Böcker av Nimrod Luz

A study of the socio-political dimensions of sacred sites in Israel-Palestine, drawing on over 20 years of in-depth ethnographic research which introduces cutting-edge theories on secularization, struggles for recognition, and diversity issues. This book focuses on contemporary sacred sites and their socio-political meanings for minorities within a hegemonic and a secularizing state-system. It argues that sacred places and the ample socio-religious-political practices they entail provide a space which is less scrutinized by the state and hegemonic powers within it, where alternative visions of the socio-political may be produced. In this spatially-oriented inquiry, places are understood and explored through a mostly phenomenological lens as fundamental to all socio-political processes. Places are explicitly understood as always in flux, and as constantly being produced, contested and in a perpetual dynamic process among forces to be found in a complex scalar matrix. These sites are explored in various contexts from the individual body to the global. This book offers a critical-analytical study of the socio-political aspects of sacred sites in contemporary societies within the broader understanding of scale and the spatial turn in the study of religion.

The Mamluk City in the Middle East offers an interdisciplinary study of urban history, urban experience, and the nature of urbanism in the region under the rule of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517). The book focuses on three less-explored but politically significant cities in the Syrian region - Jerusalem, Safad (now in Israel), and Tripoli (now in Lebanon) - and presents a new approach and methodology for understanding historical cities. Drawing on diverse textual sources and intensive field surveys, Nimrod Luz reveals the character of the Mamluk city as well as various aspects of urbanism in the region, establishing the pre-modern city of the Middle East as a valid and useful lens through which to study various themes such as architecture, art history, history, and politics of the built environment. As part of this approach, Luz considers the processes by which Mamluk discourses of urbanism were conceptualized and then inscribed in the urban environment as concrete expressions of architectural design, spatial planning, and public memorialization.