Nora Lafi presents a working paper on ‚Daily Life Spatialities of Religiosity in Ottoman Tunis: Reflections on the Complexity of Urban Religious Landscapes‘

On September 26, 1861, chronicler Ahmed Ibn Abî Dhiyâf reported, an angry crowd of protesters gathered inside the Ezzituna Mosque of Tunis. They were upset against the consequences of the modernizing reforms of the local government in this Ottoman province and of pressures by foreign consuls. The gathering then evolved into a street demonstration that took the direction of the Palace of the Bardo, the residence of the Bey outside of the city walls. What could be interpreted as the mere protest of a group of conservative religious notables against modernity and its ambiguities, in fact hides numerous layers of complexity that involve the relationship between space and religiosity. The demonstrators, indeed, did not directly walk to the Bardo. Before exiting the city walls, they stopped at a mausoleum dedicated to a local saint, Sidi Mahres (951-1022), patron of the city since the middle-ages. Passing through this place meant for the protesters that their demonstration had acquired a religious, but also civic, legitimacy and force. Demonstrators grabbed symbols of the saint, among which his banners, that they carried in the demonstration. After the failure of a negotiation in front of the palace, they broke the banners of the saint. It meant that a riot could start. It is the object of this presentation in the colloquium to investigate these dimensions of complexity in the relationship between space, society and religiosity. Using the concept of religious landscape and reflecting on methodology in urban history as well as on the notion of longue durée, Nora Lafi analyses how the spatiality and nature of everyday life popular religiosity in Tunis, that also included forms of devotion common to Jews and Muslims and had some specific feminine declensions, invites to nuance ideas of identity and religion as blocks. What this presentation suggests, with an attention to the inertia of deep forms of religiosity and to notions like negotiation, mediation and accommodation, is to revise the very definition of urbanity and to see logics of spatialization of the self as more complex than the mere projection onto the urban space of pre-defined identities.

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