Promised Lands: What Is The Cartography of Divine Claims?

A promised land is a place that people, belonging from a particular community, believe was created for them. This belief often comes from religious stories or traditions passed down through generations. These lands are seen as sacred and essentially as a gift from a higher deity. In the Bible, for example, Canaan is called the promised land for the Israelites. In Hindu texts, Bharatvarsha is a land that holds deep spiritual meaning. In Islamic thought, Dar al-Islam is a land where Muslims can live in faith and peace. Many people grow up believing that their religion or community belongs to a certain land. But what happens when these beliefs start to shape real maps and countries? What happens to the people who do not fit into that belief? 

A map of ancient Canaan

Israel and the Idea of Return

The idea of Israel as a promised land has deep roots in Jewish history, coming from biblical stories about a covenant between God and the people of Israel and their return to a chosen homeland. For centuries, this dream stayed alive in Jewish memory through life in the diaspora and through persecution, especially in Europe. In the late nineteenth century, this dream began to connect with modern political nationalism through the Zionist movement, which saw the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as both a historic right and a safe place from antisemitism. The horrors of the Holocaust gave this vision a new urgency, pushing large numbers of Jews to move to Palestine and leading to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

For Palestinians, however, this time was the Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave or fled from their homes. Palestinian scholar Edward Said called this a ‘contrapuntal’ history, meaning that one people’s return was another people’s loss. He argued that while Zionism came from the Jewish story of exile, it also worked like European colonial settlement, reshaping the land without recognising the people already living there. This history made the idea of “return” central to both Jews and Palestinians. Israel, in this way, shows the conflict between sacred promise and political reality, where both groups hold competing claims of belonging to the same land.

The Middle East: Empires and Holy Cities

The Middle East is one of the most fought-over regions in the world, not just because of oil or trade but because it is full of places that are holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Cities like Jerusalem, Mecca, and Karbala are closely linked to faith and prayer, and that makes them strong symbols. But these holy cities have also been used in political plans. Historian Rashid Khalidi says that even before modern borders were made, European powers used religion to help control the region. The British and French cut up the Ottoman Empire after World War I with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, making borders that ignored local people and instead served their own interests. Political scientist Lisa Anderson says that many of these new Middle Eastern states were not built from inside but forced from outside, often leaving weak national identities.

The idea of a religious homeland has been used by many groups to claim power and land. For example, both Sunnis and Shias have fought over who should guard or control certain sites. Even today, leaders and militias use religion to defend violence or to say cities belong to them. The result is that religion gets tied up with borders. When holy places are pulled into political fights, the lines between faith and power start to blur.

Map of the Middle East from 1762

India: Bharat and defining Hindus

In India, the idea of Bharat—often called “the land of the Bharatas”—is found in old Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata and the Vishnu Purana. In these writings, Bharat is shown as both a real place on the map and a holy land, blessed by the gods and tied to the moral and political order of the world. Like other promised lands, it is imagined as a space where people share the same roots and culture. In the 20th century, thinker Vinayak Damodar Savarkar gave this old idea a new form. In his book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, he called Bharat both the land of the ancestors (pitribhumi) and the holy land (punyabhumi) for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. He said only those for whom India was both could fully be part of the Hindu nation. For him, this was a way to build a common identity strong enough to resist colonial power. But it also left out Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands were outside India. Groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) later treated Savarkar as a guide. Modern critics point out that while such ideas can bring people together, they can also change who counts as a citizen and push some to the margins. In this way, Bharat is like other promised lands in the world: it gains power from old stories, but when those stories set borders and rights, they can create deeper fights over who truly belongs.

A scene from the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic

Native Americans and “Civilised” Erasure

For Native Americans, the land that became the United States was never empty or waiting to be claimed. It was already home to hundreds of nations with their own systems of governance, rich traditions, and deep spiritual connections to rivers, mountains, and plains. After expeditions like Lewis and Clark in the early 1800s, the American government and settlers began to fold these lands into the national story of the “New World,” a place that was seen as full of opportunity and, for many, as territory given by God to be settled. Early settlers were motivated by gold, farmland, and trade, but over time, this hunger for resources became tied to the belief in Manifest Destiny, the idea that the United States was meant to expand across the continent. Native American scholars like Vine Deloria Jr. and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz have shown how this belief justified policies that forced Native peoples from their homes. 

Some tribes were defined as friendly so they could be used as allies in expansion, while others were branded as hostile to allow military campaigns against them. The U.S. Army brought advanced weapons into conflicts, and settlers and soldiers killed millions of bison to cut off the main food source for Plains tribes, leading to widespread hunger and death. The destruction of villages, seizure of land, and removal of children to boarding schools worked together to break the connection between Native peoples and their lands. What the United States called nation-building was, for Native communities, the loss of a homeland that had always been their own promised land.

The genocide of the Bison

Can Faith Shape Nations?

When we look at how promised lands have been imagined and fought over, one thing becomes clear: religion is not only a matter of belief but also a matter of control. The Italian thinker Niccolò Machiavelli wrote that rulers could use religion to bring people together, justify authority, and even prepare them for war. In many parts of the world, sacred stories and divine claims have been tied to political power in ways that shape who belongs, who is excluded, and which histories are remembered or erased. Leaders have often turned spiritual traditions into political tools, framing territorial ambitions as the will of God or destiny. This is about making dissent seem like a betrayal of faith itself. When this happens, land becomes more than just soil or borders. It becomes the centre of an unending struggle, where defending political power is framed as defending the sacred. In that sense, the idea of the promised land is never purely religious or purely political. It exists in a space where faith gives politics its moral authority, and politics gives faith its power to command.