SAN DIEGO — Ever wonder why the mainstream media so
consistently apply the adjective “holy” to places like Najaf and
Karbala? The Associated Press Style Guide says nothing about holy
cities, preferring to let reporters decide for themselves whether
they’re filing stories from sacred ground. Reporters, for their
part, typically defer to local sensibilities, unless those
sensibilities are Christian, Jewish, or unlikely to impress
America’s self-styled cultural gatekeepers, many of whom are
discomfited by religious faith any stronger than the Unitarian or
agnostic brews to which they’ve been conditioned (good luck looking
for “holy” in a byline from Rome, Hebron, or Salt Lake City). That
approach has combined with the fighting in Iraq to make a handful
of Muslim shrines household names, and people in the “blogosphere”
have noticed.
In one of the wire service parodies for which he is notorious,
Scott “Scrappleface” Ott announced earlier this year that the
city councils of Washington, D.C. and New York City “unanimously
approved resolutions declaring both metropolitan areas Muslim holy
cities like Najaf, Kufa, and Karbala in Iraq.” Mark Shea wondered why Beijing,
China didn’t count as holy, when “it used to have a divine emperor
and everything.” Meanwhile, Matt
Yglesias proposed limiting the number of cities that any one
religion can designate as holy, and Josh Chafetz
suggested a tradable voucher system, “where religions that don’t
need many holy cities get to sell their leftover city vouchers to
religions that need more.”
This politically incorrect whimsy would probably have amused
Augustine of Hippo, who borrowed from early Christian preaching
about conduct befitting “strangers in a strange land” to write
about the “City of God.” His book was a virtuoso riff on the
“Heavenly Jerusalem” described at the end of the Christian
Scriptures, and commonly regarded as a metaphysical analog to the
earthly Jerusalem. In other words, Augustine’s City of God is not
the kind of place where tourists pump locals for advice on where to
find cappuccinos and Wi-Fi hotspots.
But Augustine was writing early in the fifth century. Reporters
these days have no trouble locating holy places, if only because
U.S. Marines seem to be encamped near a disproportionate number of
them. Staffers at the Council on American-Islamic Relations
probably think the American military has a jones for Muslim
shrines, but the truth is more complicated. If, for example,
Nepalese leaders were better known for fostering hatred of the
Western world than for anything else, the number of postcards sent
from Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal to military towns like Oceanside,
California, might increase exponentially, but not because
imperialist Yankee devil-dogs had suddenly decided to pick a fight
with Buddhist and Hindu partisans.
AS A MARINE HELICOPTER PILOT wrote August 23 for the New York
Times, his low-level flights over the cemetery next to the
Imam Ali shrine in Najaf were made not because his commanders were
insensitive to Muslim burial rites, but because the cemetery had
been used as a staging area for attacks on American forces. Sermons
erasing the distinction between blessings and bullets tend to
aggravate that kind of thing by distorting the whole concept of
holiness, and exposing it to the corrosive sarcasm of pundits like
John Derbyshire, resident curmudgeon at National Review
Online.
Fresh from a mind-meld of sorts with aspiring politician and
Insurgent-of-the-Month Moqtada al-Sadr, Derbyshire observes that
“poking a finger in the infidel’s eye trumps any amount of holiness
in any number of shrines.” In the same vein, one contributor to an
Internet bulletin board asked his fellows to “name a city in Iraq
that is not holy,” and the wittiest response to that challenge
cited the “Green Zone” in Baghdad which houses many of the
Americans now helping Iraqi reconstruction efforts.
When coffins conceal shoulder-fired missiles, schoolchildren are
massacred without compunction, and videotaped “militants” shout
“God is Great” while sawing other people’s heads off, it’s safe to
infer that “holiness” means different things to different cultures.
We also know that the definition of holiness can change within a
culture, and sometimes even from one neighborhood to the next.
This, of course, is a two-sided coin: Mr. Eric Scheie noticed that
editors for his Philadelphia newspaper avoid using the term
“terrorist” except when quoting other people, because they prefer
the term “extremist.” Scheie then pointed out that this puts actual
terrorists “on the same moral plane as conservative radio talk show
hosts.”
SO WHAT CITIES ARE holy and why? Christians, Muslims, and Jews all
agree that Jerusalem is significant, but Muslims alone exalt Medina
because the prophet Mohammed is buried there, and consider Mecca
the first created place on Earth. Unlike their more numerous Sunni
co-religionists, Shiite Muslims also embrace Karbala and Najaf as
the burial sites for Mohammed’s grandson and son-in-law,
respectively. Kufa, the city between them, is revered as the place
where Mohammed’s son-in-law was stabbed to death by assassins
working for a Sunni rival.
Western Christianity pays unique attention to Rome (read: the
pope), and, to a much lesser extent, Santiago de Compostela, Spain,
where First Daughter Jenna Bush made a splash on a spring, 2004
pilgrimage. The caption on the ensuing AP photo noted that Jenna
and her friends averaged 19 miles a day over the 112-mile
pilgrimage route, without explaining that Santiago de Compostela
derives any holiness it has from proximity to Jesus, because the
remains of Jesus’ apostle James are buried there (this would be
“James the Greater,” as opposed to fellow apostle “James the Less,”
first bishop of Jerusalem, whose death could not lift that
metropolis into the holy city sweepstakes only because it was
already there).
Various European locales important to Protestant Christians are
not usually described as holy. This can be attributed to the “local
sensibility” rule mentioned earlier. Journalists who don’t know or
care that Protestant theology avoids ascribing holiness to physical
places so as to avoid even the appearance of conceding anything to
Catholic talk of “sacramentals” are nevertheless clever enough to
pick up on the nomenclature cues offered to them in the pubs and
newspapers of places like Canterbury, England.
Here at home, and to the great relief of adamantly secular
organizations like the ACLU, it also takes more than an explicitly
religious name to plant “holy” among the preferred list of
adjectives associated with a particular place. Holiness can be
thought of as a kind of perfume whose fragrance diffuses over large
areas. Thus Abraham Lincoln could speak of how the valor of the
dead had consecrated the battlefield at Gettysburg without
ascribing special merit or divine blessing to the town around the
battlefield.
Were that not the case, the American Southwest would be
pockmarked with holy cities from Santa Cruz, California, to Corpus
Christi, Texas. It’s an intriguing thought, and a gentle but
unmistakable indictment of how we usually view the world.
