Deniz Ilhan is a visiting graduate student fellow at Center for Democracy, Toleration and Religion at University of California, Berkeley.
Biography
Deniz Ilhan is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stony Brook University, Department of Sociology in New York, and is currently working on his dissertation thesis titled “Making Space in the Conversation: Muslims in Turkey’s Intellectual Field since 1980.”
Drawing on archival research, his study comparatively examines the interactions, content productions, curricular and research operations of select intellectual magazines, academic journals, educational think-tanks, and universities in Turkey since 1980, which are founded and led predominantly by Muslims. The analysis seeks to explain how these Muslim platforms strive to increase their institutional presence and influence over the agenda in Turkey, and what factors distinguish the successful. The study builds upon the sociology of intellectuals, knowledge and ideas, and the multi-disciplinary area studies on the Muslim intellectual space in general, and Turkish in particular.
Since September 2016, Deniz has been co-facilitating the weekly Middle East and North Africa Salons held at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, where recent developments or chronic issues of the region are discussed based on pre-assigned readings. Deniz has a Master’s degree from the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in which studied the multinational corporation professionals and cosmopolitanization in a globalizing city context: Istanbul, based on in-depth interviews.
SHARED SACRED SITES EXHIBITION IN THESSALONIKI, GREECE 2017
On September 23, 2017, we opened Shared Sacred Sites exhibition in Thessaloniki, Greece. Part of the international multi-year Shared Sacred Sites project, the exhibit engages the public in conversations about tolerance and coexistence among religious groups. This exhibition is hosted by three local institutions of art and culture: Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yeni Cami, and funded by generous grants from Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation. On the first day in Thessaloniki, the exhibition attracted hundreds of visitors.
By Elena Vanessa Caroline Kempf
By Elena Vanessa Caroline Kempf
By Elena Vanessa Caroline Kempf
By Vatsal Naresh
By Vatsal Naresh
History of “Shared Sacred Sites” Exhibition
“Shared Sacred Sites” is a touring exhibition that communicates the themes of religious tolerance among communities without defaulting to the hollow rhetoric of “a dialogue of cultures and religions.” The exhibition makes the experience of shared sacred sites accessible to new audiences, through a medium of multimedia exhibit featuring a variety of themes. The exhibition in France at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) described: “it seems vital, amid debates about the clash of civilizations, to demonstrate that alienation and abhorrence of the other are not the required modalities of interaction between the religions of [the] Mediterranean.”
Significant to exhibition are also host-cities, which themselves are sites of convergence of multiple traditions and cultures. The exhibition was first launched in 2015, at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM) in Marseilles, France and drew more than 120 000 persons in four months. From November 2016 to February 2017, it was featured at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. On September 23rd 2017 it launched in Thessaloniki, Greece and will remain open until December 2017. In March 2018, “Shared Sacred Sites” will travel to New York City, NY. Exhibitions in Istanbul, Turkey and Berkeley, California are under development.
Thessaloniki, a city of sharing
Lithography Hulusi Mehment 1891. From Parallaxi Magazine.
Thessaloniki is a significant city in its rich history of diversity—religious and secular. Throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire, Thessaloniki was one of the most vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious trading cities of the empire. Its conviviality attracted all different religious communities and became known throughout the Empire. To this day, the city neighborhoods preserve vestiges of this interfaith cohabitation and collaboration.
Retracing the city’s multicultural past recently became even more vital amidst the rise of intolerant and exclusionary politics in different regions of the world. Once in the past, the city’s diverse character was violently dismantled by the annihilation of its Jewish population during the Nazi occupation. Today, the narratives of tolerance become particularly critical as Greece finds itself in the middle of a double financial and a humanitarian refugee crisis at the margins of Europe and at the crossroads of human flows and mobility across the Balkans and the Mediterranean.
Though this exhibition, we aim to revisit the city’s legacy of sharing, tolerance and diversity. Considering current debates of inclusion and exclusion, borders, encounters and interactions in Europe, the “Shared Sacred Sites” exhibition offers an alternative view of the Mediterranean as an open, shared and networked space and sheds light to both historical legacies of coexistence and contemporary cases of faith communities living and praying together.
By Elena Vanessa Caroline Kempf
The Three Sites of Exhibition
The three sites of the exhibit, The Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA), Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, and Yeni Cami reveal different aspects, both historic and contemporary, of “sharing the sacred.” We communicate the main themes of sharing through the photographic materials and films, modern and contemporary art pieces, ethnographic material, bibliographical sources that tell the stories of both the past and present of the crossovers of religious communities.
The Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA) exhibition provides the visitor with an experience that blends anthropological research and contemporary art. The anthropological encounter tells of shrines dedicated to prophets and patriarchs, to Mary and shared saints. The works of contemporary art, present a different locus for notions of sharing the sacred. Photographs, works of art, icons, and anthropological evidence are interwoven to evoke religious coexistence. With contemporary art, the exhibition raises questions concerning the power of religious symbols and practices that stand simultaneously at the core or at the edge of religion and faith.
By Vatsal Naresh
By Vatsal Naresh
At the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (ThMP) the exhibition presents a visual journey through the diverse geographies and communities of the Mediterranean. Places of coexistence and active sharing are revealed, next to cases where territorial disputes lead to conflict and physical separation. The exhibition uses multiple photographic approaches, where archival material meets contemporary documentary photography and scientific fieldwork research blends with the vernacular photo keepsakes of the pilgrims and devotees themselves.
By Manoël Pénicaud
By Vatsal Naresh
At Yeni Cami, the exhibition presents a historical narrative of Thessaloniki, privileging a religious osmosis that occurred between the three religions as they accommodated to living together. Daily contacts, popular religious interactions, testimonies of travelers and the coexistence in particular sacred spaces and iconic monuments of the city are highlighted as treasured fragments of an experience now lost and a memory largely erased: that of Thessaloniki as a city once shared by different ethnic and religious communities.
By Dimitris Papadopoulos
By Dimitris Papadopoulos
Below is a description of the exhibit in Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, reported by the museum’s news medium.
A journey through geographies and communities of shared sacred places
The exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography unfolds in eight sections, where three distinct levels of photographic narration, one historic, one purely documentative and one artistic, are interwoven. We travel in regions where geography, history and tradition, social conditions and mixed communities crafted unique examples of cohabitation, of shared sacred sites and practices among groups of different religions.
Our tour begins from the “Holy City”, Jerusalem, sacred to all three monotheistic religions, where coexistence occurs, but in parallel and profoundly segregated ways. Divisions in the Holy Land become even more apparent in the section of the “Walls”.
The next sections on “Mountains” and “Islands” show us various communities, with lesser or greater isolation, from North Africa to the Aegean, where peaceful coexistence and the sharing of sacred sites constructed a common ground. Here the example of some Christian monasteries in Syria is high lightened as the confront the tragedy of civil war.
Through the numerous scattered “Sites of the Virgin” we encounter the timeless worship of Mother Mary by both Christians and Muslims, while in the section “Caves” we learn about exorcism rituals and about the legends of the Seven Sleepers that crosses through regions, cultures and religions.
Towards the end of the exhibition, the “In-betweens” of religious traditions and practices – and their hybridity – are explored in the Balkan region, while the makeshift worship places of immigrants in Greece are revealed in the section “From one coast to the other”, where a photographic project brings together diverse ethnic and religious communities and their experience.
Along with visual and interactive material, the exhibition also offers cultural events and performances that are open to the public.
By Vatsal Naresh
On September 24th, “Shared Sacred Sites in the Balkans and the Mediterranean: International Workshop” was held at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography as a part of the exhibition program, where international and domestic academics and artists discussed the state of religious pluralism and sharing in places of convergence of cultures.
Workshop Program
Workshop Program
On the opening date of the exhibition, Yeni Cami hosted a concert by Savina Yannatou, a talented singer, songwriter and composer, who captivated the crowd with her magical voice and exuberant charisma. Although her main repertoire consists of Greek traditional music, she also experiments with free jazz ans avant-garde styles.
By Vatsal Naresh
By Vatsal Naresh
Lessons from the Past
When religions converge, the resulting crossovers are not devoid of ambiguity and can sometimes also lead to conflict. But among the examples of partition and division in the Mediterranean worlds, there are also examples of inconspicuous and often silent sharing. The presence of shared sacred sites reveals the permeability of the frontiers between religious communities the dogmas of which seem incompatible.
The exhibition will be featured in Thessaloniki until December 2017. In parallel, the exhibition is adapted in Paris, France at the National Museum of the Immigration History from October 2017 to January 2018. In 2018, the Shared Sacred Sites project will reemerge in Marrakesh, Morocco at the Museum of the Confluences from December to March 2017. After Morocco, you can follow our exhibition in New York City, USA at three central cultural and educational institutions – New York Public Library, Morgan Library and Museum, and Graduate Center, CUNY – from March to July 2018.
We would like to thank Stavros Niarchos Foundation along with the Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation, and the Mayor and the City of Thessaloniki for making the exhibition possible.
Travis Zadeh, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies; Director of Undergraduate Studies for Modern Middle East Studies, Yale University
Monday, November 27, 5-7pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley
Please join us for the Berkeley Public Theology Program lecture on November 27, Monday 5pm – 7pm at Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley. We welcome Travis Zadeh, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Modern Middle East Studies at Yale University.
Islam plays a powerful role in American public discourse. Across this often contentious landscape, numerous voices can be heard defining and contesting the nature of Islam. These definitional problems also shape academic debates, where the seemingly basic question of what is Islam has received renewed attention. This lecture addresses the place and history of Islam in the modern academic study of religion in light of discursive structures that are designed to contain and delimit the meaning of Islam.
Travis Zadehis a scholar of Islamic intellectual and cultural history. His areas of interest include frontiers and early conversion, Qur’anic studies, eschatology, mythology, mysticism, pilgrimage and sacred geography, encyclopedism, cosmography, classical Arabic and Persian literary traditions, material and visual cultures, Islamic studies in the digital humanities, vernacularity and language politics, comparative theories of language and translation, secularism, colonialism, Islamic reform, science, magic, miracles, and philosophies of the marvelous.
Please join us for the third Israel Studies Colloquium of the Fall 2017 semester. We welcome Gayil Talshir, the 2017-2018 Israel Institute Visiting Professor at San Jose State University. She is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she directs the Center for Advanced Public Policy Makers.
Prof. Talshir’s research focuses on the crisis of legitimation of advanced democracies. She is currently involved in an international project on Democracy and Inequality where she is working on a report on the state of Israeli democracy for the Shasha Center for Strategic Studies.
Her talk is entitled: “Israeli Democracy in Crisis? Between Governability and Governance.”
Please join us in the Goldberg Room (297 Boalt Hall), at 12:15pm, on Thursday, November 9. We look forward to seeing you there. Please share this talk with your colleagues and graduate students. We welcome your RSVP by email to Rebecca Golbert at rlgolbert@law.berkeley.edu so we can anticipate the number of lunches to order.
Matthias Haeussler, PhD is a visiting scholar at Center for Democracy, Toleration and Religion at University of California, Berkeley from October, 2017 through January, 2018.
Biography
Matthias Haeussler studied Philosophy, Sociology and Political Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, where in 2006, he earned his PhD in Philosophy with a thesis on
Hegel’s Conception of Religion („Der Religionsbegriff in Hegels Phänomenologie des
Geistes“, 2 nd edition, Freiburg: Alber). In 2004 he became a faculty member of the
Department of Sociology of the University of Siegen. Between 2004 and 2009 he
conducted a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on
colonial rule, war and genocide in “German South West Africa“ (1904-1908), leading
him to extended stays in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. He recently
completed a book on the Herero Genocide.
In 2014, Matthias was Visiting Scholar at the Hamburg Institute of Social Research,
since 2015 he has been a researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the
Advancement of Science and Culture, working on a project titled “On Imperial
Domination. An Inquiry into Non-State Political Orders in Colonial Libya and
Namibia”. In addition to his research, he is editor of “Sociology of Violence” at
“Soziopolis”, (HIS/ Mittelweg 36) as well as on the advisory board of the “Journal of
Namibian Studies”.
The workshop was the second event in a larger project that aims to examine how religious actors and democratic institutions renegotiate early compacts drawn at constitutional moments and the role of religious pluralism in these societies today. The “Religious Toleration and Plural Democracies” project, originally funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and now part of the Haas Institute’s Religious Diversity research cluster efforts, seeks to identify and promote a culture of coexistence within democratic society.
The project rooted its work in three nations that have historically faced the challenge of fashioning democratic institutions within societies with long-standing religious traditions: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. Firstly, it looks at how these nations have negotiated the balance between the claims of religious groups and those modern democratic institutions; Secondly, how democratically-elected regimes may now pose challenges to pluralism and coexistence. These questions were further elaborated during the workshop in October, which was organized by Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and chair of the Haas Institute’s Religious Diversity cluster, and Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University.
The workshop kicked off with a look at the transitions three countries experienced as they went from societies with great degrees of religious and ethnic pluralism to simplified versions of nation-states. Rochana Bajpai (SOAS, University of London), Uday Mehta (CUNY Graduate Center), Christine Philliou (UC Berkeley) and Faisal Devji (University of Oxford) presented papers that problematized the notion of the transition, discussed the understandings of religious diversity, liberalism, and democracy before and during the transition to the modern state. They highlighted not only the social diversity within the society more broadly, but also the diversity of intellectual and political views present in these moments, and the implications of these for the winners and losers of the struggles for national liberation that followed. The papers explored key parts of the constitutions and the political techniques responding to religious diversity that were implemented during initial moments of state and nation-building.
The second set of discussions focused on democracy, secularism, law, and religious diversity. Ates Altinordu(Sabanci University) discussed the possibilities of a post-secular construction in contemporary Turkey and what that would entail in terms of particular arrangements in the social and political order of the country. He demonstrated serious tensions between the state’s vision of religion and post-secular ideals.
Mathew John (Jindal Global Law School) shared his work on the Indian Supreme Court and its assertion of authority over religious practice by violating social intuitions and casting traditions of practice as founded in doctrine. Fatima Bokhari (Open Society Foundations, Budapest) presented her research on the ways that religious blasphemy laws, which are supposed to protect minorities from the majority religion, were used to protect the majority from the minority in Pakistan and allowing for the discrimination and persecution of minorities, rather than their protection.
The discussion then turned to an exploration of the relation between democracy and violence, with special attention given to the ways that democratic regimes can inspire violence as well as themselves become violent actors. Papers by Sudipta Kaviraj (Columbia University) and Amrita Basu (Amherst College) investigated such relations in the context of India while three papers explored the particularities of state-minority relations with regard to violence, persecution, and claim-making for rights. Senem Aslan (Bates College) compared Alevi and Kurdish communities in Turkey and their particular claim-making relations with the state, each shaped by particular histories and identities. Sadia Saeed(University of San Francisco) studied religious pluralism in Muslim societies and demonstrated how Muslim empires were different then Muslim majority states today. Finally, Nosheen Ali (Umang Poetry) presented a powerful study of minoritization in Pakistan, especially the attitudes and practices that perpetuate humiliation and hostility towards the Shia, the biggest minority group.
Karen Barkey and Sudipta Kaviraj are now collecting these essays and putting them together into a collection that they hope to publish quickly given the urgency of the politics of pluralism around the world today. In addition to the papers presented at the conference, the collection will include a comparative paper by Barkey and Vatsal Naresh (Yale University) that sets the rise of majoritarian leaders in Turkey and India as the key question through which to explore democracy, secularism and religious pluralism.
Karen Barkey, Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity, UC Berkeley
Note: This lecture will be held in the Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley.
In this talk, I will discuss the sharing of sacred sanctuaries by the three great monotheistic religions across the Mediterranean, with particular examples from the history of the Ottoman Empire. At first sight, sharing the same sacred sites would seem impossible in a monotheistic world characterized by total submission to a single God. And yet in the Mediterranean world it is not unusual for followers of different religions to frequent the same shrines. In the past, and even today, numerous believers — Jews, Christians and Muslims — have prayed together in the holy places of another religion.
Shared sacred sites are religious sanctuaries where people from different and potentially antagonistic religious and ethnic backgrounds are able to live with difference, accommodate others’ religious needs, and publicly negotiate their otherness. The sharing provides key insights into characteristics and features crucial to the cultivation of tolerance and understanding.
I will traverse the territories of the Ottoman Empire to give examples of shared sites, discuss their origins and transformation over time, and describe the subtly negotiated nature of numerous practices that make for long periods of tolerance among religious groups. These examples will show how it is possible to accommodate to the other, even in a world riven by religious differences.
On May 4, 2017, Social Science Matrix held its Spring Open House to welcome friends and celebrate the end of another successful academic year. Students, staff, and faculty from across campus—as well as the external community—joined us in our home in Barrows Hall to gather, share food and drink, and learn about the past year’s activities at Matrix.
In his introductory remarks, Professor William Hanks, Director of Social Science Matrix, introduced some of the key developments from this year, including the formation of a bilateral exchange with Sciences Po, in Paris; a fellowship by Professor Ishtan Rev of Central European University; and the Matrix Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Helga Nowotny, Former President of the European Research Council.
Hanks also thanked inaugural cohort of Matrix Dissertation Fellows, and he noted that Matrix added five new Affiliated Centers to our roster this year, bringing the total to 23. Hanks said that the Affiliated Centers—which span disciplines and topical areas—help to create “enduring relations” on campus.
Matrix is proud and honored to count the Center for Democracy, Toleration, & Religion as one of its new affiliated centers. Welcome Professor Barkey!
DATE:
Exhibition opens on September 23, 2017 and will run through December 2017
International workshop to take place on September 24, 2017
LOCATION:
Thessaloniki Museum of Photography
Thessaloniki, Greece
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION: “Shared Sacred sites”, a touring exhibition planned for September to December 2017 in Thessaloniki by a French-US collaboration team of researchers and curators, uses visual, interactive and mixed media to create an immersive visitor experience of a long, yet less known tradition in the Mediterranean: that of sharing of places, practices, and figures between the three monotheistic religions. Looking at the historical and the contemporary practices of sharing places, prayers and stories between Christians, Muslims and Jews it offers a timely alternative narrative to current debates on religion and violence and discourses of hatred, exclusion and fundamentalism. Having been originally curated by Dionigi Albera and Manoël Penicaud at the Musée des Civilisations et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) in Marseille in 2015, it was redesigned for the Bardo Museum in Tunis (November 2016 – Feburary 2017), almost year after the horrible terrorist attack at the museum, and is planned to travel to Paris, Marrakesh, Istanbul and New York in 2018.
Our team of curators and researchers is currently working on reimagining the exhibition’s powerful story for Thessaloniki, in partnership with the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, and with generous funding from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation along with the Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation, and the support of the Mayor and the City of Thessaloniki. We consider Thessaloniki, in its regional significance and its particularly rich history of diversity, a prime site not only to host this exhibition but also to be showcased in it. Thessaloniki was, throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire, one of the most vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious trading cities of the empire. Its conviviality attracted communities of all different religions and became known throughout the Empire. One needs to walk in city neighborhoods today to see the vestiges of this interfaith tolerance and collaboration. The city’s diverse character was violently dismantled by the Nazi occupation of Greece and the annihilation of its Jewish community. Rethinking the city’s multicultural past has recently become significant and efforts are being made to retrace it. Through this exhibition, we aim to revisit the city’s legacy of sharing, tolerance and diversity. The narrative of tolerance and diversity becomes particularly critical as Greece finds itself in the middle of a double financial and a humanitarian refugee crisis at the margins of Europe and at the crossroads of human flows and mobility across the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Considering current debates of inclusion and exclusion, borders, encounters and interactions in Europe, the “Shared Sacred Sites” exhibition offers an alternative view of the Mediterranean as an open, shared and networked space and sheds light to both historical legacies of coexistence and contemporary cases of faith communities living and praying together.
For more general information on the Shared Sacred Sites exhibit and its history, please click here.
For the report and a selected photo gallery on the Thessaloniki exhibition from September 2017, please click here.
The workshop was the second event in a larger project that aims to examine how religious actors and democratic institutions renegotiate early compacts drawn at constitutional moments and the role of religious pluralism in these societies today. The “Religious Toleration and Plural Democracies” project, originally funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and now part of the Haas Institute’s Religious Diversity research cluster efforts, seeks to identify and promote a culture of coexistence within democratic society.
