Trees of Life

Published in 1927, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries is a work that aims to find structures, typologies, and logics among the hundreds of shrines that once dotted the flourishing Palestinian village landscape. There I found a variety of forms that these once sacred places have taken – shrines now decomposing in cemeteries, shrines housed inside modern mosques, shrines cared for by Bedouin shepherds, shrines turned into children’s parks, shrines adopted by messianic Jews, shrines used as garbage dumps, and so on. Al-Badriyya was known to have a number of trees to her name – two olive trees, a lemon tree, and several oak trees dispersed throughout the Jerusalem area, including in al-Malha, where an Israeli shopping mall now stands, and as far away as al-Ram in the West Bank.