Cities of God and nationalism: Rome, Mecca and Jerusalem as contested sacred world cities (Italy, Saudi Arabia, Israel).

摘要

The Dissertation utilizes the concept of "Sacred Global Cities" to analyze Rome (Italy), Mecca (Saudi Arabia), and Jerusalem (Israel). It expands the notion of national imagined communities to include global imagined communities epitomized by Islam and Christianity. Looked at in this way, the study of cities like Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem can contribute towards opening up the "World City Hopethesis" to cities that are qualitatively different from those that receive most of the attention, in both temporal as well as thematic terms.; The concept of global sacred city is also necessary to illustrate the tensions that arise when ecclesiastical and universalistic communities encounter the most recent nationalist imagined communities that Benedict Anderson and others have explored. The approach used in the Dissertation provides the conceptual tools to explore how sacred global cities have been immunized to national projects that attempt to appropriate them. It is hypothesized that Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem, as sacred global cities, belong to transnational universalistic communities, and thus cannot readily be appropriated by nationalist movements. This is because their symbolic status expresses the universalistic religious and spiritual aspirations of imagined communities, which far exceed the spatial and cultural limits of the states in which the cities are located. The Italian nationalists' attempt to seize Rome and Vatican City in the mid-19 th century, the Wahabi's/Saudi's seizure of the Hijaz and the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the early part of this century, and, finally, the attempt of the Zionist's to make Jerusalem "the eternal capital of the Jews" today are all of this type.