Khaldoun Samman's new book, Cities of God and Nationalism:
Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome as Contested World Cities, tackles
the controversial thesis that modernity, far from bringing in
an age of tolerance, creates the social bases of exclusion.
Many histories of Jerusalem are written with the premise that intolerance
and violence are built into the sacred place because of some premodern
civilizational holdovers of some archaic age, with the assumption
that once this time-immemorial leftover is removed we will finally
enter a new age of love and brotherhood. In contrast to this Samman
argues that Jerusalem has long entered the modern world and what
we desperately need now, if we are to resolve such conflicts as
those we find in Jerusalem, is to exit modernity and reimagine the
institutional basis upon which it is built.
The central thesis of the book is that our real problem is the
rigid conceptions of national spaces and peoples that have recently
been forced upon these sacred spaces. Samman uses three major
sacred cities to explore how modernity, through the apparatus
of nationalism and the nation-state, redefined our constructs
of self and other in fundamental ways, having major implications
for the way Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem are conceived by the inhabitants
of the world who identify with them. In the refusal of the time-immemorial
way of thinking about these sacred cities, therefore, the argument
found in his book is that the cataclysmic transformations produced
by modernity are essential to our understanding the contemporary
plight of these three cities.
