The controversy over the proposed “Cordoba House” mosque to be
built in Manhattan less than two blocks from Ground Zero is
almost enough to make me want to collar author Dan Brown
so as to ask if Robert Langdon, his fictional Harvard
“symbologist,” has time for a good cause.
What Cordoba House supporters play down is symbolism. Any
objections to their plans founded on the perceptions of Islamic
victory likely to be reinforced by constructing a building of
that size for that faith on that
particular ground are addressed condescendingly or not at
all.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and his allies keep saying
that one mission of the Cordoba House will be to advance
interfaith understanding, which makes me wonder if any other
mosque has a similar charter. You could (and should) make the
argument that this mosque is special by virtue of its location,
although saying so shreds the “nothing to see here” argument
advanced by people like
Julie Clawson, who chirped in the pages of a blog associated
with Sojourners magazine that “Basically it’s the
neighborhood YMCA with that weird contemporary ‘church plant’
meeting in the yoga room on Saturday nights.”
Riiiight. Clawson went on to write
about fear of the mysterious Other, but it was a pop-psych
caricature of the way some Christians treat Muslims, not a
mea culpa about her own attitude toward evangelical
co-religionists who suffer from what she considers freakish zeal
for church planting.
Amid the tsk-tsking about how un-Christian it is to judge
any faith by the actions of its “fringe” adherents, there is at
least one big question that more people should be asking: how do
you figure out where the fringe is in a faith without a central
authority?
Is there nothing to do but hope that Cordoba House
investors who think this mosque will “amplify the voices
of the moderate Muslims” are right? If I may pose another
question of the kind that the ever-rumpled Detective Columbo used
to ask on his way out the door, as suspects were beginning to
breathe more easily: would those investors being right violate
the laws of probability?
Some mosque supporters are cheered by the fact that the
project leader adheres to Sufi rather than Wahhabi
interpretations of the Koran, as though dabbling in the
user-friendly end of Islamic theology absolves them of the need
to call for an independent audit of the financing on a complex
that will
include a swimming pool and a 500-seat auditorium in addition
to art space and the mosque. Former New York Governor George
Pataki is one of the people
calling for more transparency in Cordoba House financing, and
he can’t be dismissed as a bigoted bogey-man of the Right. Ditto
for Rudy Giuliani, who famously rejected
a ten-million-dollar donation from the government of Saudi Arabia
in October of 2001 because it showed up with a “you had it
coming” lecture on the shortcomings of American foreign
policy.
Even the name “Cordoba House” ought to give pause. Given
the longstanding acrimony between Sunni and Shia Muslim sects,
the complex could not be named for Baghdad or Tehran. Any
reference to Riyadh would also pose problems, thanks to the
well-known Saudi penchant for funding “extremism” elsewhere as a
sop to powerful clerics who could otherwise cause political
trouble.
In other words, even in cosmopolitan Manhattan,
majority-Muslim city names apparently presented daunting image
problems for the partners in this development. As a result,
project leaders had little in the cupboard to draw from.
Nostalgic allusion was perhaps the only option left to them, and
there’s the rub: Even if you think that Newt Gingrich is a
no-account politico flogging his history degree for the sake of a
rhetorical point, the name Cordoba House harks back to an age
that ended before Christopher Columbus set sail for the New
World, and so we must peer behind the mask of time. Does anyone
else see the “Where’s Waldo?” problem in that scenario?
By modern standards, Cordoba was not all that tolerant even
at its harmonious zenith, as Dr. Andrew Bostom’s
impeccably-researched compendium,
The Legacy of Jihad, makes clear. Ibn Abdun (d. 1134)
called Jews and Christians “confederates of Satan’s party,” while
Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064) wrote that Allah has established
the infidels’ ownership of their property “merely to provide
booty for Muslims.” In other words — and this may come as hard
news for certain “symbologists” — there is more evidence for
Muslim intolerance than there is for murder by associates of Opus
Dei. Dan Brown says “albino assassin,” I say
“reconquista.”
Fortunately for all concerned, Christians and Jews don’t
have to look back eight hundred years to find examples of
peaceful coexistence. Relations between those two faiths
have been improving
since the pontificate of Pope Pius XII and the lesser-known but
inspiring example of brotherhood from the Protestant, Catholic,
and Jewish chaplains who
sacrificed their lives together when the troop transport
Dorchester was torpedoed by a German submarine in
1943.
History seems lost on Mayor Bloomberg and his allies, who
have nothing to say about Catholic pharmacists forced to dispense
abortificiants, but don’t hesitate to smear mosque opponents as
bigots opposed to freedom of religion. Some pundits also accuse
the critics of Cordoba House of “renouncing pluralism” or trying
to confine religions to ghettos. These shameless exercises in
motive-finding lack corroborating
evidence.
But Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t have to win the argument; he
just has to buy time for the banks and the backhoes. He can frame
Cordoba House construction in terms of tolerance, or
religious freedom, or jobs for New Yorkers, or private property
rights, and almost everything he says on the subject counts as
misdirection, the political equivalent of breaking into “Oh look!
A squirrel!” or (better yet) “Hey soul sister,
Ain’t that Mister Mister on the radio?”
I said this was a fight over symbols. In that respect, it’s
not unlike the controversy over the curiously crescent-shaped
memorial proposed for the field in Pennsylvania where heroic
airline passengers foiled another set of hijackers on September
11, 2001. What’s needed now is not another mindless swipe at
“bigotry” or an essay about the notably un-Islamic virtues of
separating of church and state, but attention to the niceties of
neighborly behavior: “Sense and Sensibility,” you might say. And
while “Professor Robert Langdon” and his academic discipline are
fictional, any number of advice columnists, marketing executives,
liturgists, and drill sergeants know about symbols, also. Perhaps
they — we — can help Cordoba House backers extricate
themselves from the mother of all faux pas.
