April 19, 2004
Reclaiming the mosque at Cordoba
Muslims across Spain are lobbying the Roman Catholic church in the southern city of Córdoba to make a symbolic gesture of reconciliation between faiths by allowing them to pray in the city's cathedral.From the Guardian. It would appear many Spanish Christians are not overly sympathetic to this rather selective ecumenicism:Córdoba's renaissance cathedral sits in the centre of an ancient mosque complex, and local Muslims want to be allowed to pray there again. They have appealed to the Vatican to intercede on their behalf.
Zakarias Maza, the director of the Taqwa mosque in neighbouring Granada, said yesterday: "We hope the Vatican will give a signal that it has a vision of openness and dialogue. It would be good if there were a gesture of tolerance on their part.
"Will Christians be able to pray in the mosques of Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Kuwait?" demanded one contributor to a Catholic website. "Muslims should practise what they preach!"The better comparison to Cordoba's Christianized mosque, however, would be the many now-Islamicized Judeo-Christian religious sites of the former eastern Roman Empire -- most prominently, Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
Posted by David on April 19, 2004 3:11 PM
Or Damascus's Great Mosque -- which is built over the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist.
This is NOT going to fly.
Posted by: Michael Tinkler on April 19, 2004 4:50 PM
Although technically a post-mosque, it would be nice to see the Hagia Sophia returned to Christendom.
Posted by: Rooster on April 20, 2004 3:52 AM
H. Sophia? Not likely -- there was quite a fuss just last year over the decision to hold a concert there, and a rather exclusive one at that.
The number of mosques-that-used-to-be-churches in Turkey is large indeed -- ask your local Byzantinist!
Posted by: David on April 20, 2004 9:43 AM
I'll finally believe that Muslims are harmless when Mass is celebrated in the Hagia Sophia again.
Until that time, forget it.
Posted by: eric on April 20, 2004 4:12 PM
cronaca.com