Political power and contested religious sites in jerusalem: Harem-i Sharif, Wailing Wall and Church of Holy Sepulchre (1871-1948)

This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the administrative, religious, and political policies implemented by two distinct political regimes that held sovereignty over Jerusalem between 1871 and 1948 (the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate) focusing on three central sacred sites: al-Ḥaram al-Sharif, the Wailing Wall, and the Kamame Church. The research explores how state-society relations were structured through religious public spaces, what normative policies imperial authorities developed in relation to these sites, and how spatial-societal interactions were transformed over time. The study is primarily based on a wide range of primary sources drawn from both national and local Ottoman and British archives. The historical and symbolic meanings of these sacred spaces extended far beyond their religious traditions and became deeply entangled with processes of national identity formation, imperial interventions, and colonial administrative practices in the modern period. Al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, associated with the Prophet Muḥammad's Isrāʾ and Miʿrāj narratives, served during the Ottoman era as a key site legitimizing the caliphate's authority. Under British rule, however, it emerged as a powerful symbol of Palestinian Arab nationalist resistance. The Western Wall, increasingly reconstructed within Jewish national memory from the late nineteenth century onward, was transformed into a spatial emblem of Zionist ideology—transcending its religious function to become a site of ideological significance. The Church of al-Kamāmeh, despite being regulated under the Ottoman-imposed Status Quo of 1852 due to intra-Christian sectarian rivalry, became increasingly destabilized under the British Mandate as international pressures intensified. Each of these sacred sites, therefore, came to embody far more than their roles as loci of worship: they were redefined in the early modern period as symbolic arenas of identity contestation, international diplomacy, and colonial domination. Within this framework, the study reveals how sacred spaces were instrumentalized across distinct imperial contexts and examines the ways in which their meanings were reconfigured and contested over time.