ABSTRACT
In this essay I explore the relations between the construction of social and political power and the politics of sacred places in urban communities through the analysis of changes in the architectural environment in Tel AvivJaffa. My main goal is to reconstruct and analyze the struggle over the control and the use of the Hassan Bey Mosque as part of the community need for self-empowerment. I argue that the public and legal struggle conducted in Tel Aviv-Jaffa through the 1970s by its Muslim community reflects the strategies of a subordinate group to achieve better representation in the urban landscape, as part of its broader need to gain more control and live according to its cultural-religious codes. In the aftermath of the 1948 War, Jaffa’s Arab community declined from
70,000 people to a devastated community of less than 4,000. Jaffa, considered the “bride of Palestine” (Arus Filastin) and its intellectual center, thus became an obsolete and decaying suburb of the relatively new Jewish city of Tel Aviv.1
The growing needs of the State of Israel led to the expropriation of Arab real estate and lands, some of which were religious institutions, such as mosques and cemeteries. One of these is the Hassan Bey Mosque, built in 1916 by the Ottomans on the outskirts of Manshiyyah, the biggest Muslim suburb of Jaffa. During the 1948 War it was used as a sniper post to inflict casualties on the Tel Aviv population. The history of the Mosque is not unlike that of the historic Arab town-once the center of a growing and lively neighborhood, and since 1948 a neglected, dilapidated building, inaccessible to its former community. During the 1970s and 1980s the Mosque became the focus of a lengthy public and legal debate, as it was slated to be leased and turned into a tourist shopping center. The struggle resulted in the Mosque’s repossession by the Jaffa Muslim community and its renewal as a center for religious practice. The Hassan Bey Mosque is yet another case study illustrating the insepar-
ability of religious and sociopolitical forces in society. In this particular instance it is almost impossible to differentiate between the two, for the two
forces are used interchangeably to promote and sustain the political needs of the Muslim community. The conflict over the Mosque is intrinsically connected to the political struggle of a minority group to express itself within the city’s landscape and to challenge the hegemonic position of the majority group. The Hassan Bey affair demonstrates the ways in which the Jaffa community operates in order to reclaim its cultural assets, to enhance its cohesion as a group against the dominant majority (hegemonic prevailing discourse and agencies), and to better represent itself in the city. I maintain that these are all part and parcel of the long and fraught process of self-empowerment of the Arab community of Jaffa. My objectives are threefold: 1) to explore the Hassan Bey affair as an
example of a minority group’s politico-cultural struggle to challenge the dominant group and to work cohesively to augment its role in the daily management of its life; 2) to outline the historical narrative of the struggle (what actually took place on the ground and within the community) using in-depth interviews and municipal archival documents; 3) to analyze the political use of the religious sacred place within the context of a cultural conflict between hegemonic and subordinate groups.
