This AsiaNews story about the Muslim request to pray in the Cordoba Cathedral contains several important details. One is that Muslims already pray there.
The article also reveals the openness of many Muslims about the desire to make Spain Muslim again. As Abderrahman Muhammad Manan wrote, "In its essence Alhama is Islam in our land, as is Al-Andalus, Andalucia; it is the remembrance of a colonization, of a genocide, of an expulsion." He doesn't mean, of course, the colonization by Muslims of Christian Spain in the eighth century and thereafter, but the reconquest, which he rejects as illegitimate.
I recently spoke to a man who had recently come from Spain; he told me that he spoke to at least one Spaniard who was fatalistic: will Spain be Muslim again? "Of course!" (Thanks to Nicolei for the link.)
Cordoba (AsiaNews/IslamOnline) – “We don’t need to ask for the Vatican’s intercession (to pray in Cordoba Cathedral) since it is a historical site,” Munir Al-Musiri of The Islamic Cultural Center of Madrid (ICCM) told IslamOnline. “This is nonsense, I myself have prayed there many times.” Some Muslims deny that they have need to seek permission from Rome to worship in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Cordoba, the city which had been the heart of Moorish Spain in the eighth century, the church which once had been one of Islam’s holiest mosques. ...Zakarias Maza, director of the Taqwa mosque in nearby Granada expressed, “We hope the Vatican will give a sign that it has a vision of openness and dialogue… Cordoba has been a symbol of the union of three cultures for centuries. Even now, Jews and Muslims live together with Christians in the neighborhood around the mosque.”
Local politicians also backed the move. Antonio Hurtado, a spokesman for the local Socialist party told El Mundo, “We hope to see Cordoba become a place for the meeting of the faiths.”
Yet Musiri stated he had no idea a national Islamic group besides the ICCM existed in Spain. He believes the request was brought forward by individuals who “were in no position to speak for the entire Muslim community in Spain.” Fearing that this type of individual initiative would spark a certain “Islamophobia” during today’s sensitive times, Musiri cautioned, “It will play well in the hand of some people and western media, which could add fuel to the fire and say Muslims want to re-conquer Al-Andalus (Spain).”
How can he deny that at least some want to do this?
Some of Spain’s Catholic’s have been angered by the proposal that Muslims share their worship space. “Will Christians be able to pray in the mosques of Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Kuwait?” one Catholic demanded on a religious website.A member of the Islamic Council of Spain, Isabel Romero, stated her perspective of the motion. “In no way is this request about reclaiming our right, far less about any kind of re-conquest,” she told a local newspaper. “Instead, we want to give our support to the universal character of this building.” ...
On March 3rd, however, a different picture was painted, when as Sunday Mass barely concluded, participants of the Third International Congress of Moslem Woman attempted to perform a communal prayer before the mihrab, challenging staff that tried to impede the forbidden act of worship, actions that would most likely bring the death of any Christian attempting the same in a mosque in a Muslim country.
Recently, a prominent Spanish Muslim, Abderrahman Muhammad Manan, wrote that the ancient mosque should be freed and that, "We Moslems cannot stand behind, saying that Islam is not stones or monuments. To do so is to not give account of what things are in their essences, and in its essence Alhama is Islam in our land, as is Al-Andalus, Andalucia; it is the remembrance of a colonization, of a genocide, of an expulsion.” Alhama and Andalucia are areas in Spain with much Islamic history.
Those who continue to pander to the myth of a golden age in Andalucia, such as Maria Rosa Menocal, where "convivencia" meant Muslim rule and massacres and persecution of Christians and Jews punctuated this "glorious" past, should read the scholar Levi-Provencal on the subject, before further pronouncements are made. The refusal of Europeans to take seriously the mind-set of many Muslims, the refusal to believe that they really mean that, while ultimately all of dar al-Harb must be conquered and subjugated to Islam, in priority the recovery of those lands, whatever they are, and whoever lives on them, which were once under Muslim rule.
The inability of the Europeans to fathom this may partly be due to the failure of Israel to make clear that what it faces, and has always faced, is not a conflict between "two tiny peoples, etc." but a classic Jihad, waged by the Arabs, and by those Muslims most affected by Arab propaganda (i.e. Pakistanis, but not Kemalist Turks, and Pehlevi but not Khomeini Persians). By allowing themselves not to see the real nature of the problem (possibly because Israel's political establishment for the first few decades was mostly from Europe, not from the Arab countries, and had as little understanding of Islam as Western leaders -- including our own -- do today)--the Israelis not only fell into the trap of allowing the Jihad to be disguised as a manageable and compromiseable conflict, one where negotiations and "treaties" had some meaning, beyond their strategic value to the (temporarily)weaker Muslim side.
Failing to recognize the Jihad, and failing to understand Muslim tenets, the Israelis presented two kinds of arguments in their own defense. One was the argument from history; they noted how empty and desolate "Palestine" had been, after centuries of depopulation; they also noted how many Arabs entered Mandatory Palestine -- more Arabs than Jews; some even did the research and discovered just how many of the ancestors of the "Palestinian people" (newly-invented after the 1967 war) were in fact arrivals in the 19th century, from the thousands of Algerian troops of Abd el Kader, to those of Mehmet Ali, to the Muslims whom, left behind in Bulgaria and other areas as Ottoman Muslim rule receded in Europe, were transferred by the Ottomans to the emptiest part of their empire -- Palestine. But this does not matter; nor do borders. Essentially, the territory of modern Israel was once part of dar al-Islam, and that is all that matters -- even if the Israelis could prove that there was not a single Muslim living west of the Jordan by 1850, this would, from a Muslim point of view, be irrelevant to the Muslim claim to this land. It is the same in Spain today. It was once Muslim, and it is no accident that Bin Laden in his first tapes spoke more than once about Al-Andalus, just as it is no accident that his very first inquiry, after the 9/11 attacks, was about the number of Dutch converts to Islam. Unlike the West, where every sort of plausible and implausible "theory" is offered except for what is staring everyone in the face, Islam is rational and coherent in its geopolitical goals, and in the instruments for obtaining those goals -- of which the emphasis on "terrorism" and lack of attention to economic, propagandistic, and demographic instruments of Jihad are proving so wasteful and unsatisfactory.
It is amazing to see a fatalism in Europe about all this -- so many people, so unhappy, without any leaders to express that unhappiness or to rouse them, except for those so unpleasant, such as Le Pen, that no one wants to have anything to do with them. (If Le Pen is not yet in the pay of the Muslims, he really ought to be, for in France he is the single greatest obstacle to any discussion of immigration limits and expulsion of those many who are in, but wilfully not of, France).
A thoroughly modern El Cid Campeador will have to wield not a sword, but books on Islam, and patents for alternative energy and energy-saving discoveries, and legislation about zoning (for mosques), hate-speech (for the content of khutbas), immigration, family and criminal law, and he will sit quietly at a desk, behind a computer, unlike the original El Cid, that hero on a horse.
RE: Cordoba,Palestine,etc.
If one willonly take the trouble to READ ALL of the Qur'an and ALL the most relevant parts of the HADITH,one may, as I did, come to the conclusion
that Islam is not in fact,a "religion".It was,is and will continue to be, a GEO-POLITICAL MOVEMENT--POWER-GRAB,LAND-GRAB.It is essentialy an unending struggle for "turf", to use mafia jargon.
The "religion"in Islam is simply a salsa of kidnapped, distorted,misinterpreted Judaism with
a brief ,perfunctory nod to a minimalist Christianity.
If one wants to get a well researched examination of Jihad and specifically how it played out in Spain, I would recommend reading Paul Fregosi's book "Jihad."
Contrary to what most muslim apologist say about Jihad today, the book gives a very sobering and disturbing account of how Jihad was practiced by Mohammed and throughout the centuries.
The behavior and attitude of the muslim women in the Cathedral is reprehensible. It is hypocritical to say that Islam is tolerant of other religions and then disrupt a religious ceremony because of the misquided notion that because it was once a mosque you have a right to pray there.
Such behavior would not be tolerated if Christians were to go into mosques that were once Churches and hold a prayer service.
John
Spain requires another cleansing.
I can sum it up: muslims are like children. Like when a child doesn't get his way he will give his mother a sad look, when muslims don't get their way they innocently say "but, but, but, it's just my religion, I don't want to hurt anyone."
And like children who think they have fooled their parents into getting their way, so too do muslims think they have fooled the world when they get their way.
The child-parent analogy can be carried further--like children look to their parents for guidance, muslims too must look to the West for innovation, leadership and morality- for both child and muslim when left to their own rules certainly make foolish ones.
And finally, like children who have sufficiently irritated their parents get punished, so too will muslims be punished when the world has had enough. The world is not dumb, it's just tolerant to children.
Hmmm...Spainish Catholics giving the muslims trouble...perhaps another train blast will presuade them...worked the first time...I guess they will now start to realize that they let the terrorists get their way...they will get their way every time with them...hope those pretty senoritas will like their new head to toe black garments...this cult is spreading like cancer.
I find it very cynical that the muslim women were sent in there. If it were a mosque, wouldn't they be hustled in through a trap doo round the back for fear of offending the men folk ?