God’s Land: Blurring the National and the Sacred in Waqf Territory

From the Peace of Westphalia, territorial sovereignty has been a vital criterion for the definition of the Western nation-state. The dominance of national understandings of territory has led to many theorists assuming that this is the only form of political geography. An examination of the conception of waqf lands (Islamic endowments) reveals a far more nuanced understanding. Using the case study of the Palestinian movement Hamas, this article proposes that Hamas' understanding of waqf as both God's land in perpetuity and the territorial justification for an independent Palestinian state challenged Western assumptions of national territory and the monopoly of legitimate violence.