Mary may be seen as a bridge between faiths in the field of pilgrimages and devotional practices. If several Christian holy figures (such as Saint Anna, Saint George, or Saint Anthony of Padua) appear to be powerful intermediaries with other religions, it is undoubtedly Mary who does most to encourage inter-faith gatherings in the shrines that are consecrated to her. As a matter of fact, many Marian sanctuaries are magnets that attract non-Christian faithful. The global expansion of Christianity has generated the development of several interreligious pilgrimages linked to Marian sites. For example, some pivotal Marian sanctuaries in Asia appeal to immense crowds of pilgrims, which include Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims along with Christians. This happens in Sri Lanka (Our Lady of Lanka at Tewatte and Our Lady of Madhu), in India (Vailankanni, Tamil Nadu, and Gunadala, Andhra Pradesh), in Pakistan (Mariamabad), and in Java (Sendangsono). This attraction exerted by Mary on non-Christian pilgrims is particularly pronounced in the direction of Muslims. The Marian devotion is indeed well implanted in the Islamic tradition, in which several sacred texts sanction it.
The web of inter-faith intermingling among Christians and Muslims inspired by Mary is particularly thick and ancient in the Mediterranean region, where many sources attest the tenacity of this worship through the centuries, showing forms of sharing in the longue durée (Cuffel 2003; Albera 2005, 2012a). In this ancient contact zone between Christianity and Islam, it is possible to draw centuries-old Islamic topography of the Virgin Mary, dotted with a number of shrines jointly worshipped by Christians and Muslims. Some of these sites have experienced an uninterrupted continuity until today; others have decayed, but have given way to new sanctuaries that are still able to attract a miscellaneous mass of worshipers of different religious affiliations.
Even if this may seem rather odd for a Christian audience, Mary cannot be considered only as a Christian figure. In particular, there also exists an Islamic Mary, who has an eminent role in the context of this revelation. There are certainly crucial theological differences: while for Christians Mary is the Mother of God, Muslims consider her only the mother of a prophet. Yet Mary is often evoked in the Qur’an, where she is the only female figure designated by her name, while all the other women are simply indicated as daughter, wife, mother, or sister of a man whose name is given. Moreover, the name of Mary recurs more times in the Qur’an than in the whole of the New Testament: thirty-four occurrences versus nineteen. In addition to evocations scattered in the text, Mary is a central figure in two suras. One, the nineteenth, bears her name; the other, the third, is entitled ‘The family of Imran’.
A disconcerting aspect for a Christian reader is probably the fusion that the Qur’an operates between the Old Testament Mary, sister of Moses and Aaron, and the Gospel Mary, the mother of Jesus. The latter is seen as belonging to the family of Imran (Amran), the father of Aaron and Moses according to the Bible (Num. 26:59; 1 Chr. 5:29; Dousse 2005: 243). Yet other aspects of the Marian universe drawn by the Qur’an by no means disorient a Christian reader, who can discover mentions of the nativity of Mary, her presentation to the Temple, the annunciation, the virginal conception of Jesus, and the childbirth in difficult conditions. The prominence of the Islamic Mary from a theological point of view is indisputable. According to the Qur’an, Mary is a sign for the entirety of humanity and an example for believers; she is a living model of trust, abandonment to divine will, modesty, and piety. The references to Mary present in the Qur’an have been expanded by the Muslim tradition: in the hadiths, in the commentaries of the Qur’an, in mystical literature. According to a well-known hadith (saying of the Prophet), Mary and Jesus are the only human beings born without any contact with Satan. The Arab historian El-Asraqî (ninth century) writes that when Mohammed conquered Mecca, he ordered the destruction of all the idols present at the Qaba with the exception of an icon representing Mary with the child. Theological and mystical authors have often discussed the role of Mary, attributing her a status of sainthood, and sometimes even considering her as a female prophet.
The textual dimension cannot be disjoined from ritual behaviours and from localizations of significant episodes in sacred places. In Jerusalem’s Haram el Sharif, there is an Oratory of Mary (marking the place where she would have lived inside the Temple) and a Cradle of Jesus, where the Child would have spoken to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Both these places have been important for several centuries from a devotional point of view, and were meeting points for Muslim mystics (Matar 2017). Yet the Islamic topography of Mary was not at all confined to this space, being invested in several Christian sanctuaries too. Muslims accepted a complementary version of the Nativity focused on Bethlehem and several narratives evoking the presence of miraculous palm trees concerned both Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In the tenth century, Eutychius, a Melchite Patriarch of Alexandria, reported that Muslims gathered for prayer in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He also relates the origin of this practice. After the conquest of Jerusalem, the Caliph Omar visited Bethlehem and when the hour of prayer arrived, he did his devotions inside the church, near the southern apse, which was entirely decorated with mosaics. Yet, according to Eutychius, Omar issued an official act to Christian authorities in which he asserted that only individual Muslim prayer was possible within the basilica, and formally forbade community prayer and the call to prayer. But the Patriarch noticed that in his times the Muslims derogated from these pronouncements. They removed the mosaics from the apse, and celebrated community prayer there, with the official call to prayer (Marmardji 1951: 25). In the thirteenth century the famous geographer Yakut related a similar story, but from a Muslim point of view. According to him, it would be a monk who, to avoid the demolition of the church in order to build a mosque, would have suggested to Omar to use an apse already oriented towards the Qibla to make it a place of Muslim prayer. Omar accepted, imposing on the Christians the charge of the various expenses (lighting, cleaning) for this ‘mosque’ inside the basilica. Yakut observed that the Muslims never stopped visiting Bethlehem and went to this apse to pray. They told from generation to generation that this apse is that of Omar. And he added that the Franks did not change anything while they dominated the country (Marmardji 1951: 25–6).
Along with the traditional reference to the mythical deeds of Omar, another powerful narrative came to reinforce Muslim claims on the Basilica of Nativity. According to some of the traditions of Mohammed’s night journey to Jerusalem, when the Prophet was miraculously transported from Mecca to Jerusalem, he stopped at Bethlehem (see Bencheikh 1988). At the end of the fifteenth century, Mujir ad-Dîn writes that on this occasion the angel Gabriel, his guide, instructed him to pray at the place where Jesus had been born (Marmardji 1951: 26). Apparently the official Muslim presence inside the Basilica ceased in the centuries after the Crusades and subsequent sources are silent concerning the mihrab and a space inside the church reserved to Muslims. Yet this did not put an end to the latters’ frequentation of this place of pilgrimage.
In the following centuries accounts of Christian pilgrims constantly reported the presence of Muslims who came to Bethlehem to worship the Virgin and her Child. It was possible to meet them in the Church of the Nativity, but also in other places where the Marian epic had left its imprint: for instance, around the tree under which the Virgin had rested on the way to Jerusalem and in the place where the angel announced the Holy Nativity to the shepherds. In the cave where Mary took refuge with her child, before fleeing to Egypt, some drops of her milk fell, conferring a miraculous power to its walls. Century after century, women of different religions have crushed fragments of the rock walls into powder which, mixed with water, they drank to ensure the abundance of their own milk. The Franciscan monk Francesco Suriano, a well-informed witness who spent several years in the Holy Land between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century, wrote that fragments of the marble wall of the Church of Nativity were used in a similar way: ‘the Moslem women make bread, and when it is baked, they send it throughout the country: a piece of this is taken by expectant mothers when they feel the pangs of child birth; when eaten they bring forth without pain, according to what these Moslem women told me’ (Suriano 1949: 137). Such Marian piety was not confined to women, or to the lower classes. This is clearly shown by the same Suriano, who relates the pious visit to the Grotto of Nativity of a Muslim delegation, including the Governors of Jerusalem and Gaza (1949: 136–7). Jacques de Villamont, who visited Bethlehem in the second half of sixteenth century, related a similar example of high-placed pilgrims. There he met the Cadi of Jerusalem, who had come with his wife and children to pay a visit to the sanctuary. The group stayed initially in the gardens of the convent and then crossed the threshold into the Church of the Nativity (de Villamont 1600: 192). The Damascene Sufi and theologian ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi has left a vivid description of the visit he made to the Church of the Nativity in 1693. When inside, he recited poetry about the blessing he received in this place. Then he accepted the invitation of the monks who offered him food and musical entertainment. Al-Nabulusi and his companions particularly appreciated the sound of the organ, which he likened to the singing of a blackbird or a nightingale (Matar 2017: 120).
The frequentation of the Bethlehem church by Muslim devotees continued in the following period, and up until now. And this is far from being the only example of such a cross-religious attendance. Another central site for the Islamic Marian topography has for several centuries been the Church of the Virgin’s Tomb, at the foot of Mount Olives in Jerusalem, which in its turn has also been associated with the tradition of the night journey to Jerusalem (Mohammed would have stopped here to pray at Mary’s tomb).
Niccolo da Poggibonsi, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the mid-fourteenth century, recounts that he celebrated the Mass inside this church, on the altar near to the Virgin’s tomb, and during the celebration he saw several Muslims coming to manifest their veneration to the Sepulchre of the Virgin (1881: I.184–5). Almost 150 years later, the testimony of Suriano confirms this mixed attendance:
Many a time I have heard these Moslem women over that glorious tomb of our Lady say: O Holy, O Virgin, O blessed, O mother of Issa, that is, Jesus Christ, O Our Queen, O Mary we pray you that you pray to God for us. And barefooted they enter the tomb filling it with butra and other aromatic and odoriferous powders. They take it bad that we call her our mother, saying that we are unworthy of so great a queen, and that as she belonged to them the Christians were wrong in usurping her.
(Suriano 1949: 114)
It seems that the Muslims acquired some formal rights on this church. A precise drawing by Bernardino Amico, who lived in the Holy Land in the last years of the sixteenth century, shows the presence, alongside several altars belonging to various Christian denominations, of a mihrab (Amico 1620). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the French traveller Laurent D’Arvieux reports: ‘the Turks dug a sort of niche in the wall, which is used by them as a mosque, where they make their prayers’ (d’Arvieux 1735: II. 180). The sources attesting Muslim attendance at this site are reiterated during the following centuries. Even in this case, the regular frequentation of this church by Muslims has continued until contemporary times.
The deep-rooted Christian–Islamic topography of Mary is not limited to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Early modern accounts attest, for instance, that Muslims frequented the chapel of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Here two marble columns marked, according to tradition, the places where the Virgin and the angel sat at the time of the Annunciation. Both Christian and Muslim faithful passed between them and rubbed the sick parts of their bodies there (D’Arvieux, who visited the church in 1660, describes these practices).
Moreover, also outside Palestine, in the territories of the Eastern Mediterranean belonging to Islamic rulers, there has been the development, since the Middle Ages, of major Marian sites attracting a Muslim clientele. An important site of this type is the Greek Orthodox monastery of Saydnaya, approximately twenty-five kilometres from Damascus, on a peak overlooking the Damascene plain. Saydnaya was immensely popular during the Middle Ages, and attracted a great number of pilgrims. Particularly reputed was an icon of the Virgin attributed to St Luke to which many miracles were credited. The icon would grow flesh from breasts to navel and produce a perfumed liquid, with miraculous properties, which was collected and distributed to pilgrims. The veneration of the Madonna of Saydnaya was common to Greek Orthodox, Catholics, and Ethiopians. The cult of Our Lady of Saydnaya was promoted in Western Europe by the Templars and had a tremendous impact, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Several medieval accounts affirm that Muslims frequented this sanctuary in order to pray to the Virgin Mary and mention miracles concerning Muslim faithful (see Devos 1947). Burchard of Strasbourg, the envoy whom Emperor Frederick I sent to Saladin in 1175, visited Saydnaya and documented its frequentation by Muslims: ‘All Saracens of that country flock to that place on the Assumption and the Nativity of the Glorious Virgin, together with the Christians, in order to pray there. The Saracens offer there their ceremonies with utmost devotion’ (Kedar 2001: 93).
According to the European pilgrim Thetmar, who visited the sanctuary in 1217, a ruler of Damascus miraculously recovered from a disease thanks to a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Saydnaya (Meri 2002: 211). If the renown of Saydnaya became less pervasive during the early modern times, the miraculous properties of the icon continued to attract mixed crowds of pilgrims. In the seventeenth century, Laurent d’Arvieux saw that Muslims frequented the sanctuary, and that they entered ‘after being purified, as when they enter their Mosques’ (d’Arvieux 1735: II.462). Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, streams of Christian and Muslim pilgrims continued to go to Our Lady of Saydnaya. The British writer William Dalrymple, who visited the place in 1994, was impressed by a mixed ceremony he observed in the church of the monastery. While the priest was circling the altar and then the length of the church with his thurible, ‘filling the sanctuary with great clouds of incense’, several heavily bearded Muslim men ‘bobbed up and down on their prayer mats’ and some Muslim women ‘went up to the icons hanging from the pillars of the church; kissed them, then lit candles and placed them in the candelabra in front of the images’ (Dalrymple 2005: 187). During a visit in 2003 I could observe that the most important site of devotion was the small chapel near to the main church, where the miraculous icon was hidden under a profusion of silver, gold, and gems. The visitor who entered the chapel was invited to remove his shoes. The place was literally filled with icons, ex-votos, and precious gifts. Candles and oil lamps burned day and night. Christian and Muslim pilgrims, coming principally from Syria or Lebanon, carried out identical rites, mainly related to the oil collected under the image. Yet throughout recent years, the civil war has severely hindered this and other pilgrimages in Syria, and the monastery has also been damaged.
In Egypt, Christians and Muslims have jointly worshiped several sacred sites linked to the tradition of the Holy Family’s passage. The most important of these sites, Matariyeh (near Cairo), has been mentioned by Coptic, Muslim, and Catholic authors since the Middle Ages as a place where the Holy Family stayed in Egypt (Zanetti 1993). Throughout several centuries, features of the landscape have been remarked upon by chroniclers: a garden of fruit trees; the sycamore where the Virgin hid her child; balsamic trees with therapeutic virtues; a miraculous source. Burchard of Strasbourg, in 1175, related that the fountain ‘is venerated by the Saracens down to the present day, and they bring candles and incense when they wash themselves there. At Epiphany a vast number of people flock there from all confines, and wash themselves in its water’ (Kedar 2001: 89). Symon Semeonis—an Irish pilgrim who was there in 1323—was told by the Muslim guards of the place that they had witnessed several appearances of the Virgin Mary close to the source (Régnier-Bohler 1997: 987). At the end of sixteenth century, the Venetian Prospero Alpino gave several examples of Muslim devotion at this Christian holy place (Zanetti 1993: 57–59).
Through the centuries the heart of this site—and the centre of its symbolic power—was the space of the garden and the spring. Since the twelfth century, Coptic priests have celebrated Mass here using a stone near the source as an altar (Zanetti 1993: 32–9). Around 1480, Felix Fabri and Joos van Ghistele saw a rudimentary building, without a roof, enclosing the pool of miraculous water and the stone where the Virgin would have put the Infant (Fabri 1975: 385; van Ghistele 1976: 70–2). Some years later a more solid structure made of brick was erected. In the following centuries this structure (referred to by Western pilgrims as a chapel, a mosque, or the house of the Holy Family) was used by both Christians and Muslims for prayer and for bathing. It contained an altar on which Christian priests could say Mass. At the beginning of seventeenth century, one of them, Father Boucher, stated that when he was celebrating Mass there, Muslims came in to make their devotions and perform ablutions (Fedden 1944: 41). Although the cultivation of the balsam trees declined in the sixteenth century and had vanished by the seventeenth century, the garden did not disappear. It remained a place of promenade for both ordinary people and the elite during the Ottoman period. When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the religious building collapsed (Meinardus 2002: 92), the devotional interest of Christians and Muslims focused on the sycamore. That medieval tree died in the seventeenth century, but was replaced by another tree, planted in 1672 and attributed with the same virtues. This reached an imposing size but itself fell down in 1906 (Meinardus 1986: 39–40). Nowadays the site is included in modern Cairo, and has been transformed in a small museum, where it is still possible to see the remains of the ancient tree.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many important Marian sanctuaries have come into existence on the Mediterranean shores, and several of them have attracted a multi-faith clientele, including mainly Muslims. Some of these sanctuaries were born in the context of French colonial experience in North Africa, especially in Algeria, where French colonization was earlier and more intense. Since the nineteenth century, the Church’s action has been a crucial instrument in assuring the integration of newcomers into the colonial state. The country was gradually organized in an ecclesiastical grid inspired by the logic of the religious structure of the territory in Catholic Europe. Alongside the reinvention of the African past of the Algerian Church, some modern themes were also mobilized to consolidate the Catholic presence on Algerian soil and to amalgamate a population of European colons with different origins. Among these themes, the cult of the Virgin Mary, with the popularity that it manifested during the nineteenth century in Europe, had a very important role. Several new sanctuaries, sometimes linked to supernatural manifestations, were devoted to the Virgin. Some urban sanctuaries (such as Our Lady of Santa Cruz in Oran) and rural chapels (e.g. in Misserghin) acquired a great reputation. Their influence soon went beyond the Christian sphere, as they also attracted several Muslim faithful. Yet the paramount efforts to establish a Marian sacred geography were concentrated in the capital of the colony. The most conspicuous result of this endeavour was the creation of the sanctuary of Our Lady of Africa in Algiers (Albera 2014).
Located in the upper part of the town, in a panoramic position, the huge sanctuary of Our Lady of Africa is a central element in the urban landscape of Algeria’s capital. The imposing edifice was inaugurated in 1872, and immediately attracted a large number of pilgrims. Many episodes of miraculous healing occurred in the sanctuary and thousands of votive offerings were accumulated in the space of just a few years. Moreover a multi-faith attendance is clearly attested to in the 1880s by a book on the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Africa in Algiers, where it is stated that both Muslim and Jewish women used to visit the sanctuary, where they accomplished devotional actions: ‘Many times Muslim women came to light candles before the statue of the Immaculate Virgin, and Jewish women were to ask for their children, and this repeatedly, the strings of the Virgin Mary, blessed by the chaplains of Our Lady of Africa’ (see Albera 2014: 110–111).
Indeed, Muslims frequented the basilica throughout all of the twentieth century. Our Lady of Africa became a very popular figure in Algiers, where she was often defined as ‘Lalla Africa’ or ‘Madame l’Afrique’. These inter-faith practices linked to Mary resisted the war of independence, the rise of Islamism, and the civil war of the 1990s. In this violent context, in which the populations of European origin almost entirely abandoned the country, several Christian buildings were damaged or transformed into mosques. Yet, even in the most dangerous moments of the 1990s, several Muslims continued their devotions to Our Lady of Africa. Overhanging Bâb el-Oued, a ‘sensitive’ district, Our Lady of Africa is still among the most important places of pilgrimage in the Algerian capital. Every year, dozens of thousands people visited it, and the great majority are Muslims. Gifts of different natures (money, flowers, small cakes, carpets) are brought to the sanctuary for wishes to be fulfilled, and it is possible to see, inside the church, ex-votos and prayer slips left by Muslims (Albera 2014: 114–119).
On another shore of the sea, near Ephesus, the Catholic sanctuary of the House of the Virgin has become a paramount inter-religious place of pilgrimage. According to an ancient tradition, Mary would have followed the apostle John to Ephesus. In the late nineteenth century, this tradition has materialized in the creation of a shrine, with a quite peculiar procedure. At the beginning of that century, the German mystic Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824) had a number of visions on the life of Jesus and Mary, later published by the poet Clemens Brentano. In this framework she gave a precise description of the site where the Virgin Mary would have lived near Ephesus. In the 1890s a group of French priests ‘discovered’ a site consistent with the revelations of the German mystic, and corresponding to the ruins of a Greek Orthodox chapel. The members of the Catholic Church were able to acquire the land around this site. The chapel was restored and since 1896 it has become a pilgrimage centre, experiencing a consistent growth in the following years, also attracting Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and Protestants. Yet the destruction and the troubles generated by the First World War, and the war between Greece and Turkey (1919–22), brought about a prolonged crisis for this pilgrimage (Pénicaud 2016: 168–171).
From 1950, the sanctuary experienced renewed success, in the wake of the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption by the Pope in that year. The chapel—which could be considered as the second possible site (after the Church of the Tomb of Mary in Jerusalem) where this phenomenon occurred—was restored and a new road was built to permit easier access to the shrine. Since the beginnings of this new period of increasing prosperity of the pilgrimage, it is possible to note a Muslim attendance. By 1959 there were already reports of miraculous healing of Muslims after a visit to the shrine. This Muslim presence at the shrine seemed to be preponderant by this time. According to the information given by the journal of the sanctuary, in 1960 the pilgrimage for the Feast of the Assumption saw the coming together of two thousand Muslims and six hundred Catholics (Pénicaud 2016: 174). The trend has been confirmed in the following decades, when the House of the Virgin has continued to attract considerable crowds of Muslim faithful. Every year hundreds of thousands of Muslims attend this shrine and in the small chapel it is even possible to see some of them praying prostrate (Pénicaud 2016: 178).
Another major pilgrimage site is the shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon, which was erected during the first decade of the twentieth century in the village of Harissa. The decision to build this sanctuary was taken in 1904 by Maronite and Catholic authorities in order to commemorate fifty years since the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Since 1908 a gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary has surmounted the shrine, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in the proximity of Beirut. The pilgrimage has experienced a growing success, becoming the most popular in the country. In the second part of the twentieth century, a number of churches (including a gigantic basilica) have been built on the site to accommodate the numerous faithful who attend the shrine. A few years ago the clergy in charge of the shrine estimated that the yearly number of pilgrims was around two million. Muslims coming from the Lebanon, but also from Iran and Syria, represented a significant proportion of the latter. There one can see Muslim women, wrapped in their long black clothes, lighting candles or climbing on the base of the immense statue of the Virgin overhanging the sea.
The long civil war (1975–90) which opposed the various Lebanese factions, often along religious divides, did not put an end to devotional porosity. In spite of the ferocity of the battles and the massacres, even today there are numerous shrines attended by different religious communities (Farra-Haddad 2010). Besides Harissa, there are other Marian shrines that are also frequented by Lebanese Muslims of different denominations, such as the monastery of Saïdet-en-Nourié in the region of Tripoli and the sanctuary of Saïdet-el-Mantara near Sidon. A massive display of mixed devotion has taken place since 2004 in Bechouate, a village in the Bekaa Valley, after a miraculous manifestation of the Virgin Mary (Aubin-Boltanski 2008). A Jordanian Muslim child was visiting, with his parents, a church (attended by Muslim worshippers over several centuries), and saw a statue of the Virgin become animated. The church was immediately submerged under a wave of devotion, and according to local clergy nearly a million pilgrims (Catholic and Orthodox Christians as well as Shiites, Sunnis, and Druze) had visited it by the end of 2004. A series of miraculous cures occurred, several of which concerned Muslims (including the father of the Jordanian child). One could see Muslims making their prostrations on carpets inside the church. The pilgrimage rapidly became a symbol of national unity in a context marked by shared opposition to the Syrian occupation of parts of Lebanon, including the Bekaa valley (Aubin-Boltanski 2008, 2010).
In Egypt also, several miraculous phenomena have been the origin of contemporary multi-faith Marian pilgrimages. In the last fifty years, the cult of Mary has been reinvigorated by a series of apparitions of the Virgin, generally on the roof of Coptic churches. This series started in Zaytûn, a district on the periphery of Cairo, where the Virgin manifested herself repeatedly between 1968 and 1970 (Voile 2004; Keriakos 2012). Hundreds of thousands of people claimed to have seen her. In 1968 the first to distinguish the luminous image of the Virgin on the roof of the Zaytûn church were a group of Muslims who were working in the vicinity. Immense crowds of Christians and Muslims gathered in subsequent months around the church, hoping to see the Virgin. Several Muslims claimed to have benefited from the Virgin’s miracle. Between 1968 and 1970 the Coptic weekly newspaper Watani published some seven hundred accounts of miraculous healing linked to the Virgin: about 8 per cent of these concerned Muslim faithful (Keriakos 2012: 182). Moreover, several recent pilgrimages attracting a number of Muslim devotees converge towards places of more recent apparitions of the Virgin: Shubra in the 1980s, the church of St Mark in Assiut in 2000–01, and Giza in 2009 (Keriakos 2012; Heo 2013). More generally, Muslim faithful attend several important Marian pilgrimages in Egypt, such as in Dayr Dronkah, Gabal al-Tayr, or Musturud (Samir 1987; Meinardus 1996; Mayeur-Jaouen 2012).
The pilgrimages that I have mentioned show that a tight web of relations between Christians and Muslims has developed around the figure of Mary in the Mediterranean. These inter-faith pilgrimages have a considerable chronological span and are still present today. I have mostly focused on main shrines, but in fact it would be possible to consider hundreds of minor sites, which make even denser the texture of the Islamo-Christian relationship at Marian sanctuaries. Often these less important shared sites were situated in peripheral locations, and immersed in natural settings—the vicinity of trees and wells, or mountaintops—and understandably have left fewer traces of their existence. Even now, there are peripheral Marian sites that are frequented by Muslims in different regions around the Mediterranean Sea (see for instance the shrines described in Bowman 1993; Farra-Haddad 2010; Albera 2012a).
As a whole, Muslims utilize Christian religious structures in order to manifest their devotion for Mary. It is true that this figure is evoked in many mosques, where the verses of the sura 3 of the Qur’an recounting Mary’s life inside the Temple are frequently reproduced as a decoration of the mirhabs (also because the term mirhab occurs precisely in this passage). But these references to Mary do not operate as material support for a specific devotion. Moreover, the Oratory of Mary and the Cradle of Jesus in Jerusalem’s Haram el Sharif have been the magnets of particular pilgrimages and prayers. But, in spite of the symbolic importance of these places, the attraction that they have exerted is minor if compared with that of hundreds of Christian Marian sanctuaries frequented over the centuries by countless Muslim faithful.
A general overview shows an imbalance in the distribution in space and time of these phenomena throughout the Mediterranean. Mixed devotional practices are well established and recurring in the eastern and southern Mediterranean. Generally speaking, this area has retained a kaleidoscope of peoples and religions. Given that, historically, Muslim attendance at Marian shrines is mainly attested in the territories controlled by Muslims, this behaviour could also be related to a dominant position, which permitted people to enter the holy places of other religions.
In some respect, Muslim pilgrimage at Marian shrines could be assimilated to a form of ziyara (pious visitation) that Muslims have always paid to the tomb of their saints. For several centuries, for example, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was part of the habitual circuit of Muslim pilgrims around Jerusalem, along with Muslim shrines. Yet the hybrid nature of the practices that accompanied these Marian pilgrimages could easily be considered as ‘impious’ and ‘heretical’ by the rigorists. The prototypical dogmatist sentinel of the purity of the Islamic cult, Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), even conceived an attempt to destroy the icon of Saydnaya (Garosi 2015).
The prolonged interaction with Christian material infrastructures at Marian shrines has generated a number of symbolic adjustments and alterations with respect to normative Islamic practices. In general, from the point of view of the ritual acts accomplished by the Muslim faithful at Marian shrines, it is possible to distinguish three broad modalities. First, the main channel that drives their ritual behaviour, and that is apparently largely shared with Christian faithful, derives from a common repertoire of concrete, ‘tactile’ piety. Examples of this are ingesting fragments of rock or marble powder for health or fertility, rubbing the sick parts of the bodies on church columns, filling a tomb with aromatic powders, venerating sacred trees, bathing together in miraculous water, manipulating candles, votive offerings, strings, and so on. These practices belong to a common vernacular lexicon, which could be defined as infra-religious, because it is largely circulating among different religious groups, and is independent from theological and symbolic distinctions between them. Second, at Marian sanctuaries Muslims sometimes directly use some semiotic resources strictly belonging to Christian tradition (as architecture, statues, and paintings). This may imply an ‘imitation’ of some Christian ritual forms, such as touching the icons, or praying in front of a painting or a statue of the Virgin Mary, kneeling before the altar, collecting a sacred oil exuding from a relic or a sacred image. A third tendency might be called ‘distortion’: some gestures are borrowed from the typical Muslim repertoire and inserted into a Christian framework, generally inside a church. Examples of this are the adoption of corporal postures linked to Muslim prayer (including the recitation of the formal Muslim prayer bobbing up and down on prayer mats and facing the direction of Mecca), and entering a church barefooted or after practising ablution.
In rare cases some material elements of the Islamic cult may penetrate inside a Marian sanctuary. We have seen two examples in which Muslims exerted formal rights from this point of view. In both the Church of the Nativity and in the Church of the Tomb of Mary a section of the shrine was reserved for the Muslim cult. The presence of a mihrab sanctioned this appropriation, which seems stronger in Bethlehem, in the centuries before the Crusades, than in the Church of the Tomb of Mary during the early modern period. Moreover, there was also a production of narratives that corroborated Muslim claims, linked to pivotal figures like Mohammed and Omar. In both cases this ‘intrusion’ was partial and ephemeral. In other words, it was neither the first step of a complete separation of the space, nor a preliminary act of an appropriation of the whole place by the Muslims.
As a whole, it is impossible to define a gender identity for the protagonists of these cross-faith pilgrimages under the aegis of Mary. Muslim women have often been seeking the protection and help of this quintessential maternal figure, especially for concerns linked to fertility, motherhood, and infancy. But a feminine predominance among Mary’s Muslim faithful does not exclude the fact that many men have been (and are) likewise involved in these pilgrimages. With regard to the sociological profile of the pilgrims, it is also impossible to generalize. On the one hand, several testimonies suggest that popular classes are prevalent among Muslim pilgrims at Marian shrines, but, on the other hand, this is not exclusive, and there are sources attesting the recurrent presence of elite members among them.
On the Christian side, missionary strategies have contributed to the development of these inter-faith pilgrimages. The presence of the devotion for Mary among Muslims is an old topos among Christian authors, and since the Middle Ages this has been seen as a tool for their conversion (as, for instance, in some episodes of the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Marìa). Yet the phenomena of conversion seem to be rare and not intrinsically related to the attendance at Marian shrines. In general, Muslims were attracted by the spiritual magnetism of certain Marian holy places and neither worried very much about theological distinctions and dogmatic boundaries, nor considered the possibility of a formal conversion.
During the twentieth century there has been a considerable incrementation of the Muslim population on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, where it is now possible to find cases of Muslim attendance at Marian sanctuaries. In Marseilles, the ecumenical symbol of the city’s identity, the sanctuary of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, welcomes pious visits by Muslims. The same phenomenon occurs on the outskirts of Nimes, in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Santa Cruz (Albera 2012b). Similarly, some Marian high places such as Lourdes and Fatima also attract a number of Muslim pilgrims. In the same century, the clash of bellicose nationalisms has definitively altered the ethnic and religious profile of the southern and eastern Mediterranean through a process of homogenization that put an end to centuries of coexistence, and made interreligious sharing more difficult. The construction of a religious-based nationalism led to a new rigidity on the Muslim side, accompanied by the development of fundamentalist tendencies influenced by salafiyya and by Wahhabism. Nevertheless, even in this highly problematic context, in many cases the figure of Mary still constitutes a crucial bridge between Christianity and Islam, despite political and religious tensions.