Posted on 09/27/2003 1:05:33 PM PDT by quidnunc
Granada, Spain – A dispenser of iced lemonade sits invitingly by the door of the newly whitewashed building — hospitality for summer visitors coming to the first mosque built in Granada in over 500 years.
But looming over the freshly planted garden, seeming to quiver in the furnacelike heat, is another image: the Alhambra, a 14th-century Muslim fortress of red-tinted stone that is everything this mosque is not: ancient, battle-scarred, monumental. It seems at once a reminder of lost glories and a spur for their restoration.
It may also inspire darker sentiments. For it was from the Alhambra's watchtower that Christian conquerors unfurled their flag in 1492, marking the end of almost eight centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. Less than a decade later, forced conversions of Muslims began; by 1609, they were being expelled.
That lost Muslim kingdom — the southern region of Spain the Muslims called al-Andalus and is still called Andalusia — now looms over far more than the new mosque's garden. And variations of "the Moor's last sigh" — the sigh the final ruler of the Alhambra supposedly gave as he gazed backward — abound.
For radical Islamists, the key note is revenge: in one of Osama bin Laden's post-9/11 broadcasts, his deputy invoked "the tragedy of al-Andalus." For Spain, which is destroying Islamic terrorist cells while welcoming a growing Muslim minority (a little over 1 percent of Spain's 40 million citizens), the note yearned for is reconciliation.
The sighs have also included a retrospective utopianism. Islamic Spain has been hailed for its "convivencia" — its spirit of tolerance in which Jews, Christians and Muslims, created a premodern renaissance. Córdoba, in the 10th century, was a center of commerce and scholarship. Arabic was a conduit between classical knowledge and nascent Western science and philosophy. The ecumenical Andalusian spirit was even invoked at this summer's opening ceremony for the new mosque.
That heritage, though, can be difficult to define. Even at the mosque, the facade of liberality gave way: at its conference on "Islam in Europe," one speaker praised al-Andalus not for its openness but for its rigorous fundamentalism. Were similar views also part of the Andalusian past?
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But as many scholars have argued, this image is distorted. Even the Umayyad dynasty, begun by Abd al-Rahman in 756, was far from enlightened. Issues of succession were often settled by force. One ruler murdered two sons and two brothers. Uprisings in 805 and 818 in Córdoba were answered with mass executions and the destruction of one of the city's suburbs. Wars were accompanied by plunder, kidnappings and ransom. Córdoba itself was finally sacked by Muslim Berbers in 1013, its epochal library destroyed.
Andalusian governance was also based on a religious tribal model. Christians and Jews, who shared Islam's Abrahamic past, had the status of dhimmis — alien minorities. They rose high but remained second-class citizens; one 11th-century legal text called them members of "the devil's party." They were subject to special taxes and, often, dress codes. Violence also erupted, including a massacre of thousands of Jews in Grenada in 1066 and the forced exile of many Christians in 1126.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
… and there's where you fall into wishful thinking. those dimwits believe the CIA took down the WTC…
All of them?
It might be wishful thinking in part, but I do think that anything that cuts into their recruitment efforts would be worthwhile. How would it hurt us to make this a secular rather than a religious conflict?
Except for the period between Exodus and the Diaspora. Take a look at the Old Testement (Torah) for how the existing inhabitants of Israel (the Canaanites) were treated. As in exterminated down to the children and farm animals
In other Muslim areas, eunichs were given authority and power too. The rationale was the same: the ruler needs capable people to help run his kingdom. But a very capable person may want to replace the King and rule outright. The solution is to choose a person who, although very competent, CANNOT assume the throne
Except for the period between Exodus and the Diaspora.
In those days (except for the Diaspora) the Jews had power, and used it to eliminate competition. Of course, it was at God’s direct command.
bttt
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