The Muslim Festival of Nabi Rubin in Palestine: From Religious Festival to Summer Resort

This article traces the origin of the annual pilgrimage (mawsim) to the shrine (maqam) of Nabi Rubin, located 14 kilometres south of Jaffa, from the late thirteenth century to the destruction of Palestine in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba. The resulting line of historical continuity reveals a gradual process of desanctification: the mawsim's pronouncedly religious nature is gradually transformed over time into a far more secular event, with ever larger crowds turning the maqam into a true summer resort (masif). Viewed as a Foucauldian heterotopia, the ‘transitory’ tent city of Nabi Rubin represents not just a symptom or an effect of an unfolding modernity in Palestine and its effect on the Palestinian city of Jaffa but becomes itself constitutive of that modernity.