Posted on 08/16/2010 10:01:15 PM PDT by neverdem
One wonders about the symbolism of the Cordoba Initiative. Was Cordoba selected because in a multicultural context it represents a blending of harmonious cultures? If so, I’m not sure history quite supports such a usage.
The city was founded by Romans and remained Western in some sense until conquered by Muslim invaders in 711, when it soon became a capital of what Muslims called al-Andalus, the Islamic foothold in southern Europe, the recurrence of which is so nostalgically evoked by bin Laden and Co. The president’s Cairo speech cited Cordoba as a beacon of tolerance during the Spanish Inquisition (“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance: We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition”), but that was mostly therapeutic myth-making: Cordoba had been captured in the first wave of the Reconquisita in 1236, and most of its Muslim population had fled, been converted, or forced out more than two-and-a-half centuries before the Inquisition even began.
But even before then, the once-cosmopolitan Cordoba — as handed down from the overtly homosexual and enlightened Al-Hakam II — was already in decline due to serial assassinations, court coups, and increasing Islamic intolerance for freedom of thought and expression outside the boundaries of the Koran.
The evocation of Cordoba may refer to the cultural achievements of late tenth-century Islam, but the city’s full history also recalls Islam’s efforts to conquer southern Europe and reminds us that, so often in the past, innate Muslim genius was stifled by reactionary clerics worried about human claims of secular achievement.
If a Muslim city inside Europe is what the Initiative needs for symbolic purposes, why not the “Constantinople Initiative”? Perhaps the proponents of the new Islamic center could make the argument that 1453, with its symbolic minarets on Hagia Sophia, marks the sort of religious ecumenism that we should again strive for. To go further, why look for iconic Islamic cities in formerly European territory at all, when a “Dubai Initiative”or a “Baghdad Initiative” might serve as a better and more contemporary model of East-West cultural and commercial cross-fertilization, or our common efforts at promoting democracy?
I will be very happy when one day those minarets are torn down and the Hagia Sophia is once again a Christian church.
I have read someplace that part of the issue with long islamic memory for historical events comes from the nature of the Arabic language itself, because Arabic has no ~tenses~. There’s no past tense... no future tense... everything is written about in what amounts to the present tense.
An illuminating little factoid, that.
It certainly has a strong historical precedent!
Some of Pope Urban II speeches should be required reading. We really need to take back Constantinople, which is the birthplace of Christianity as a united and stuctured religion (and I am Catholic, not Orthodox). Having that city in Muslim hands is a spit in the face, much worse than the ground zero mosque. If Westerners knew their history, we would not tolerate muslim control of Constantinople and the way the few Orthodox that remain their are treated.
Wow.... Wolfman's crusade to invade Turkey. How remarkably silly.
Not as remarkably silly as accepting the city as a part of Turkey.
Or even sillier regarding Manhattan as part of the United States, rather than belonging to Native American tribes. Istanbul became part of Turkey the year after Columbus first sailed the oceans blue, and a century and a half before New Amsterdam was settled.
Yes, quite illuminating indeed. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting. I didn’t know that much of Cordoba’s “tolerant” reputation was largely a myth. VDH is indispensible.
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