This paper examines contentious politics and urban violence in Jerusalem during the early Mandate period. By tracing the routes and locations of political demonstrations, contentious religious processions and rituals, and riots during periods of communal violence, it reveals a shift in attention from the political to the religious sphere that took place in the 1920s. The new focus on the religious centered mainly on the area of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount with the Western Wall and was promoted by both Muslim and Zionist leadership. Clubs and associations initiated conflicts in the symbolic landscape of the city through local and international newspaper campaigns, political speeches, and demonstrations. While new secular holidays in the emerging Zionist and Arab-Palestinian nationalist calendars played an important role in focusing these tensions, the politicization of sacred space and religious festivals increasingly fostered conflict and often sparked riots. Focusing on how these conflicts were linked to sacred and secular urban space (and time), I interpret the conflicts in Jerusalem in the 1920s as manifestations of competing claims to belonging and ownership. I argue that British imperial policy was a major cause of the politicization of religion and the imbuing of sacred space with nationalist aspirations. British religious imaginaries of Jerusalem and their colonial practices of rule emphasized religious identities that allowed for the mobilization of masses during religious festivals, initiating a period of protests and riots in the 1920s that ultimately led to the nationalist and anticolonial violence of the 1930s and 40s.