties to the Holy Land can help people better understand the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, according to the speakers. Still, they said there were no easy solutions.

“How can we have a safe Israel within its borders? On the other hand, how can we have a sovereign Palestine state with its own government and arms—these two are not compatible.” Turan said, stating that she still wished for peace. “That’s why it is not that easy, because the space is very, very tight.”

Unger highlighted another challenge: The area has seen its Christian population, which had oftentimes eased tensions between the Jewish and Muslim populations, decrease rapidly.

“There’s a tremendous Palestinian-Christian diaspora emerging,” he said. “This is a great loss for the majority Jewish population because the Christian-Arab population sometimes has been and also can be a bridge between the Muslim majority within the Arab sector…as well as a bridge to the West itself and to the Jewish majority.”

A Dream of Peace

Father Ryan, however, encouraged the next generation to look to history and then try to find a way forward.

“I have shared with you this evening my dream—an old man’s dream—in the hope that some young people here will see visions, visions of peacemaking in the Holy Land, peacemaking in every land,” Father Ryan said.

But this concept of authority and impartiality, according to Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., evolved a great deal over the years. In “Judging Justly: Judgment in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions,” Father Ryan, Fordham’s Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, explored how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths contributed to that idea through their own unique traditions.

He framed his discussion of judgment with the tragic story of how three High Court judges in Ghana were murdered in 1982 precisely because they had given judicial redress to people convicted by a kangaroo court under a military regime.

In remarks delivered on March 28 and March 29 as part of the annual Spring McGinley Lecture,

Father Ryan delved into examples from scripture that illustrated how the faithful have struggled with concepts such as mercy and justice. In the Book of Genesis, he noted that God, whom Jews regard as the supreme judge, had a “crowded docket”: Weighing in on the fratricide of Cain, and condemning the corrupt and violent contemporaries of Noah yet sparing the ark-builder and his family.

In Christian scripture, he recalled an account in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is confronted by “the scribes and the Pharisees” asking him to judge a woman caught in the act of adultery. Jesus play-acted the role of judge, writing on the ground, and finally declaring, Jesus’ declaration “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” illustrates the importance of impartiality and fairness.

“When Jesus finally rises from his play-acting, he finds that all the guilty accusers of the woman have departed, ‘one by one, beginning with the elders,’” Father Ryan said.

“One possible reason that the placement of this Gospel passage in the New Testament has proven so problematic may be that the discipline of the early church, in cases of adultery, was much less merciful than that of Jesus.”    *       

In Islam, as in Christianity and Judaism, God is also the ultimate judge, he said. His command and judgment are closely associated with the commands and judgments issued by the Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad. That practice continued after Muhammad’s death via judges who were concretized as the caliphs’ appointees in the Sunni tradition from the seventh to at least the 13th century, and the appointees of the imams in the Shi‘i tradition.

A qadi, or judge in the Sunni Muslim tradition, was appointed by the caliphs in the seventh century, and gradually began to exercise judicial functions in the eighth century, said Father Ryan. When the Turkish government suppressed the caliphate in 1924, however, a central religious-political institution was lost. Since then, Muslim judges are often appointed by national or regional governments. This has led to some controversial rulings in Nigeria, in particular, he noted, involving the amputation of hands for sheep-stealing, as well as overly zealous accusations of adultery against women based on circumstantial evidence only.

“Better trained Muslim judges, with expertise in comparative law and a broader vision of Islamic jurisprudence, can be found in many of the Gulf States,” he said. “But there have been highly problematic judgments handed down by judges, not only in northern Nigeria but also in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in recent decades.”

Respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture included Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, and Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham. Gribetz highlighted two passages from Genesis Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud and one from the Torah that illustrate the ongoing debate between mercy and justice in God’s mind. God is compared to a king who holds up two empty cups and notes that they will crack when filled with cold water and burst when filled with hot water. The temperatures are stand-ins for too much mercy and too much justice.

“[They] represent radical extremes-order and chaos, suffocating restriction and unbounded freedom. Each on their own is assumed to be too dangerous—so dangerous that it will shatter, crack or deform the world,” she said.

Turan further developed Father Ryan’s history of how the role of judge developed historically in the Muslim tradition. The Ottoman Empire, from the 13th to the early 20th century, developed a system of training legal scholars for such posts. With the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after 1918, modern Turkey appoints judges with a much more secular orientation.

Father Ryan said offered three conclusions from the faith traditions’ experiences with justice:

-Judges need protection from manipulative politicians, established ruling classes, and populist demagogues. He cited as examples the Roman-dominated Hebrew sanhedrins, Pope Urban II commanding Christian knights to go on Crusade, and modern “Muslim muftis” who “declare every military adventure of a Middle Eastern dictator a jihad.”

-Judges should have excellent legal credentials, a deep understanding of the law in their own tradition, and a sense of comparative law. There is no room in the courtroom for mediocre judges.

-Judges benefit from differences in legal opinion, or “ikhtilaf,” an Islamic concept being promoted by movements concerned with the status of Muslim women. This contrasts with the generally approved idea of Islamic  legal consensus, or “ijma,” relied on by Orthodox Jews, Catholic Christians, and the various Eastern Christian Churches.

Valentina Izmirlieva, Ph.D., chair of the department of Slavic languages at Columbia University, came across the history while conducting research on the phenomenon of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire who adopted and adapted their Muslim neighbors’ custom of undertaking a pilgrimage, or hajj. These Christian pilgrims traveled not to Mecca but to Jerusalem. Upon return to their homes, those who completed the trip were given the honorific title of hajji—one who has completed the hajj— which conferred respect and permitted them a privileged position within their own communities and among their Muslim neighbors, even as religious minorities.

Historians of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire have long been familiar with the Christian hajjis, Izmirlieva said. But, like so many aspects of history, the Christian hajj has been understood as an exclusively male endeavor.

“You may ask: How come no one noticed these women before? It’s partly because the available hajji sources hide their women well,” said Izmirlieva, whose work focuses on religious and cultural exchange in the Ottoman Balkans. “In short, recovering these traces, and the experiences they stand for, is a laborious task of cultural archeology that requires much archival digging and then some creative detective work. But most of the problem lies elsewhere, in a disciplinary inertia: No one really expects these women to be there—so no one has been looking for them.”

Through painstaking research, Izmirlieva uncovered the existence of dozens of women—grandmothers, wives, pregnant women, teenage girls—in the beginning of the 19th century alone, who traveled with their husbands and sons. By the later part of the century the arduous trip had been simplified by steam ships and reduced taxes, and the number of hajjis, male and female, skyrocketed. There is documentary evidence of women making the Christian hajj as early as 1682, but by the early-19^th century the family journeys had taken on a distinctly feminine cast, Izmirlieva said.

These women travelers visited many sites in Jerusalem pertaining to Mary, mother of Jesus, in the hopes of boosting fertility and solidifying a connection to the life of Christ. They became conduits of the sacredness of Jerusalem to their families and communities, Izmirlieva said. On the months- and years-long hajj, it fell to the mothers to enforce orthodoxy—to make sure their families prayed at the correct times and observed the appropriate rituals, even in foreign places. When they returned home, their social status had changed. Even a young wife, she said, generally a person of little respect and subject to the authority of her mother-in-law, was now addressed with deference, called hajji even by old men. By distributing to churches, monasteries, and extended family the relics and Holy Land mementos the family had spent most of its money to acquire, the mama hajji burnished the family’s reputation. She also positioned her sons to be respected members of the community, ready to step into positions of secular leadership when the Balkan nations gained independence from the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Izmirlieva believes the “hajji mama” story is worth considering during the current moment of heightened nationalism and fraught interaction between Christians and Muslims because it offers a historical example of successful interaction and negotiation between cultures.

“We think of coexistance of groups in two polar opposite models: It’s either clash of civilizations or a ‘Kumbaya’ model of erasing difference. In reality it’s more complicated. It’s in the middle,” she said.

Fordham history professor Ebru Turan, Ph.D., offered a response focusing on the geopolitical antecedents and implications of the Christian hajj. She wondered how Balkan Muslims, watching their own empire fade as Christian European nations expanded their political and economic influence in Jerusalem, felt about their Christian neighbors appropriating the title of hajji. “To what extent were the new hajji part of the general European, Christian expansion into Jerusalem?” Turan asked. “What did the Muslim neighbors think, seeing Christian merchants usurp this title and come home with all this status?”

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., a Fordham theology professor, offered a response focusing on the biblical language used to describe Jerusalem as a woman, a mother, a grieving princess. She recounted the ancient queens who ruled the city and the female philanthropists—from St. Helen, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine and founder of the true cross, to early modern heiresses—who funded the preservation of historic sites. She argued the mama hajji story is but one in a history of Jerusalem as a city of women. Kattan Gribetz praised Izmirlieva for uncovering a piece of women’s history and providing a fuller and more accurate picture of a period and a society.

“The project of recovery is part of a larger historiographical effort to repopulate the histories we write, and the stories we tell, with those who were there, and who played important roles, but who were left out of the narrative,” Kattan Gribetz said.

–Eileen Markey

Wisdom and Learning.

Inspired by this motto, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J, Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, made it the central focus of this fall’s McGinley Lecture, which took place Nov. 15 at the Lincoln Center campus and Nov. 16 at the Rose Hill campus.

The lecture, “Wisdom and Learning: Higher Education in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Traditions,” acted as a conversation between the traditions of the People of the Book, with Magda Teter, Ph.D., Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies, representing Judaism, and Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history, representing Islam.

Father Ryan noted that the notion of wisdom is prevalent in all three religious traditions because it “enables us to attain to an overarching moral and spiritual perspective on our world.”

“It prompts us to discern how learning or knowledge should be used and how to live as perceptive and virtuous citizens of our world,” he said.

Just as the three traditions share spiritual roots, they also share educational ones; some of their structures of higher learning all come from the ancient Greeks. However, as the religions began to develop and change, so did their educational structures.

“The Jewish and Christian and Muslim traditions of education have diverged greatly on the detailed contents of their curricula,” said Father Ryan.

In the Jewish tradition, education is an important aspect of the faith’s identity, said Teter, who talked about the difficulties Jews faced in the modern era when entering institutions of higher education.

“Jews were excluded from education until the 19th century,” said Teter, “and even when they were accepted, many schools did not support Jewish studies—or forced the students to learn from the Christian perspective. They lost their identity in their own story.”

The Jewish response was to create its own educational institutions, which began to thrive in the early 1900s, she said. It allowed Jewish populations to continue spiritual instruction outside the synagogue and the home, creating the chance to integrate into society.

Islamic instruction, which is heavily based on the memorization of the Qur’an, embraced higher education because it standardized Muslim beliefs, said Turan.

“Higher education provided a cohesiveness and unity to medieval Islam,” she said. “It gave Islam a global identity.”

Muslim schools called madrasas, derived from the Arabic word “to learn,” focused on law, theology and logic in their earliest iterations. Now, there are Muslim universities around the world that provide a diverse selection of study. Turan said that the translation of the Qur’an into other languages allowed Islam to be studied by a greater population.

“The translation . . . empowered Islamic education and opened it up to the rest of the world.”

In the Catholic tradition, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, complimented university education with humanistic studies. By drawing from his own experiences at the University of Paris, Ignatius wanted to ensure that his students “went through systematic humanistic training in grammar, literature, and rhetoric.”

Jesuit education evolved around this foundation and now includes a diverse selection of fields of study. Father Ryan stressed that Ignatius’ humanistic training is ingrained in Jesuit education’s infrastructure.

“No one finishes any undergraduate college at Fordham without some exposure to philosophy, theology, literature, the natural and social sciences,” he said.

A Q&A segment following the lectures raised the question “Will the three faiths ever agree on the definition of wisdom?”

In response, the panelists laughed.

“We are all conscious that wisdom is important to our faiths and recognize it is something worth pursuing,” said Turan. “But besides that, I think we are fine agreeing to disagree.”

–Mary Awad