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The Cultural Landscape Chapter 6: Religion
Religion
The passage from the Bible, the holiest book of Christianity and Judaism, is one of the most eloquent pleas for peace among the nations of the world.
For many religious people, especially in the Western Hemisphere and Europe, Isaiah evokes a highly attractive image of the ideal future landscape.
Islam’s holiest book, the Quran, also evokes powerful images of a peaceful landscape.
Most religious people pray for peace, but religious groups may not share the same vision of how peace will be achieved.
Geographers see that the process by which one religion diffuses across the landscape may conflict with the distribution of others.
Geographers are concerned with the regional distribution of different religions and the resulting potential for conflict.
Geographers also observe that religions are derived in part from elements of the physical environments and that religions, in turn, modify the landscape.
Religion interests geographers because it is essential for understanding how humans occupy Earth.
The predominant religion varies among regions of the world, as well as among regions within North America.
Geographers document the places where various religions are located in the world and offer explanations for why some religions have widespread distributions and others are highly clustered in particular places.
To understand why some religions occupy more space than others, geographers must look at differences among practices of various faiths.
Geographers study spatial connections in religion: the distinctive place of origin of religions, the extent of diffusion of religions from their places of origin, the processes by which religions diffused to other locations, and the religious practices and beliefs that lead some religions to have more widespread distributions.
Geographers find the tension in scale between globalization and local diversity especially acute in religion for a number of reasons:
People care deeply about their religion and draw from religion their core values and beliefs, an essential element of the definition of culture.
Some religions are actually designed to appeal to people throughout the world, whereas other religions are designed to appeal primarily to people in geographically limited areas.
Religious values are important in understanding not only how people identify themselves, as was the case with language, but also the meaningful ways that they organize the landscape.
Most (though not all) religions require exclusive adherence, so adopting a global religion usually requires turning away from traditional local religion.
In contrast, people can learn a globally important language such as English and a the same time still speak the language of their local culture.
Like language, migrants take their religion with them to new locations, but although migrants typically learn the language of the new location, they retain their religion.
This chapter starts by describing the distribution of major religions, then in the second section explains why some religions have diffused widely and others have not.
As a major facet of culture, religion leaves a strong imprint on the physical environment, as discussed in the third section of the chapter.
Religion, like other cultural characteristics, can be a source of pride and a means of identification with a distinct culture.
Unfortunately, intense identification with one religion can lead adherents into conflict with followers of other religions, as discussed in the fourth key issue of the chapter.
KEY ISSUE 1 - Where Are Religions Distributed?
Only a few religions can claim the adherence of large numbers of people.
Each of these faiths has a distinctive distribution across Earth’s surface.
Geographers distinguish two types of religions: universalizing and ethnic.
A universalizing religion attempts to be global, to appeal to all people, wherever they may live in the world, not just to those of one culture or location.
An ethnic religion appeals primarily to one group of people living in one place.
This section examines the world’s three main universalizing religions and some representative ethnic religions.
Universalizing Religions
According to Adherents.com, about 58 percent of the world’s population practice a universalizing religion, 26 percent an ethnic religion, and 16 percent no religion.
The three main universalizing religions are Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
Each of the three is divided into branches, denominations, and sects.
A branch is a large and fundamental division within a religion.
A denomination is a division of a branch that unites a number of local congregations in a single legal and administrative body.
A set is a relatively small group that has broken away from an established denomination.
Statistics on the number of followers of religions, branches, and denominations can be controversial.
Christianity
Christianity has more than 2 billion adherents, far more than any other world religion, and has the most widespread distribution.
It is the predominant religion in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia, and countries with a Christian majority exist in Africa and Asia as well.
BRANCHES OF CHRISTIANITY.
Christianity has three major branches—Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox.
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Roman Catholics comprise 51 percent of the world’s Christians, Protestants 24 percent, and Orthodox 11 percent.
In addition, 14 percent of Christians belong to churches that do not consider themselves within one of these three branches.
Within Europe, Roman Catholicism is the dominant Christian branch in the southwest and east, Protestantism in the northwest, and Orthodoxy in the east and southeast.
The regions of Roman Catholic and Protestant majorities frequently have sharp boundaries, even when they run through the middle of countries.
The orthodox branch of Christianity (often called Eastern Orthodox) is a collection of 14 self-governing churches in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
More than 40 percent of all Orthodox Christians belong to one of these 14—the Russian Orthodox Church.
Christianity came to Russia in the tenth century, and the Russian Orthodox Church was established in the sixteenth century.
Nine of the other 13 self-governing churches were established in the nineteenth or twentieth century.
The largest of these 9, the Romanian Church, includes 20 percent of all Eastern Orthodox Christians.
The Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian Orthodox churches have approximately 10 percent each,
The other 5 recently established Orthodox churches—Albania, Cyprus, Georgia, Poland, and Sinai—combined have about 2 percent of all Orthodox Christians.
The remaining 4 of the 14 Eastern Orthodox churches—Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—trace their origins to the earliest days of Christianity.
They have a combined membership of about 3 percent of all Orthodox Christians.
CHRISTIANITY IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.
The overwhelming percentage of people living in the Western Hemisphere—nearly 90 percent—are Christian.
About 5 percent belong to other religions, and the remaining 6 percent profess adherence to no religion.
A fairly sharp boundary exists within the Western Hemisphere in the predominant branches of Christianity.
Roman Catholics compromise 93 percent of Christians in Latin America, compared with 40 percent in North America.
Within North America, Roman Catholics are clustered in the southwestern and northeastern United States and the Canadian province of Quebec.
Protestant churches have approximately 82 million members or about 28 percent of the US population over age 5.
Baptist churches have the largest number of adherents in the United States, about 37 million combined over age 5.
Membership in some Protestant churches varies by region of the United States.
SMALLER BRANCHES OF CHRISTIANITY.
Several other Christian churches developed independently of the three main branches.
Many of these Christian communities were isolated from others at an early point in the development of the Christian party because of differences in doctrine and partly as a result of Islamic control of intervening territory in Southeast Asia and North Africa.
Two small Christian churches survive in northeast Africa—the Coptic Church of Egypt and the Ethiopian Church.
The Ethiopian Church, with perhaps 10 million adherents, split from the Egyptian Coptic Church in 1948, although it traces its roots to the fourth century, when two shipwrecked Christians, who were taken as slaves, ultimately converted the Ethiopian king to Christianity.
The Armenian Church originated in Antioch, Syria, and was important in diffusing Christianity to South and East Asia between the seventh and thirteenth centuries.
Despite the small number of adherents, the Armenian Church, like other small sects, plays a significant role in regional conflicts.
The Maronites are another example of a small Christian sect that plays a disproportionately prominent role in political unrest.
They are cultured in Lebanon, which has suffered through a long civil war fought among religious groups.
In the United States, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) regard their church as a branch of Christianity separate from other branches.
About 3 percent of Americans are members of the Latter-day Saints, and a large percentage is cultured in Utah and surrounding states.
Islam
Islam, the religion of 1.3 billion people, is the predominant religion in the Middle East from North Africa to Central Asia.
Half of the world’s Muslims live in four countries outside the Middle East—Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.
The word Islam in Arabic means “submission to the will of God,” and it has a similar root to the Arabic word for peace.
An adherent of the religion of Islam is known as a Muslim, which in Arabic means “one who surrenders to God.”
The core of Islamic belief is represented by the five pillars of faith.
There is no god worthy of worship except for the one God, the source of all creation and Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Five times daily, a Muslim prays, facing the city of Makkah (Mecca), as a direct link to God.
A Muslim gives generously to charity as an act of purification and growth.
A Muslim fasts during the month of Ramadan as an act of self-purification.
If physically and financially able, a Muslim makes a pilgrimage to Makkah.
BRANCHES OF ISLAM.
Islam is divided into two important branches, Sunni and Shiite (sometimes written Shia in English).
Sunnis compromise 83 percent of Muslims and are the largest branch in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia.
The word Sunni comes from the Arabic for “people following the example of Muhammad.”
Shiites comprise 16 percent of Muslims, clustered in a handful of countries.
Nearly 30 percent of all Shiites live in Iran, 15 percent in Pakistan, and 10 percent in Iraq.
Shiites compromise nearly 90 percent of the population in Iran and more than half of the population in Azerbaijan, Iraq, and the less populous countries of Oman and Bahrain.
The word Shiite comes from the Arabic word for “sectarian.”
ISLAM IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE.
The Muslim population of North America and Europe has increased rapidly in recent years.
Estimates of the number of Muslims in North America vary widely, from 1 million to 5 million, but in any event, it has increased from only a few hundred thousand in 1990.
In Europe, Muslims account for 5 percent of the population.
France has the largest Muslim population, about 4 million, a legacy of immigration from predominantly Muslim former colonies in North Africa.
Islam also has a presence in the United States through the Nation of Islam, also known as Black Muslims, founded in Detroit in 1930 and led for more than 40 years by Elijah Muhammad, who called himself “the messenger of Allah.”
Black Muslims lived austerely and advocated a separate autonomous nation within the United States for their adherents.
Buddhism
Buddhism, the third of the world’s major universalizing religions, has nearly 400 million adherents, who are mainly found in China and Southeast Asia.
The foundation of Buddhism is represented by these concepts, known as the Four Noble Truths:
All living beings must endure suffering.
Suffering, which is caused by a desire to live, leads to reincarnation (repeated rebirth in new bodies or forms of life).
The goal of all existence is to escape from suffering and the endless cycle of reincarnation into Nirvana (a state of complete redemption), which is achieved through mental and moral self-purification.
Nirvana is attained through an Eightfold Path, which includes rightness of belief, resolve, speech, action, livelihood, effort, thought, and meditation.
Like the other two universalizing religions, Buddhism split into more than one branch, as followers disagreed on interpreting statements by the founder, Siddhartha Gautama.
The three main branches are Mahayana, Theravada, and Tantrayana.
Mahayanaists account for about 56 percent of Buddhists, primarily, in China, Japan, and Korea.
Therapists comprise about 38 percent of Buddhists especially in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
The remaining 6 percent are Tantrayanists, found primarily in Tibet and Mongolia.
An accurate count of Buddhists is especially difficult because only a few people participate in Buddhist institutions.
Religious functions are performed primarily by monks rather than by the general public.
The number of Buddhists is also difficult to count because Buddhism, although a universalizing religion differs in significant respects from the Western concept of a formal religious system.
Someone can be both a Buddhist and a believer in other Eastern religions, whereas Christianity and Islam both require exclusive adherence.
Most Buddhists in China and Japan, in particular, believe at the same time in an ethnic religion.
Other Universalizing Religions
Sikhism and Baha’i are the two universalizing religions other than Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism with the largest number of adherents.
There an estimated 23 million Sikhs and 7 million Baha’is.
All but 3 million Sikhs are clustered in the Punjab region of India; Baha’is are dispersed among many countries, primarily in Africa and Asia.
Sikhism’s first guru (religious teacher or enlightener) was Nanak (1469-1538), who lived in a village near the city of Lahore, in present-day Pakistan.
God was revealed to Guru Nanak as The One Supreme Being, or Creator, who rules the universe by divine will.
Only God is perfect, but people have the capacity for continual improvement and movement toward perfection by taking individual responsibility for their deeds and actions on Earth, such as heartfelt, adoration, devotion, and surrender to the one God Sikhism’s most important ceremony, introduced by the tenth guru, Gobind Singh (1666-1708), is the Amrit (or Baptism), in which Sikhs declare they will uphold the principles of the faith.
Gobind Singh also introduced the practice of men wearing turbans on their heads and never cutting their beards or hair.
Wearing a uniform give Sikhs a disciplined outlook and a sense of unity of purpose.
The Baha’i religion is even more recent than Sikhism.
It grew out of the Babi faith, which was founded in Shiraz, Iran, in 1844 by Siyyid ‘Ali Muhammad, known as the Bab (Persian for “gateway”).
Baha’is believe that one of Bab’s disciples, Husayn ‘Ali Nuri, known as Baha’u’llah (Arabic for “Glory of God”), was the prophet and messenger of God. Baha’u’llah’s function was to overcome the disunity of religions and establish a universal faith through the abolition of racial, class, and religious prejudices.
Ethnic Religions
The ethnic religion with by far the largest number of followers is Hinduism.
With 900 million adherents, Hinduism is the world’s third-largest religion, behind Christianity and Islam.
Ethnic religions in Asia and Africa comprise most of the remainder.
Hinduism
Ethnic religions typically have more clustered distributions than do universalizing religions.
Hinduism is the world’s third-largest religion, but 97 percent of Hindus are concentrated in one country, India, and most of the remainder can be found in India’s neighbor Nepal.
Hindus comprise more than 80 percent of the population of these two countries and a small minority in every other country.
A rigid approach to theological matters is not central to Hinduism.
Hindus believe that it is up to the individual to decide the best way to worship God.
Various paths to reach God include the path of knowledge, the path of renunciation, the path of devotion, and the path of action.
You can pursue your own path and follow your own convictions as long as they are in harmony with your true nature.
You are responsible for your own actions and you alone suffer the consequences.
Because people start from different backgrounds and experiences, the appropriate form of worship for any two individuals may not be the same.
Hinduism does not have a central authority or a single holy book, so each individual selects suitable rituals.
If one person practices Hinduism in a particular way, other Hindus will not think that the individual has made a mistake or strayed from orthodox doctrine.
The average Hindu has allegiance to a particular god or concept within a broad range of possibilities.
The manifestation of God with the largest number of adherents-an estimated 70 percent-is Vaishnavism, which worships the god Vishnu, a loving god incarnated as Krishna.
An estimated 26 percent adhere to Sivaism, dedicated to Siva, a protective and destructive god.
Shaktism is a form of worship dedicated to the female consorts of Vishnu and Siva.
Although these and other deities and approaches are supported throughout India, some geographic concentration exists: Siva and Shakti are concentrated in the north Shakti and Vishnu in the east’ Vishnu in the west; and Siva, along with some Vishnu, in the south.
However, holy places for Siva and Vishnu are dispersed throughout India.
Other Ethnic Religions
Several hundred million people practice ethnic religions in East Asia, especially in China and Japan.
The coexistence of Buddhism with these ethnic religions in East Asia differs from the Western concept of exclusive religious belief.
Confucianism and Daoism are often distinguished as separate ethnic religions in China, but many Chinese consider themselves both Buddhists and either Confucian, Daoist, or some other Chinese ethnic religion.
Buddhism does not compete for adherents with Confucianism, Daoism, and other ethnic religions in China because many Chinese accept the teachings of both universalizing and ethnic religions.
Such a commingling of diverse philosophies is not totally foreign to Americans.
The tenets of Christianity or Judaism, the wisdom of the ancient Greek philosophers, and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence can all be held dear without doing a grave injustice to the others.
CONFUCIANISM.
Confucius (551-479 BC) was a philosopher and teacher in the Chinese province of Lu.
His sayings, which were recorded by his students, emphasized the importance of the ancient Chinese tradition of Ii, which can be translated roughly as "'propriety" or "correct behavior."
Confucianism is an ethnic religion because of its especially strong rooting in traditional values of special importance to Chinese people.
Confucianism prescribed a series of ethical principles for the orderly conduct of daily life in China, such as following traditions, fulfilling obligations, and treating others with sympathy and respect.
These rules applied to CHinas rulers as well as to their subjects.
DAOISM (TAOISM).
Lao-Zi (604-531? BC, also spelled Lao Tse), a contemporary of Confucius, organized Daoism.
Although a government administrator by profession, Lao-Zi’s writings emphasized the mystical and magical aspects of life rather than the importance of public service which Confucius had emphasized.
Daoists seek dao (or tao), which means the "way" or “path.”
A virtuous person draws power (de or le) from being absorbed in dao.
Daoism split into many sects, some acting like secret societies, and followers embraced elements of magic.
The religion was officially banned by the Communists after they took control of China in 1949, but it is still practiced in China, and it is legal in Taiwan.
SHINTOISM.
Since ancient times, Shintoism has been the distinctive ethnic religion of Japan.
Ancient Shintoists considered forces of nature to be divine, especially the Sun and Moon, as well as rivers, trees, rocks, mountains, and certain animals.
Under the reign of Emperor Meiji (1868-1912), Shintoiums became the official state religion, and the emperor was regarded as divine.
Shintoism, therefore, was as much a political cult as a religion, and in a cultural sense, all Japanese were Shintoists.
Shintoism still thrives in Japan, although no longer as the official state religion.
JUDAISM.
Around one-third of the world’s 14 million Jews live in the United States, one-third in Israel, and one-third in the rest of the world.
Within the United States, Jews are heavily concentrated in large cities, especially in the New York metropolitan area.
Judaism plays a more substantial role in Western civilization than its number of adherents would suggest because two of the three main universalizing religions—Christianity and Islam—find some of their roots in Judaism.
Jesus was born a Jew, and Muhammad traced his ancestry to Abraham.
Judaism is an ethnic religion based in the lands bordering the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, called Canaan in the Bible, Palestine by the Romans, and the State of Israel since 1948.
About 4,000 years ago Abraham, considered the patriarch or father of Judaism, migrated from present-day Iraq to Canaan, along a route known as the Fertile Crescent.
The Bible recounts the ancient history of the Jewish people.
Fundamental to Judaism is the belief in one all-powerful God.
It was the first recorded religion to espouse monotheism, the belief that there is only one God.
Judaism offered a sharp contrast to the polytheism practiced by neighboring people, who worshipped a collection of gods.
The name Judaism derives from Judah, one of the patriarch Jacob’s 12 sons: Israel is another biblical name for Jacob.
ETHNIC AFRICAN RELIGIONS.
Approximately 100 million Africans, 12 percent of the continent’s people. follow traditional ethnic religions, sometimes called animism.
Animists believe that such inanimate objects as plants and stones, or such natural events as thunderstorms and earthquakes, are “animated,” or have discrete spirits and conscious life.
Relatively little is known about African religions because few holy books or other written documents have come down from ancestors.
As recently as 1980, some 200 million Africans—half the population of the region at the time—were classified as animists.
Some atlases and textbooks persist in classifying Africa as predominantly animist, even though the actual percentage is small and declining.
The rapid decline of animists in Africa has been caused by increases in the numbers of Christians and Muslims.
Africa is now 46 percent Christian—split about evenly among Roman, Catholic, Protestant, and others—and another 40 percent are Muslims.
KEY ISSUE 2 - Why Do Religions Have Different Distributions?
We can identify several major geographical differences between universalizing and ethnic religions.
These differences include the locations where the religions originated, the processes by which they diffused from their place of origin to other regions, the types of places that are considered holy, the calendar dates identified as important holidays, and attitudes toward modifying the physical environment.
Origin of Religions
Universalizing religions have precise places of origin based on events in the life of a man.
Ethnic religions have unknown or unclear origins, not tied to single historical individuals.
Origin of Universalizing Religions
Each of the three universalizing religions can be traced to the actions and teachings of a man who lived since the start of recorded history.
The beginnings of Buddhism go back about 2,500 years, Christianity 2,000 years, and Islam 1,500 years.
Specific events also led to the division of the universalizing religions into branches.
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY.
Christianity was founded upon the teachings of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem between Band 4 B.C. and died on a cross in Jerusalem about A.D. 30.
Raised as a Jew, Jesus gathered a small band of disciples and preached the coming of the Kingdom of God.
The four Gospels of the Christian Bible—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—documented miracles and extraordinary deeds that Jesus performed.
He was referred to as Christ, from the Greek word for the Hebrew word messiah, which means "anointed."
In the third year of his mission, Jesus was betrayed to the authorities by one of his companions, Judas Iscariot.
After sharing the Last Supper (the Jewish Passover seder) with his disciples in Jerusalem, Jesus was arrested and put to death as an agitator.
On the third day after his death, his tomb was found empty.
Christians believe that Jesus died to atone for human sins, that he was raised from the dead by God, and that his Resurrection from the dead provides people with hope for salvation.
Roman Catholics accept the teachings of the Bible, as well as the interpretation of those teachings by the Church hierarchy, headed by the Pope.
According to Roman Catholic belief, God conveys His grace directly to humanity through seven sacraments, including Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and the Eucharist (the partaking of bread and wine that repeats the actions of Jesus at the Last Supper).
Roman Catholics believe that the Eucharist literally and miraculously becomes the body and blood of Jesus while keeping only the appearances of bread and wine, an act known as transubstantiation.
Orthodoxy comprises the faith and practices of a collection of churches that arose in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.
The split between the Roman and Eastern churches dates to the fifth century, as a result of rivalry between the Pope of Rome and the Patriarchy of Constantinople, which was especially intense after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Orthodox Christians accepted the seven sacraments but rejected doctrines that the Roman Catholic Church had added since the eighth century.
Protestantism originated with the principles of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
The Reformation movement is regarded as beginning when Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted 95 theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.
According to Luther, individuals had the primary responsibility for achieving personal salvation through direct communication with God.
Grace is achieved through faith rather than through sacraments performed by the Church.
ORIGIN OF ISLAM.
Islam traces its origin to the same narrative as Judaism and Christianity.
All three religions consider Adam to have been the first man and Abraham to have been one of his descendants.
According to the Biblical narrative, Abraham married Sarah, who did not bear children.
As polygamy was a custom of the culture, Abraham then married Hagar, who bore a son, Ishmael.
However, Sarah's fortunes changed, and she bore a son, Isaac.
Sarah then successfully prevailed upon Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael.
Jews and Christians trace their story through Abraham's original wife Sarah and her son Isaac.
Muslims trace their story through his second wife Hagar and her son Ishmael.
After their banishment, Ishmael and Hagar wandered through the Arabian desert, eventually reaching Makkah (spelled Mecca on many English-language maps), in present-day Saudi Arabia.
Centuries later, according to the Muslim narrative, one of Ishmael's descendants, Muhammad, became the Prophet of Islam.
Muhammad was born in Makkah about 570.
At age 40, while engaged in a meditative retreat, Muhammad is believed by Muslims to have received his first revelation from God through the Angel Gabriel.
The Quran, the holiest book in Islam, is accepted by Muslims to be a record of God's words as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through Gabriel.
Arabic is the lingua franca, or the language of communication, within the Muslim world, because it is the language in which the Quran is written.
Islam teaches that as he began to preach the truth that God had revealed to him, Muhammad suffered persecution, and in 622 he was commanded by God to emigrate.
His migration from Makkah to the city of Yathrib—an event known as the Hijra (from the Arabic word for "migration," sometimes spelled hegira)—marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.
Yathrib was subsequently renamed Madinah, Arabic for "the City of the Prophet.”
After several years, Muhammad and his followers returned to Makkah and established Islam as the city's religion.
By Muhammad’s death, in 632 at about age 63, the armies of Islam controlled most of present-day Saudi Arabia.
Differences between the two main branches—Shiites and Sunnis—go back to the earliest days of Islam and basically reflect disagreement over the line of succession in Islamic leadership.
Muhammad had no surviving son and no follower of comparable leadership ability.
His successor was his father-in-law Abu Bakr (573-634), an early supporter of Makkah, who became known as caliph ("successor of the prophet").
The next two caliphs, Umar (634-644) and Uthman (644-656) expanded the territory under Muslim influence to Egypt and Persia.
Uthman was a member of a powerful Makkah clan that had initially opposed Muhammad before the clan's conversion to Islam.
More zealous Muslims criticized Uthman for seeking compromises with other formerly pagan families in Makkah.
Uthman's opponents found a leader in Ali (600?- 661), a cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, and thus Muhammad’s nearest male heir.
When Uthman was murdered, in 656. Ali became caliph, although five years later, he, too. was assassinated.
Ali's descendants claim leadership of Islam, and Shiites support his claim.
But Shiites disagree among themselves about the precise line of succession from Ali to modem times.
During the 1970s both the shah (king) of Iran and an ayatollah (religious scholar) named Khomeini claimed to be the divinely appointed interpreter of Islam for the Shiites.
ORIGIN OF BUDDHISM.
The founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama, was born about 563 B.C. in Lumbini in present-day Nepal, near the border with India, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from Varanasi (Benares).
The son of a lord, he led a privileged existence sheltered from life's hardships.
Gautama had a beautiful wife. palaces, and servants.
According to Buddhist legend, Gautama's life changed after a series of four trips.
He encountered a decrepit old man on the first trip, a disease-ridden man on the second trip, and a corpse on the third trip.
After witnessing these scenes of pain and suffering, Gautama began to feel he could no longer enjoy his life of comfort and security.
Then, on a fourth trip, Gautama saw a monk, who taught him about withdrawal from the world
At age 29 Gautama left his palace one night and lived in a forest for the next 6 years, thinking and experimenting with forms of meditation.
Gautama emerged as the Buddha, the "awakened or enlightened one," and spent 45 years preaching his views across India.
In the process, he trained monks. established orders, and preached to the public.
Theravada is the older of the two largest branches of Buddhism.
The word means "the way of the elders," indicating the Theravada Buddhists' belief that they are closer to Buddha's original approach.
Theravadists believe that Buddhism is a full-time occupation, so to become a good Buddhist, one must renounce worldly goods and become a monk.
Mahayana split from Theravada Buddhism about 2,000 years ago.
Mahayana is translated as "the bigger ferry" or "raft," and Mahayanists call Theravada Buddhism by the name Hinayana or, “the little raft."
Mahayanists claim that their approach to Buddhism can help more people because it is less demanding and all-encompassing.
Theravadists emphasize Buddha's life of self-help and years of solitary introspection, and Mahayanists emphasize Buddha's later years of teaching and helping others.
Theravadists cite Buddha's wisdom and Mahayanists his compassion.
ORIGIN OF OTHER UNIVERSALIZING RELIGIONS.
Sikhism and Baha'i were founded more recently than the three large universalizing religions.
The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak traveled widely through South Asia around 500 years ago preaching his new faith, and many people became his Sikhs, which is the Hindi word for "disciples."
Nine other gurus succeeded Guru Nanak.
Arjan, the fifth guru, compiled and edited in 1604 the Guru Granth Sahib (the Holy Granth of Enlightenment), which became the book of Sikh holy scriptures.
When it was established in Iran during the nineteenth century, Baha’i provoked strong opposition from Shiite Muslims.
The Bab was executed in 1850, as were 20,000 of his followers.
Baha’u’llah, the prophet of Baha'i, was also arrested but was released in 1853 and exiled to Baghdad.
In 1863, his claim that he was the messenger of God anticipated by the Bab was accepted by other followers.
Before he died in 1892, Baha'u'llah appointed his eldest son 'Abdu'l-Baha (1844-1921) to be the leader of the Baha'i community and the authorized interpreter of his teachings.
Origin of Hinduism, an Ethnic Religion
Unlike the three universalizing religions, Hinduism did not originate from a specific founder.
The origins of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are recorded in the relatively recent past, but Hinduism existed prior to recorded history.
The word Hinduism originated in the sixth century B.C. to refer to people living in what is now India.
The earliest surviving Hindu documents were written around 1500 B.C., although archaeological explorations have unearthed objects relating to the religion from 2500 B.C.
Aryan tribes from Central Asia invaded India about 1400 B.C. and brought with them Indo-European languages.
In addition to their language, the Aryans brought their religion.
The Aryans first settled in the area now called Punjab in northwestern India and later migrated east to the Ganges River valley, as far as Bengal.
Centuries of intermingling with the Dravidians already living in the area modified their religious beliefs.
Diffusion of Religions
The three universalizing religions diffused from specific hearths, or places of origin, to other regions of the world.
In contrast, ethnic religions typically remain clustered in one location.
Diffusion of Universalizing Religions
The hearths where each of the three largest universalizing religions originated are based on the events in the lives of the three key individuals.
All three hearths are in Asia (Christianity and Islam in Southwest Asia, Buddhism in South Asia).
Followers transmitted the messages preached in the hearths to people elsewhere, diffusing them across Earth's surface along distinctive paths.
Today, these three universalizing religions together have several billion adherents distributed across wide areas of the world.
DIFFUSION OF CHRISTIANITY.
Christianity's diffusion has been rather clearly recorded since Jesus first set forth its tenets in the Roman province known at the time as Judea.
Consequently, geographers can examine its diffusion by reconstructing patterns of communications, interaction, and migration.
In Chapter 1 two processes of diffusion were identified—relocation (diffusion through migration) and expansion (diffusion through a snowballing effect).
Within expansion diffusion, we distinguished between hierarchical (diffusion through key leaders) and contagious (widespread diffusion).
Christianity diffused through a combination of all of these forms of diffusion.
Christianity first diffused from its hearth in Judea through relocation diffusion.
Missionaries—individuals who help to transmit a universalizing religion through relocation diffusion—carried the teachings of Jesus along the Roman Empire’s protected sea routes and excellent road network to people in other locations.
Paul of Tarsus. a disciple of Jesus, traveled, especially extensively through the Roman Empire as a missionary.
People in commercial towns and military settlements that were directly linked by the communications network received the message first from Paul and other missionaries.
But Christianity spread widely within the Roman Empire through contagious diffusion—daily contact between believers in the towns and nonbelievers in the surrounding countryside.
Pagan, the word for a follower of a polytheistic religion in ancient times, derives from the Latin word for “countryside.”
The dominance of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire was assured during the fourth century through hierarchical diffusion—acceptance of the religion by the empire's key elite figure, the emperor.
Migration and missionary activity by Europeans since the year 1500 has extended Christianity to other regions of the world.
Through the permanent resettlement of Europeans, Christianity became the dominant religion in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Latin Americans are predominantly Roman Catholic because their territory was colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese, who brought with them to the Western Hemisphere their religion as well as their languages.
Canada (except Quebec) and the United States have Protestant majorities because their early colonists came primarily from Protestant England.
Similarly, geographers trace the distribution of other Christian denominations within the United States to the fact that migrants came from different parts of Europe, especially during the nineteenth century.
Followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as Mormons, settled at Fayette, New York, near the hometown of their founder Joseph Smith.
Eventually, under the leadership of Brigham Young, they migrated to the sparsely inhabited Salt Lake Valley in the present-day state of Utah.
DIFFUSION OF ISLAM.
Muhammad's successors organized followers into armies that extended the region of Muslim control over an extensive area of Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Within a century of Muhammad's death, Muslim armies conquered Palestine, the Persian Empire, and much of India, resulting in the conversion of many non-Arabs to Islam, often through intermarriage.
To the west, Muslims captured North Africa, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and retained part of Western Europe, particularly much of present-day Spain, until 1492.
During the same century in which the Christians regained all of Western Europe, Muslims took control of much of southeastern Europe and Turkey.
As was the case with Christianity, Islam, as a universalizing religion, diffused well beyond its hearth in Southwest Asia through relocation diffusion of missionaries to portions of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Although it is spatially isolated in Southeast Asia from the Islamic core region, Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, is predominantly Muslim because Arab traders brought the religion there in the thirteenth century.
DIFFUSION OF BUDDHISM.
Buddhism did not diffuse rapidly from its point of origin in northeastern India.
Most responsible for the spread of Buddhism was Asoka, emperor of the Magadhan Empire from about 273 to 232 B.c.
About 257 B.C., at the height of the Magadhan Empire's power, Asoka became a Buddhist and thereafter attempted to put into practice Buddha's social principles.
A council organized by Asoka at Pataliputra decided to send missionaries to territories neighboring the Magadhan Empire.
Emperor Asoka's son, Mahinda, led a mission to the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where the king and his subjects were converted to Buddhism.
As a result, Sri Lanka is the country that claims the longest continuous tradition of practicing Buddhism.
Missionaries were also sent in the third century B.C. to Kashmir, the Himalayas, Bunna (Myanmar), and elsewhere in India.
In the first century A.D., merchants along the trading routes from northeastern India introduced Buddhism to China.
Many Chinese were receptive to the ideas brought by Buddhist missionaries, and Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese languages.
Chinese rulers allowed their people to become Buddhist monks during the fourth century A.D., and in the following centuries, Buddhism turned into a genuinely Chinese religion.
Buddhism further diffused from China to Korea in the fourth century and from Korea to Japan two centuries later.
During the same era, Buddhism lost its original base of support in India.
DIFFUSION OF OTHER UNIVERSALIZING RELIGIONS.
The Baha'i religion diffused to other regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under the leadership of 'Abdu'l-Baha, son of the prophet Baha'u'llah.
Baha'i also spread rapidly during the late twentieth century, when a temple was constructed on every continent.
Sikhism remained relatively clustered in Punjab, where the religion originated.
Sikhs fought with the Muslims to gain control of the Punjab region, and they achieved their ambition in 1802 when they created an independent state in Punjab.
The British took over Punjab in 1849 as part of its India colony but granted the Sikhs a privileged position and let them fight in the British army.
When the British government created the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, it divided Punjab between the two instead of giving the Sikhs a separate country.
Preferring to live in Hindu-dominated India rather than Muslim-dominated Pakistan, 2.5 million Sikhs moved from Pakistan’s West Punjab region to East Punjab in India.
Lack of Diffusion of Ethnic Religions
Most ethnic religions have limited if any diffusion.
These religions lack missionaries who are devoted to converting people from other religions.
Thus, the diffusion of universalizing religions, especially Christianity and Islam, typically comes at the expense of ethnic religions.
MINGLING OF ETHNIC AND UNIVERSALIZING RELIGIONS.
Universalizing religions may supplant ethnic religions or mingle with them.
In some African countries, Christian practices are similar to those of their former European colonial masters.
In East Asia, Buddhism is the universalizing religion that has most mingled with ethnic religions, such as Shintoism in Japan.
Shintoists first resisted Buddhism when it first diffused to Japan from Korea in the ninth century.
Later, Shintoists embraced Buddhism and amalgamated elements of the two religions.
Buddhist priests took over most of the Shinto shrines, but Buddhist deities came to be regarded by the Japanese as Shintoist deities instead.
The current situation in Japan offers a strong caution to anyone attempting to document the number of adherents of any religion.
Although Japan is a wealthy country with excellent record-keeping, the number of Shintoists in the country is currently estimated at either 4 million or 100 million.
So if the higher number for Shintoists is correct, then most of the 122 million inhabitants of Japan profess to follow both religions.
Ethnic religions can diffuse if adherents migrate to new locations for economic reasons and are not forced to adopt a strongly entrenched universalizing religion.
A 2 040-square-kilometer (788-square-mile) island located in the Indian Ocean 800 kilometers (500 miles)east of Madagascar, Mauritius was uninhabited until 1638, so it had no traditional ethnic religion.
That year, Dutch settlers arrived to plant sugarcane and naturally brought their religion—Christianity—with them.
France gained control in 1721 and imported African slaves to work on the sugarcane plantations.
Then the British took over in 1810 and brought workers from India.
Mauritius became independent in1992.
Hinduism on Mamitius traces back to the Indian immigrants, Islam to the African immigrants, and Christianity to the European immigrants.
JUDAISM, AN EXCEPTION.
The spatial distribution of Jews differs from that of other ethnic religions because Judaism is practiced in many countries. not just its place, its origin.
Only since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 has a significant percentage of the world's Jews lived in their Eastern Mediterranean homeland.
Most Jews have not lived in the Eastern Mediterranean since A.D. 70, when the Romans forced them to disperse throughout the world, an action known as the diaspora, from the Greek word for “dispersion.”
The Romans forced the diaspora after crushing any attempt by the Jews to rebel against Roman rule.
Most Jews migrated from the Eastern Mediterranean to Europe though some went to North Africa and Asia.
Having been exiled from the home of their ethnic religion, Jews lived among other nationalities, retaining separate religious practices but adopting other cultural characteristics of the host country, such as language.
Other nationalities often persecuted the Jews living in their midst.
Historically, the Jews of many European countries were forced to live in ghettos, defined as city neighborhoods set up by law to be inhabited only by Jews.
Beginning in the 1930s, but especially during World War II (1939-1945), the Nazis systematically rounded up a large percentage of European Jews, transported them to concentration camps, and exterminated them.
About 4 million Jews died in the camps and 2 million in other ways.
Many of the survivors migrated to Israel. Today. less than 15 percent of the world's 15 million Jews live in Europe, compared to 90 percent a century ago.
Holy Places
Religions may elevate particular places to a holy position.
Universalizing and ethnic religions differ in the types of places that are considered holy:
An ethnic religion typically has a less widespread distribution than a universalizing one in part because its holy places derive from the distinctive physical environment of its hearths, such as mountains, rivers, or rock formations.
A universalizing religion endows with holiness cities and other places associated with the founder's life.
Its holy places do not necessarily have to be near each other, and they do not need to be related to any particular physical environment.
Making a pilgrimage to these holy places—a journey for religious purposes to a place considered sacred—is incorporated into the rituals of some universalizing and ethnic religions.
Hindus and Muslims are especially encouraged to make pilgrimages to visit holy places in accordance with recommended itineraries, and Shintoists are encouraged to visit holy places in Japan.
Holy Places in Universalizing Religions
Buddhism and Islam are the universalizing religions that place the most emphasis on identifying shrines.
Places are holy because they are the locations of important events in the life of Buddha or Muhammad.
BUDDHIST SHRINES.
Eight places are holy to Buddhists because they were the locations of important events in Buddha's life.
The four most important of the eight places are concentrated in a small area of northeastern India and southern Nepal:
Lumbini in southern Nepal, where Buddha was born around 563 B.C, is the most important. Many sanctuaries and monuments were built there, but all are in ruins today.
Bodh Gaya, 250 kilometers (150 miles) southeast of Buddha’s birthplace, is the site of the second great event in his life, where he reached perfect wisdom. A temple has stood near the site since the third century B.C., and part of the surrounding railing built in the first century A.D. still stands. Because Buddha reached perfect enlightenment while sitting under a bo tree, that tree has become a holy object as well. To honor Buddha, the bo tree has been diffused to other Buddhist countries, such as China and Japan.
Deer Park in Sarnath, where Buddha gave his first sermon, is the third important location. The Dhamek pagoda at Sarnath, built in the third century B.C., is probably the oldest surviving structure in India. Nearby is an important library of Buddhist literature, including many works removed from Tibet when Tibet’s Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, went into exile.
Kushinagar, the fourth holy place, is where Buddha died at age 80 and passed into nirvana, a state of peaceful extinction. Temples built at the site are currently in ruins.
Four other sites in northeastern India are particularly sacred because they were the locations of Buddha’s principal miracles.
All four miracle sites are in ruins today, although excavation activity is underway.
HOLY PLACES IN ISLAM.
The holiest locations in Islam are in cities with the life of Muhammad.
The holiest city for Muslims is Makkah, the birthplace of Muhammad.
Now a city of 1.3 million inhabitants, Makkah contains the holiest object in the Islamic landscape.
The Ka'ba had been a religious shrine in Makkah for centuries before the origin of Islam.
After Muhammad defeated the local people, he captured the Ka'ba, cleared it of idols, and rededicated it to the all-powerful Allah (God).\
The second most holy geographic location in Islam is Madinah (Medina), a city of 1.3 million inhabitants, 350 kilometers (220 miles) north of Makkah.
Muhammad received his first support from the people of Madinah and became the city's chief administrator.
Muhammad's tomb is at Madinah, inside Islam's second-largest mosque.
Every healthy Muslim who has adequate financial resources is expected to undertake a pilgrimage, called a hajj, to Makkah (Mecca).
Regardless of nationality and economic background, all pilgrims dress alike in plain white robes to emphasize common loyalty to Islam and the equality of people in the eyes of Allah.
HOLY PLACES IN SIKHISM.
Sikhism's most holy structure, the Darbar Sahib, or Golden Temple, was built at Amritsar, in Punjab, by Arjan, the fifth guru, during the sixteenth century.
The holiest book in Sikhism, the Gum Granth Sahib, is kept there.
Militant Sikhs used the Golden Temple at Amritsar as a base for launching attacks in support of greater autonomy for Punjab during the 1980s.
In 1984, the Indian army attacked the Golden Temple at Amritsar and killed approximately a thousand Sikhs defending the temple.
In retaliation later that year, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her guards, who were Sikhs.
Holy Places in Ethnic Religions
One of the principal reasons that ethnic religions are highly clustered is that they are closely tied to the physical geography of a particular place.
Pilgrimages are undertaken to view these physical features.
HOLY PLACES IN HINDUISM.
As an ethnic religion of India, Hinduism is closely tied to the physical geography of India.
According to a survey conducted by the geographer Surinder Bhardwaj, the natural features most likely to rank among the holiest shrines in India are riverbanks or coastlines.
Hindus consider a pilgrimage, known as a tirtha, to be an act of purification.
Although not a substitute for meditation the pilgrimage is an important act in achieving redemption.
Hindu holy places are organized into a hierarchy.
Particularly sacred places attract Hindus from all over India, despite the relatively remote locations of some; less important shrines attract primarily local pilgrims.
Because Hinduism has no central authority, the relative importance of shrines is established by tradition, not by doctrine.
Hindus believe that they achieve purification by bathing in holy rivers.
The Ganges is the holiest river in India because it is supposed to spring forth from the hair of Siva, one of the main deities.
The remoteness of holy places from population clusters once meant that making a pilgrimage required major commitments of time and money as well as undergoing considerable physical hardship.
COSMOGONY IN ETHNIC RELIGIONS.
Ethnic religions differ from universalizing religions in their understanding of relationships between human beings and nature.
These differences derive from distinctive concepts of cosmogony, which is a set of religious beliefs concerning the origin of the universe.
Chinese ethnic religions, such as Confucianism and Daoism, believe that the universe is made up of two forces, yin, and yang.
The universalizing religions that originated in Southwest Asia, notably Christianity and Islam, consider that God created the universe including the Earth’s physical environment and human beings.
A religious person can serve God by cultivating the land, draining wetlands, clearing forests, building new settlements, and otherwise making productive use of natural features that God created.
Christian and Islamic cosmogony differ in some respects.
For example, the Roman Catholic catechism states that Earth was given by God to humanity to finish the task of creation.
In the name of God, some people have sought mastery over nature, not merely independence from it.
Large-scale development of the remaining wilderness is advocated by some religious people as a way to serve God.
Adherents of ethnic religions do not attempt to transform the environment to the same extent.
The Calendar
Universalizing and ethnic religions have different approaches to the calendar.
An ethnic religion typically has a more clustered distribution than a universalizing religion, in part because its holidays are based on the distinctive physical geography of the homeland.
In universalizing religions, major holidays relate to events in the life of the founder rather than to the changing season of one particular place.
The Calendar in Ethnic Religions
A prominent feature of ethnic religions is a celebration of the seasons—the calendar’s annual cycle of variation in climatic conditions.
Knowledge of the calendar is critical to successful agriculture, whether for sedentary crop farmers or nomadic animal herders.
The seasonal variations of temperature and precipitation help farmers select the appropriate times for planting and harvesting and make the best choice of crops.
Rituals are performed to pray for favorable environmental conditions or to give thanks for past success.
THE JEWISH CALENDAR.
Judaism is classified as an ethnic, rather than a universalizing, religion in part because its major holidays are based on events in the agricultural calendar of the religion's homeland in present-day Israel.
The other three most important holidays in Judaism originally related even more closely to the agricultural cycle.
These three agricultural holidays later gained importance because they also commemorated events in the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, as recounted in the Bible:
Pesach recalled the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt and the miracle of their successful flight under the leadership of Moses.
Sukkot is derived from the Hebrew word for the booths, or temporary shelters, occupied by Jews during their wandering in the wilderness for 40 years after fleeing Egypt.
Shavuot was considered the date during the wandering when Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.
The reinterpretation of natural holidays in light of historical events has been especially important for Jews in the United States, Western Europe, and other regions who are unfamiliar with the agricultural calendar of the Middle East.
In daily business North Americans use the solar calendar of 12 months, each containing 30 or 31 days, taking up the astronomical slack with 28 or 29 days in February.
But Israel—the only country where Jews are in the majority—uses a lunar rather than a solar calendar.
The Moon has a mystical quality because of its variation from one day to the next.
THE SOLSTICE.
The solstice has special significance in some ethnic religions.
A major holiday in some pagan religions is the winter solstice, December 21 or 22 in the Northern Hemisphere and June 21 or 22 in the Southern Hemisphere.
The winter solstice is the shortest day and longest night of the year when the Sun appears lowest in the sky, and the apparent movement of the Sun's path north or south comes to a stop before reversing direction (solstice comes from the Latin to "stand still").
If you stand at the western facade of the U.S. Capitol in Washington at sunset on the summer solstice June 21 or 22 in the Northern Hemisphere) and look down Pennsylvania Avenue, the Sun is directly over the center of the avenue.
The Calendar in Universalizing Religions
The principal purpose of the holidays in universalizing religions is to commemorate events in the founder's life.
Christians, in particular, associate their holidays with seasonal variations in the calendar, but climate and the agricultural cycle are not central to the liturgy and rituals.
ISLAMIC AND BAHA’I CALENDARS.
Islam, like Judaism, uses a lunar calendar.
Whereas the Jewish calendar inserts an extra month every few years to match the agricultural and solar calendars, Islam as a universalizing religion retains a strictly lunar calendar.
In a 30-year cycle, the Islamic calendar has 19 years with 354 days and 11 years with 355 days.
As a result of using a lunar calendar, Muslim holidays arrive in different seasons from generation to generation.
For example, during the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims fast during daylight every day and try to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah.
Observance of Ramadan can be a hardship by interfering with critical agricultural activities, depending on the season.
However, as a universalizing religion with more than 1 billion adherents worldwide, Islam is practiced in various climates and latitudes.
The Baha'is use a calendar established by the Bab and confirmed by Baha'u'llah, in which the year is divided into 19 months of 19 days each, with the addition of four intercalary days (five in leap years).
The year begins on the first day of spring, March 21, which is one of several holy days in the Baha'i calendar.
CHRISTIAN, BUDDHIST, AND SIKH HOLIDAYS.
Christians commemorate the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox in late March.
But not all Christians observe Easter on the same day because Protestant and Roman Catholic branches calculate the date on the Gregorian calendar, but Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar.
Christians may relate Easter to the agricultural cycle, but that relationship differs depending on where they live.
In Southern Europe, Easter is a joyous time of harvest.
Northern Europe and North America do not have a major Christian holiday at harvest time, which would be placed in the fall.
Instead, Easter in Northern Europe and North America is a time of anxiety over planting new crops, as well as a celebration of spring's arrival after a harsh winter.
In the United States and Canada, Thanksgiving has been endowed with Christian prayers to play the role of a harvest festival.
Most Northern Europeans and North Americans associate Christmas, the birthday of Jesus, with winter conditions, such as low temperatures, snow cover, and the absence of vegetation except for needle leaf evergreens.
But for Christians in the Southern Hemisphere, December 25 is the height of the summer, with warm days and abundant sunlight.
All Buddhists celebrate major holidays Buddha's birth, enlightenment, and death.
Japanese Buddhists celebrate Buddhist's birth on April 8, his Enlightenment on December 8, and his death on February 15; Theravadist Buddhists observe all three events on the same day, usually in April.
The major holidays in Sikhism are the births and deaths of the religion's ten gurus.
The tenth guru, Gobind Singh, declared that after his death, instead of an eleventh guru, Sikhism's highest spiritual authority would be the holy scriptures of the Guru Granth Sahib.
A major holiday in Sikhism is the day when the Holy Granth was installed as the religion's spiritual guide.
Commemorating historical events distinguishes Sikhism as a universalizing religion, in contrast to India's major ethnic religion, Hinduism, which glorifies the physical geography of India.
KEY ISSUE 3 - Why Do Religions Organize Space in Distinctive Patterns?
Geographers study the major impact on the landscape made by all religions, regardless of whether they are universalizing or ethnic.
In large cities and small villages around the world, regardless of the region's prevailing religion, the tallest, most elaborate buildings are often religious structures.
The distribution of religious elements on the landscape reflects the importance of religion in people's values.
The impact of religion on the landscape is particularly profound, for many religious people believe that their life on Earth ought to be spent in service to God.
Places of Worship
Church, basilica, mosque, temple, pagoda, and synagogue are familiar names that identify places of worship in various religions.
Sacred structures are physical "anchors" of religion.
All major religions have structures, but the functions of the buildings influence the arrangement of the structures across the landscape
They may house shrines or be places where people assemble for worship.
Some religions require a relatively large number of elaborate structures, whereas others have more modest needs.
Christian Churches
The Christian landscape is dominated by a high density of churches.
The word church derives from a Greek term meaning "lord," "master," and "power."
Church also refers to a gathering of believers, as well as the building at which the gathering occurs.
The church plays a more critical role in Christianity than buildings in other religions, in part because the structure is an expression of religious principles, an environment in the image of God.
The church is also more prominent in Christianity because attendance at a collective service of worship is considered extremely important.
The prominence of churches on the landscape also stems from their style of construction and location.
In some communities, the church was traditionally the largest and tallest building and was placed at an important square or other prominent location.
Although such characteristics may no longer apply in large cities, they are frequently still true for small towns and neighborhoods within cities.
Since Christianity split into many denominations, no single style of church construction has dominated.
Churches reflect both the cultural values of the denomination and the region's architectural heritage.
Orthodox churches follow an architectural style that developed in the Byzantine Empire during the fifth century.
Byzantine-style Orthodox churches tend to be highly ornate, topped by prominent domes.
Many Protestant churches in North America, on the other hand, are simple, with little ornamentation.
This austerity is a reflection of the Protestant conception of a church as an assembly hall for the congregation.
Availability of building materials also influences church appearance.
In the United States, early churches were most frequently built of wood in the Northeast, brick in the Southeast, and adobe in the Southwest.
Stucco and stone predominated in Latin America.
This diversity reflected differences in the most common building materials found by early settlers.
Places of Worship in Other Religions
Religious buildings are highly visible and important features of the landscapes in regions dominated by religions other than Christianity.
But unlike Christianity, other major religions do not consider their important buildings a sanctified places of worship.
MUSLIM MOSQUES
Muslims consider the mosque as a space for community assembly.
Unlike a church, a mosque is not viewed as a sanctified place, but rather as a location for the community to gather together for worship.
Mosques are found primarily in larger cities of the Muslim world; simple structures may serve as places of prayer in rural villages.
The mosque is organized around a central courtyard—traditionally open-air, although it may be enclosed in harsher climates.
The pulpit is placed at the end of the courtyard facing Makkah, the direction in which all Muslims pray.
Surrounding the courtyard is a cloister used for schools and non-religious activities.
A distinctive feature of the mosque is the minaret, a tower where a man known as a muzzan summons people to worship.
HINDU TEMPLES
Sacred structures for collective worship are relatively unimportant in Asian ethnic and universalizing religions.
Instead, important religious functions are more likely to take place at home within the family.
Temples are built to house shrines for particular gods rather than for congregational worship.
The Hindu temple serves as a home to one or more gods, although a particular god may have more than one temple.
The typical Hindu temple contains a small, dimly lit interior room where a symbolic artifact or some other image of the god rests.
Because congregational worship is not part of Hinduism. the temple does not need a large closed interior space filled with seats.
The site of the temple, usually demarcated by a wall, may also contain a structure for a caretaker and a pool for ritual baths.
Space may be devoted for ritual processions.
Wealthy individuals or groups usually maintain local temples.
Size and frequency of temples are determined by local preferences and commitment of resources rather than standards imposed by religious doctrine.
BUDDHIST AND SHINTOIST PAGODAS
The pagoda is a prominent and visually attractive element of the Buddhist and Shintoist landscapes.
Frequently elaborate and delicate in appearance, pagodas typically include tall, many-sided towers arranged in a series of tiers, balconies, and slanting roofs.
Pagodas contain relics that Buddhists believe to be a portion of Buddha’s body or clothing.
After Buddha's death, his followers scrambled to obtain these relics.
As part of the process of diffusing the religion, Buddhists carried these relics to other countries and built pagodas for them.
BAHA’I HOUSES OF WORSHIP.
Baha'is have built Houses of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, in 1953; Sydney, Australia, and Kampala, Uganda, both in 1961; Lagenhain, near Frankfurt, Germany, in 1964; Panama City, Panama, in 1972; Tiapapata, near Apia, Samoa, in 1984; and New Delhi, India, in 1986.
The first Baha'i House of Worship, built-in 1908 in Ashgabat, Russia, now the capital of Turkmenistan, was turned into a museum by the Soviet Union and demolished in 1962 after a severe earthquake.
The locations have not been selected because of the proximity to clustered Baha'is.
Instead, the Houses of Worship have been dispersed to different continents to dramatize Baha'i as a universalizing religion with adherents all over the world.
The Houses of Worship have been open to adherents of all religions, and services include reciting the scriptures of various religions.
Sacred Space
The impact of religion is clearly seen in the arrangement of human activities on the landscape at several scales, from relatively small parcels of land to entire communities.
How each religion distributes its elements on the landscape depends on its beliefs.
Important religious land uses include burial of the dead and religious settlements.
Disposing of the Dead
A prominent example of religiously inspired arrangement of land at a smaller scale is burial practices.
Climate, topography, and religious doctrine combine to create differences in practices to shelter the dead.
BURIAL
Christians, Muslims, and Jews usually bury their dead in a specially designated area called a cemetery.
The Christian burial practice can be traced to the early years of the religion.
In ancient Rome, underground passages known as catacombs were used to bury early Christians (and to protect the faithful when the religion was still illegal).
After Christianity became legal, Christians buried their dead in the yard around the church.
As these burial places became overcrowded, separate burial grounds had to be established outside the city walls.
Public health and sanitation considerations in the nineteenth century led to public management of many cemeteries.
The remains of the dead are customarily aligned in some traditional direction.
Cemeteries may consume significant space in a community, increasing the competition for scarce space.
In congested urban areas, Christians and Muslims have traditionally used cemeteries as public open space.
Before the widespread development of public parks in the nineteenth century, cemeteries were frequently the only green space in rapidly growing cities.
Cemeteries are still used as parks in Muslim countries, where the idea faces less opposition than in Christian societies.
Traditional burial practices in China have put pressure on agricultural land.
By burying dead relatives, rural residents have removed as much as 10 percent of the land from productive agriculture.
OTHER METHODS OF DISPOSING OF BODIES
Not all faiths bury their dead. Hindus generally practice cremation rather than burial.
The body is washed with water from the Ganges River and then burned with a slow fire on a funeral pyre.
Burial is reserved for children, ascetics, and people with certain diseases.
Cremation is considered an act of purification, although it tends to strain India’s wood supply.
Motivation for cremation may have originated from an unwillingness on the part of nomads to leave their dead behind, possibly because of fear that the body could be attacked by wild beasts or evil spirits, or even return to life.
Cremation could also free the soul from the body for departure to the afterworld and provide warmth and comfort for the soul as it embarked on the journey to the afterworld.
Cremation was the principal form of disposing of bodies in Europe before Christianity.
It is still practiced in parts of Southeast Asia, possibly because of Hindu influence.
To strip away unclean portions of the body, Parsis (Zoroastrians) expose the dead to scavenging birds and animals.
The ancient Zoroastrians did not want the body to contaminate the sacred elements of fire, earth, or water.
Tibetan Buddhists also practice exposure for some dead, with cremation reserved for the most exalted priests.
Disposal of bodies at sea is used in some parts of Micronesia, but the practice is much less common than in the past.
The bodies of lower-class people would be flung into the sea; elites could be set adrift on a raft or boat.
Water burial was regarded as a safeguard against being contaminated by the dead.
Religious Settlements
Buildings for worship and burial places arc smaller-scale manifestations of religion on the landscape, but there are larger-scale examples—entire settlements.
Most human settlements serve an economic purpose, but some are established primarily for religious reasons.
A utopian settlement is an ideal community built around a religious way of life.
Buildings are sited and economic activities are organized to integrate religious principles into all aspects of daily life.
An early utopian settlement in the United States was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, founded in 1741 by Moravians, Christians who had emigrated from the present-day Czech Republic.
The culmination of the utopian movement in the United States was the construction of Salt Lake City by the Mormons, beginning in 1848.
The layout of Salt Lake City is based on a plan of the city of Zion given to the church elders in 1833 by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.
The city has a regular grid pattern, unusually broad boulevards, and church-related buildings situated at strategic points.
Most utopian communities declined in importance or disappeared altogether.
Some disappeared because the inhabitants were celibate and could not attract immigrants; in other cases, residents moved away in search of better economic conditions.
The utopian communities that have not been demolished are now inhabited by people who are not members of the original religious sect, although a few have been preserved as museums.
Although most colonial settlements were not planned primarily for religious purposes, religious principles affected many of the designs.
Most early New England settlers were members of a Puritan Protestant denomination.
The Puritans generally migrated together from England and preferred to live near each other in clustered settlements rather than on dispersed, isolated farms.
Reflecting the importance of religion in their lives, New England settlers placed the church at the most prominent location in the center of the settlement, usually adjacent to a public open space known as a common, because it was for common use by everyone.
Religious Place Names
Roman Catholic immigrants have frequently given religious place names, or toponyms, to their settlements in the New World, particularly in Quebec and the U.S. Southwest.
Quebec's boundaries with Ontario and the United States clearly illustrate the difference between toponyms selected by Roman Catholic and Protestant settlers.
Religious place names are common in Quebec but rare in the two neighbors.
Administration of Space
Followers of a universalizing religion must be connected so as to ensure communication and consistency of doctrine.
The method of interaction varies among universalizing religions, branches, and denominations.
Ethnic religions tend not to have organized, central authorities.
Hierarchical Religions
A hierarchical religion has a well-defined geographic structure and organizes territory into local administrative units.
Roman Catholicism provides a good example of a hierarchical religion.
LATTER-DAY SAINTS
Latter-day Saints (Mormons) exercise a strong organization of the landscape.
The territory occupied by Mormons, primarily Utah and portions of surrounding states, is organized into wards, with populations of approximately 750 each.
Several wards are combined into a stake of approximately 5,000 people.
The highest authority in the Church—the board and president—frequently redraws ward and stake boundaries in rapidly growing areas to reflect the ideal population standards.
ROMAN CATHOLIC HIERARCHY
The Roman Catholic Church has organized much of Earth's inhabited land into an administrative structure ultimately accountable to the Pope in Rome.
Here is the top hierarchy of Roman Catholicism:
The Pope (he is also the bishop of the Diocese of Rome).
Archbishops report to the Pope. Each heads a province, which is a group of several dioceses. The archbishop also is the bishop of one diocese within the province, and some distinguished archbishops are elevated to the rank of cardinal.
Bishops report to an archbishop. Each administers a diocese, which is the basic unit of geographic organization in the Roman Catholic Church. The bishop's headquarters, called a "see," is typically the largest city in the diocese.
Priests report to Bishops. A diocese is spatially divided into parishes, each headed by a priest.
The area and population of parishes and dioceses vary according to historical factors and the distribution of Roman Catholics across Earth's surface.
In parts of Southern and Western Europe, the overwhelming majority of the dense population is Roman Catholic.
Consequently, the density of parishes is high.
A typical parish may encompass only a few square kilometers and fewer than 1,000 people.
At the other extreme, Latin American parishes may encompass several hundred square kilometers and 5,000 people.
The more dispersed Latin American distribution is attributable partly to a lower population density than in Europe.
Because Roman Catholicism is a hierarchical religion, individual parishes must work closely with centrally located officials concerning rituals and procedures.
If Latin America followed the European model of small parishes, many would be too remote for the priest to communicate with others in the hierarchy.
The less intensive network of Roman Catholic institutions also results in part from colonial traditions, for both Portuguese and Spanish rulers discouraged parish development in Latin America.
The Roman Catholic population is growing rapidly in the U.S. Southwest and suburbs of some large North American and European cities.
Some of these areas have a low density of parishes and dioceses compared to the population, so the Church must adjust its territorial organization.
New local administrative units can be created, although funds to provide the desired number of churches, schools, and other religious structures might be scarce.
Conversely, the Roman Catholic population is declining in inner cities and rural areas.
Maintaining services in these areas is expensive, but the process of combining parishes and closing schools is very difficult.
Locally Autonomous Religions
Some universalizing religions are highly autonomous religions, or self-sufficient, and interaction among communities is confined to little more than loose cooperation and shared ideas.
Islam and some Protestant denominations are good examples.
LOCAL AUTONOMY IN ISLAM
Among the three large universalizing religions, Islam provides the most local autonomy.
Like other locally autonomous religions, Islam has neither a religious hierarchy nor a formal territorial organization.
A mosque is a place for public ceremony, and a leader calls the faithful to prayer, but everyone is expected to participate equally in the rituals and is encouraged to pray privately.
In the absence of a hierarchy, the only formal organization of territory in Islam is through the coincidence of religious territory with secular states.
Governments in some predominantly Islamic countries include in their bureaucracy people who administer Islamic institutions.
These administrators interpret Islamic law and run welfare programs.
Strong unity within the Islamic world is maintained by a relatively high degree of communication and migration, such as the pilgrimage to Makkah.
In addition, uniformity is fostered by Islamic doctrine, which offers more explicit commands than other religions.
PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONS
Protestant Christian denominations vary in geographic structure from _ extremely autonomous to somewhat hierarchical.
The Episcopalian, Lutheran, and most Methodist churches have hierarchical structures, somewhat comparable to the Roman Catholic Church.
Extremely autonomous denominations such as Baptists and the United Church of Christ are organized into self-governing congregations.
Each congregation establishes the precise form of worship and selects the leadership.
Presbyterian churches represent an intermediate degree of autonomy.
Individual churches are united in a presbytery, several or which in turn are governed by a synod, with a general assembly as the ultimate authority over all churches.
Each Presbyterian church is governed by an elected board of directors with lay members.
KEY ISSUE 4 - Why Do Territorial Conflicts Arise Among Religious Groups?
The twentieth century was a century of global conflict—two world wars during the first half of the century and the Cold War between supporters of democracy and Communism during the second half.
With the end of the Cold War, the threat of global conflict has receded in the twenty-first century, but local conflicts have increased in areas of cultural diversity.
The element of cultural diversity that has led to conflict in many localities is religion.
The attempt by intense adherents of one religion to organize Earth's surface can conflict with the spatial expression of other religious or non-religious ideas.
Religion Versus Government Policies
Religious groups may oppose government policies seen as promoting social change conflicting with traditional religious values.
The role of religion in organizing Earth's surface has diminished in some societies because of political and economic change.
Islam has been particularly affected by a perceived conflict between religious values and the modernization of the economy.
Hinduism also has been forced to react to new nonreligious ideas from the West.
Buddhism, Christianity. and Islam have all been challenged by Communist governments that diminish the importance of religion in society.
Yet, in recent years, religious principles have become increasingly important in the political organization of countries, especially where a branch of Christianity or Islam is the prevailing religion.
Religion Versus Social Change
In LDCs, participation in the global economy and culture can expose local residents to values and beliefs originating in MDCs of North America and Western Europe.
North Americans and Western Europeans may not view economic development as incompatible with religious values, but many religious adherents in LDCs do, especially where Christianity is not the predominant religion.
TALIBAN VERSUS WESTERN VALUES.
When the Taliban gained power in Afghanistan in 1996, many Afghans welcomed them as preferable to the corrupt and brutal warlords who had been running the country.
The U.S. and other Western officials also welcomed them as strong defenders against a possible new invasion by Russia.
The Taliban (which means "religious students") had run Islamic Knowledge Movement religious schools, mosques, shrines, and other religious and social services since the seventh-century A.D., shortly after the arrival of Islam in Afghanistan.
Once in control of Afghanistan's government in the late 1990s, the Taliban imposed very strict laws inspired by Islamic values as the Taliban interpreted.
The Taliban believed that they had been called by Allah to purge Afghanistan of sin and violence and make it a pure Islamic state.
Islamic scholars criticized the Taliban as poorly educated in Islamic law and history and for misreading the Quran.
A U.S.-led coalition overthrew the Taliban in 2001 and replaced it with a democratically elected government.
However, the Taliban was able to regroup and resume its fight to regain control of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
HINDUISM VERSUS SOCIAL EQUALITY.
Hinduism has been strongly challenged since the 1800s when British colonial administrators introduced their social and moral concepts to India.
The most vulnerable aspect of the Hindu religion was its rigid caste system, which was the class or distinct hereditary order into which a Hindu was assigned according to religious law.
The caste system apparently originated around 1500 B.C. when Aryans invaded India from the west.
The Aryans divided themselves into four castes that developed strong differences in social and economic position—Brahmans, the priests and top administrators; Kshatriyas, or warriors; Vaisyas, or merchants; and Shudras, or agricultural workers and artisans.
The Shudra occupied a distinctly lower status than the other three castes.
Below the four castes were the outcasts, or untouchables, who did work considered too dirty for other castes.
In theory, the untouchables were descended from the indigenous people who dwelled in India prior to the Aryan conquest.
Over the centuries, these original castes split into thousands of sub-castes.
Until recently, social relations among the castes were limited, and the rights of non-Brahmans, especially untouchables, were restricted.
In Hinduism, because everyone was different, it was natural that each individual should belong to a particular caste or position in the social order.
The type of Hinduism practiced will depend in part on the individual's caste.
A high-caste Brahman may practice a form of Hinduism based on knowledge of relatively obscure historical texts.
At the other end of the caste system, a low-caste illiterate in a rural village may perform religious rituals without a highly developed set of written explanations for them.
The rigid caste system has been considerably relaxed in recent years.
The Indian government legally abolished the untouchable caste, and the people formerly in that caste now have equal rights with other Indians.
Religion Versus Communism
Organized religion was challenged in the twentieth century by the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The three religions most affected were Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM VERSUS THE SOVIET UNION.
In 1721, Czar Peter the Great made the Russian Orthodox Church a part of the Russian government.
The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was replaced by a 12-member committee, known as the Holy Synod, nominated by the czar.
Following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, which overthrew the czar, the Communist government of the Soviet Union pursued antireligious programs.
Marxism became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union, so religious doctrine was a potential threat to the success of the revolution.
The Soviet government in 1918 eliminated the official church-state connection that Peter the Great had forged.
All church buildings and property were nationalized and could be used only with local government permission.
The end of Communist rule in the late twentieth century brought a religious revival in Eastern Europe, especially where Roman Catholicism is the most prevalent branch of Christianity, including Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
Property confiscated by the Communist governments reverted to Church ownership, and attendance at church services increased.
ln Central Asian countries that were former parts of the Soviet L"n ion-Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan-most people are Muslims.
These newly independent countries arc struggling to determine the extent to which laws should be rewritten to conform t.o Islamic custom rather than to the secular tradition inherited from the Soviet Union.
BUDDHISM VERSUS SOUTHEAST ASIAN COUNTRIES.
In Southeast Asia, Buddhists were hurt by the long Vietnam War-waged between the French and later by the Americans, on one side, and Communist groups on the other.
Neither antagonist was particularly sympathetic to Buddhists.
On a number of occasions, Buddhists immolated (burned) themselves to protest policies of the South Vietnamese government.
The current Communist governments in Southeast Asia have discouraged religious activities and permitted monuments to decay, most notably the Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia considered one of the world’s most beautiful Buddhist structures.
In any event, these countries do not have the funds necessary to restore the structures.
Religion Versus Religion
Conflicts are most likely to occur where colors change, indicating a boundary between two religious groups.
Contributing to more intense religious conflict has been a resurgence of religious fundamentalism, which is a literal interpretation and a strict and intense adherence to basic principles of a religion (or a religious branch, denomination, or sect).
In a world increasingly dominated by a global culture and economy, religious fundamentalism is one of the most important ways in which a group can maintain a distinctive cultural identity.
A group convinced that its religious view is the correct one may spatially intrude upon the territory controlled by other religious groups.
Two long-standing conflicts involving religious groups are in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.
Religious Wars in Ireland
The most troublesome religious boundary in Western Europe lies on the island of Eire (Ireland).
The entire island was an English colony for many centuries and was made part of the United Kingdom in 1801.
Agitation for independence from Britain increased in Ireland during the nineteenth century, especially after poor economic conditions and famine in the 1840s led to mass emigration.
Following a succession of bloody confrontations, Ireland became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire in 1921.
Complete independence was declared in 1937, and a republic was created in 1949.
When most of Ireland became independent, a majority in six northern countries voted to remain in the United Kingdom.
Protestants, who comprised the majority in Northern Ireland, preferred to be part of the predominantly Protestant United Kingdom rather than join the predominantly Roman Catholic Republic of Ireland.
Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland have been victimized by discriminatory practices, such as exclusion from higher-paying jobs and better schools.
Demonstrations by Roman Catholics protesting discrimination began in 1968.
A small number of Roman Catholics in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a military organization dedicated to achieving Irish national unity by whatever means available, including violence.
Similarly. a scattering of Protestants created extremist organizations to fight the IRA, including the Ulster Defense Force (UDF).
Although the overwhelming majority of Northern Ireland's Roman Catholics and Protestants are willing to live peacefully with the other religious group, extremists disrupt daily life for everyone and do well in elections.
As long as most Protestants are firmly committed to remaining in the United Kingdom and most Roman Catholics are equally committed to union with the Republic of Ireland, the peaceful settlement appears difficult.
Religious Wars in the Middle East
Conflict in the Middle East is among the world's longest-standing and most intractable.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims have fought for many centuries to control the same small strip of land in the Eastern Mediterranean.
To some extent, the hostility among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Middle East stems from their similar heritage.
All three groups trace their origins to Abraham in the Hebrew Bible narrative, but the religions diverged in ways that have made it difficult for them to share the same territory.
Judaism, an ethnic religion, makes a special claim to the territory it calls the Promised Land.
The major events in the development of Judaism took place there, and the religion's customs and rituals acquired meaning from the agricultural life of the ancient Israelite tribes.
After the Romans gained control of Judea, which they later renamed the province of Palestine, they dispersed the Jews from Palestine, and only a handful were permitted to live in the region until the twentieth century.
Islam became the most widely practiced religion in Palestine after the Muslim army conquered it in the seventh century A.D. Muslims regard Jerusalem as their third holiest city, after Makkah and Madinah, because it is the place from which Muhammad is thought to have ascended to heaven.
Christianity considers Palestine the Holy Land and Jerusalem the Holy City because the major events in Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection were concentrated there.
Most inhabitants of Palestine accepted Christianity after the religion was officially adopted by the Roman Empire and before the Muslim army conquest in the seventh century.
CRUSADES BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS.
In the seventh century, Muslims, now also called Arabs because they came from the Arabian peninsula, captured most of the Middle East, including Palestine and Jerusalem.
The Arab arm diffused the Arabic language across the Middle East and convened most of the people from Christianity to Islam.
The Arab army moved west across North Africa and invaded Europe at Gibraltar in AD 711.
The army conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula, crossed the Pyrenees Mountains a few years later. and for a time occupied much of present-day France.
To the east, Ottoman Turks captured Eastern Orthodox Christianity's most important city, Constantinople (present-day Istanbul in Turkey), in 1453 and advanced a few years later into Southeast Europe, as far north as present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The recent civil war in that country is a legacy of the fifteenth-century Muslim invasion.
To recapture the Holy Land from its Muslim conquerors, European Christians launched a series of military campaigns, known as Crusades, over a 150-year period.
Crusaders captured Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099 during the First Crusade, lost it in 1187 (which led to the Third Crusade), regained it in 1229 as part of a treaty ending the Sixth Crusade, and lost it again in 1244.
JEWS VERSUS MUSLIMS IN PALESTINE.
The Muslim Ottoman Empire controlled Palestine for most of the four centuries between 1516 and 1917.
Upon the empire's defeat in World War I, Great Britain took over Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations, and later from the United Nations.
For a few years, the British allowed some Jews to return to Palestine, but immigration was restri cted again during the 1930s in response to intense pressure by Arabs in the region.
As violence initiated by both Jewish and Muslim settlers escalated after World War II, the British announced their intention to withdraw from Palestine.
The United Nations voted in 1947 to partition the Palestine Mandate into two independent states, one Jewish and one Arab.
Jerusalem was to be an international city, open to all religions, and run by the United Nations.
When the British withdrew in 1948, Jews declared an independent state of Israel within the boundaries prescribed by the UN resolution.
The next day its neighboring Arab states declared war.
The combatants signed an armistice in 1949 that divided control of Jerusalem.
The Old City of Jerusalem, which contained the famous religious shrines, became part of the Muslim country of Jordan.
The newer, western portion of Jerusalem became part of Israel, but Jews were still not allowed to visit the historic shrines in the Old City.
Israel won three more wars with its neighbors, in 1956, 1967, and 1973.
Especially important was the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured territory from its neighbors.
From Jordan, Israel captured the West Bank (the territory west of the Jordan River taken by Jordan in the 1948-1949 war).
From Jordan, Israel also gained control of the entire city of Jerusalem, including the Old City.
From Syria, Israel acquired the Golan Heights. From Egypt came the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula.
Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, and in return, Egypt recognized Israel's right to exist.
Four decades after the Six-Day War, the status of the other territories occupied by Israel has still not been settled.
CONFLICT OVER THE HOLY LAND: PALESTINIAN PERSPECTIVES.
After the 1973 war, the Palestinians emerged as Israel's principal opponent.
Egypt and Jordan renounced their claims to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, respectively, and recognized the Palestinians as the legitimate rulers of these territories.
The Palestinians in turn also saw themselves as the legitimate rulers of Israel.
Five groups of people consider themselves Palestinians:
People living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem territories captured by Israel in 1967
Some citizens of Israel who are Arabs
People who fled from Israel to other countries after the 1948-49 war
People who fled from the West Bank or Gaza to other countries after the 1967 war
Citizens of other countries, especially Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, who identify themselves as Palestinians
After capturing the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, Israel permitted Jewish settlers to construct more than 100 settlements in the territory.
Jewish settlers comprise about 10 percent of the West Bank population, and Palestinians see their immigration as a hostile act.
To protect the settlers, Israel has military control over most of the West Bank.
The Palestinian fight against Israel was coordinated by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the longtime leadership of Yassir Arafat until his death in 2004.
The Palestinians have been divided by sharp differences, reflected in a struggle for power between the Fatah and Hamas parties.
Some Palestinians, especially those aligned with the Fatah Party, are willing to recognize the state of Israel with its Jewish majority in exchange for the return of all territory taken by Israel in the 1967 war.
Other Palestinians, especially those aligned with the Hamas Party, do not recognize the right of Israel to exist and want to continue fighting for control of the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The United States, European countries, and Israel consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization.
CONFLICT OVER THE HOLY LAND ISRAELI PERSPECTIVE.
Israel sees itself as a very small country—20,000 square kilometers (8,000 square miles)—with a Jewish majority, surrounded by a region of hostile Muslim Arabs encompassing more than 25 million square kilometers (10 million square miles).
In dealing with its neighbors, Israel considers two elements of the local landscape especially meaningful.
First, the country’s major population centers are quite close to international borders, making them vulnerable to surprise attacks.
The country's two largest cities, Tel Aviv and Haifa are only 20 and 60 kilometers (12 and 37 miles), respectively, from Palestinian-controlled territory, and its third-largest city, Jerusalem. is adjacent to the border.
The second geographical problem from Israel's perspective derives from local landforms.
The northern half of Israel is a strip of land 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
It is divided into three roughly parallel physical regions.
The UN plan for the partition of The Palestine Mandate in1947, as modified by the armistice ending the 1948-49 war, allocated most of the coastal plain to Israel, whereas Jordan took most of the hills between the coastal plain and the Jordan River valley, a region generally called the West Bank (of the Jordan River).
Farther north. Israel’s territory extended eastward to the Jordan River valley, but Syria controlled the highlands east of the Valley, known as the Golan Heights.
Jordan and Syria used the hills between 1948 and 1967 as staging areas to attack Israeli settlements on the adjacent coastal plain and in the Jordan River valley.
Israel captured these highlands during the 1967 war to stop attacks on the lowland population concentrations.
Israel still has military control over the Golan Heights and West Bank a generation later, yet attacks by Palestinians against Israeli citizens have continued.
Israeli Jews were divided for many years between those who wished to retain the disputed territories and those who wished to make compromises with the Palestinians.
In recent years, a large majority of Israelis have supported the construction of a barrier to deter Palestinian attacks.
An ultimate obstacle to a comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the status of Jerusalem.
As long as anyone religious Jewish, Muslim, or Christian—maintains exclusive political control over Jerusalem, the other religious groups will not be satisfied.
But Israelis have no intention of giving up control of the Old City of Jerusalem, and Palestinians have no intention of giving up their claim to it.