The Construction of the Beersheba Mosque: A Lens to the Desert Town

From its establishment in 1900, the town of Beersheba was an amalgamation of old and new. The town’s location at the heart of the desert of Southern Palestine served as a Bedouin meeting place for hundreds of years while its name referenced the biblical father of monotheistic religions. At the same time, the planned town of Beersheba epitomized the Islamic modernization agenda of Sultan Abdulhamid II, which strove to incorporate the semi-nomadic communities of the frontier into the empire by providing them with modern infrastructure and state services.

This paper dives into the story of the Beersheba mosque construction to show the dynamics that were in play in establishing the desert town. The paper reconstructs the building process by integrating Ottoman archival documents, state officials’ memoirs, Hebrew local press, and Arabic oral testimonies. While in the past scholars interpreted the erection of the mosque as an Ottoman top-down measure attempting to civilize the nomadic Bedouins by introducing an institutionalized form of Islam, this paper argues that the mosque building was a result of local demand from below as well as state initiative. The government relied on the Bedouin inhabitants of the region not only for labor but also for funding the mosque and mediating between the different actors who were involved in its construction. The mosque became a central feature of the desert town and one of several important institutions that drew Bedouins from the surrounding region to visit Beersheba regularly, even if not to settle in it, thereby undermining the separation between urban and rural, local and regional. The paper argues that much like the mosque, the town of Beersheba was formed through the intersection of imperial, regional, and local interests and became a central node in the desert networks, relying on older practices and offering new opportunities.