The proposed Cordoba House, a Muslim community center, a couple blocks from Ground Zero is sure kicking up a shitstorm. The Anti-Defamation League came out against the project with a statement saying, "We're all for religious tolerance, but this place has to go or go somewhere else." Joining the ADL are such luminaries as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich wrote in his opposition:
The proposed "Cordoba House" overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks - is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex. [...I]n fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest. It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.
This whole Cordoba-as-symbol-of-Muslim-victory thing was echoed by godless comic now Internet ranter Pat Condell. Condell posts his anti-Islam diatribes on YouTube and he used to be funny. Now he's transmogrified into a paranoid old man going around telling people to read Muslim Mafia, the work of two paranoid racists and published by World Nut Daily. He inveighed against the Cordoba House in "The enemy within". In the video he says:
...Cordoba is the city in southern Spain where Muslims built their first great mosque at the start of and as a symbol of their conquest of Spain. The Ground Zero mosque is intended to serve the same purpose in America.
Carl Pyrdum, a medieval scholar takes issue with this view of Cordoba and takes on Gingrich, specifically this part: 'the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex".
Notice how carefully he's phrased his claim to give the impression that during the medieval conquest of Spain the Muslims charged into Cordoba and declared it the capital of a new Muslim empire, and in order to add insult to injury seized control of a Christian church and built the biggest mosque they could, right there in front of the Christians they'd just conquered, a big Muslim middle finger in the heart of medieval Christendom. Essentially, they've done it before, they'll do it again, right there at Ground Zero, if all good Christians don't band together to stop them.
The problem is, in order to give that impression of immediacy, Newt elides three hundred years of Christian and Muslim history. Three hundred years. The Muslims conquered Cordoba in 712. The Christian church that was later transformed into the Great Mosque of Cordoba apparently continued hosting Christian worship for at least a generation after that. Work on the Mosque didn't actually begin until seventy-odd years later in 784, and the mosque only became "the world's third-largest" late in the tenth century, after a series of expansions by much later rulers, probably around 987 or so.
Furthermore:
The mosque was indeed begun in the wake of a Muslim conquest--just not the conquest of the Christians. Rather, it was ordered built by the Umayyad emir Abd-ar-Ramman I, probably in part to commemorate his successful conquest of Cordoba in the 750's, fought against other Muslim chieftains loyal to the rival Abbasid Caliphate, and his successful repulsion of subsequent Abbasid attempts to dislodge him by force throughout the 760's.
Emphasis his.
Cordoba was quite egalitarian for its time with Christians, Jews, and Muslims all living together. When the Christians eventually took firm control, they banished Jews and Muslims alike.
7 comments:
Storm of comedy music duo Paul and Storm had a great tweet a couple of weeks back. I can't find the original, but it was along the lines of "A mosque near Ground Zero? That would be like letting Japanese-Americans live on Hawaii!"
The sheer horror of it all.
Uh, if you are interested in facts and accuracy, perhaps you should identify Carl Pyrdum as a grad student, hardly a medieval scholar.
Anonymous - Uh, have you ever used a dictionary before? If not, try it sometime and lookup "scholar" because dictionaries are a good source of accurate facts. Let me do it for you. Here are the definitions from Merriam Webster:
1 : a person who attends a school or studies under a teacher : pupil
2 a : a person who has done advanced study in a special field b : a learned person
3 : a holder of a scholarship
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scholar
Palmer,
How clever of you to use a dictionary definition to parse and spin so nimbly (hey, wow!, just like the supporters of the Mosque are so cute with their phrasing of why they want to inflame so much outrage and demonstrate so little regard for the sensibilities of Americans!), obscuring your plain intent to impute with your use of the word 'scholar' more 'authority' on Mr. Pyrdum than would a more accurate description of him as "Carl Pyrdum, a graduate student of medieval studies, ...".
how about using Princeton's definition of 'scholar' ... a learned person (especially in the humanities); someone who by long study has gained mastery in one or more disciplines ? nope, that doesn't seem to fit a 'grad student' very well ... how about "learner: someone (especially a child) who learns (as from a teacher) or takes up knowledge or beliefs" ... maybe this is what you meant?
a student who holds a scholarship ... I guess this is true if Mr. Pyrdum is 'on scholarship', and not on his own Riyal.
Anon - What have you got against dictionaries? There's nothing clever about offering a definition. The guy is going for his PhD:
http://www.yale.edu/medieval/gradstudents.html
...and you don't think that counts as "a person who has done advanced study in a special field"? Seriously? Being a PhD candidate means he's done all remedial 099 level courses to you? His dissertation title is "Before Arthur: Uther’s Generation in the Arthurian of England, France, and Germany" and you still think the guy's a complete neophyte.
Don't try and tell me what my intent was just because you don't know what the definition of "scholar" is and have had your poor little sensibilities hurt. I'll tell you what my intent was: to imply that the guy knows a bit about medieval history - certainly much more than the average Joe going around blathering about what Cordoba symbolized to Muslims - and that he can thusly speak with some authority. And its an authority that neither Newt Gingrich nor Pat Condell has.
Yeah, let's use Princeton's def. (which is also given by MW - see 2b) If you don't think a PhD candidate should be considered a "learned person", then that's your delusion.
So, are you challenging what Pyrdum wrote? Do you have a PhD in the medieval history of Spain to dispute anything he said?
Or is quibbling over your preferred connotation of the word "scholar" the best you and your hurt sensibilities have?
More: Even Ted Olson, whose wife died in the 9/11 attacks does "not oppose" the project.
I can see the project as being insensitive to some. But the only thing I have at stake here is government coercion. It's private property - whatever happened to conservatives valuing private property and the actions of private citizens? I do not want the government stopping it's none of the government's business.
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