The Mosque

In the seventh century an Arabian merchant and shepherd, Muhammad ibn Abdullah, claimed he had received revelations from God to restore monotheistic religion. The content of these revelations were memorized and recorded by his companions as the Koran. From this creed sprang the practice of Islam, which spread quickly across the desert peninsula by the time of his death in 632.

Six years later Syria and Palestine fell to Islam. With its capital in Damascus, Muslim armies fanned eastward through Mesopotamia to India and Central Asia, westward to the Nile and across North Africa. From North Africa in 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Muslim general, crossed the straits of Gibraltar with soldiers and horses in four borrowed boats. Once on European soil, he dispatched the four-boat fleet back to ferry the rest of his army, and then assembled his 12,000 Muslims, which history has called Moors, to conquer Spain – a conquest that would last 900 years before they would be expelled by King Ferdinand III.

South of Cadiz, the invaders met the hastily gathered forces of Spain's Visigoth king, Roderic. "Before us is the enemy; behind us, the sea," shouted General Tariq, drawing his scimitar. "We have only one choice: to win!" King Roderic was killed, and the Moors – who were North African converts to Islam led by Arabs from Damascus and Medina – moved on to capture Cordoba in 716. Fifty years later Cordoba became the capital of the independent Muslim emirate of al-Andalus, later a Caliphate itself.

The Islamic Emir Abd ar-Rahman I modified the Christian Visigothic church of St. Vincent to become the great Mosque (Mezquita in Spanish) of Cordoba whose completion required two hundred years of construction. When finished, it was the most magnificent of the more than 1,000 mosques in Cordoba. The Mezquita held an original copy of the Koran and allegedly an arm bone of the prophet Mohammed, making it a significant Muslim pilgrimage site.

The Reconquista to expel the Moors was waged for nearly 800 years. By the thirteenth century, the sole remaining Moors were the Nasrid dynasty in the Kingdom of Granada. They were defeated in 1492, which brought the entire Iberian Peninsula under Christian rule, thus completing the Reconquista.

In 1236, Cordoba was recaptured from the Moors by King Ferdinand III of Castile and rejoined Christendom. The Christians initially left the architecture of Mezquita as it was and simply consecrated it, dedicated it to the Virgin Mary, and used it as a place of Christian worship. The kings who followed, however, added further Christian features. In the 14th century a chapel was built in the center of the mosque. Today it exists as a Christian church known as Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.

The Cordoba Mosque, as this brief recap shows, was a significant monument in the westward conquests of Islam. Therefore, when it was recently announced that the New York City zoning authorities had cleared the way for a 152 year-old building to be demolished and replaced with a $100 million, 15-story Islamic cultural center and mosque only 600 feet from the former site of the World Trade Center Towers, and that the project name was the Cordoba Initiative, the public reaction was predictable.

Opponents of the mosque are accused of being bigots and tea party wing nuts. Supporters are accused of being naïve enablers of a highly symbolic project – a deliberate effort by foreign investors and powers to show dominance near a spot hallowed by the mass murder of innocents. Here’s my take.

That a particular spot can take on a sacred quality is not unique to Ground Zero. One cannot stand on the Gettysburg Battlefield, the Pearl Harbor Memorial, or the Normandy Beaches and not be awed by what happened there. Building a mosque near Ground Zero is wrong and it should be possible to protest it without being called a bigot or Islamaphobe.

Religious tolerance is a two-way street. Muslims don’t get this. There are about 2,000 mosques in the US and countless other houses of worship. There are no Christian churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. Or Iran. Or Egypt. Or most Muslim countries. So who’s intolerant?

Americans do not whip and stone women for adultery as Iran does, cut off the nose and ears of a woman for running away from an abusive marriage as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, or cut off the hand of a thief as was done is Saudi Arabia. So who’s intolerant?

There are 30 mosques in New York City. It’s not like another is needed within two short blocks of ground hallowed by the slaughter of 3,000 innocents. What if a Serbian Orthodox Church was proposed on the ground where 8,000 Muslims were killed in Srebrenica, or a Japanese group planned a Shinto shrine near the Pearl Harbor memorial, or a German cultural center were proposed in sight of the remains of the Auschwitz extermination camp? Would there be a reaction? Would it be justified? In fact a Carmelite convent near Auschwitz caused such cri de coeur among Jews who thought it “Christianized” the Holocaust that Pope John Paul ordered it relocated – notwithstanding its good intentions of the nuns to pray for the souls of the Jews who died there.

Enter Michael Bloomberg. When it was revealed that the Times Square car bomber was Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani, Bloomberg felt compelled to do his best imitation of an inner city school principal and warn New Yorkers that there would be no toleration of retribution against Pakistanis or Muslims. No matter that there had not been a single incident of retributional violence against a Middle Easterner from the time of the 9/11 attack to the present.

So it wasn’t surprising that the pietistic Bloomberg, against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty and surrounded by ministers of various faiths, rose in high dungeon to pontificate about the decision to build the mosque 600 feet from Ground Zero and exhort New Yorkers to be tolerant. Yet in this and other comments Bloomberg has made, it is apparent that he has gone beyond advocating tolerance and has become a proponent of the mosque. “I happen to think this is a very appropriate place for somebody who wants to build a mosque, because it tells the world that America and New York City really believe in what we preach.” Who in this world, Mr. Mayor, needs the reassurance of which you speak?

Unfortunately for them, Mayor Bloomberg is not an advocate for the congregants of Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was once directly across the street from the World Trade Center until the collapse of Tower 2 flattened it. Plans to rebuild the church two blocks from its original location were blocked by the New York Port Authority which objected to its 24,000 sq. ft. footprint and its traditional grand dome that the Authority said couldn’t rise above the planned WTC memorial. Curiously, the Authority had no problem with the 15-story cultural center and mosque.

A recent Quinnipiac poll showed that New York City residents oppose building the mosque and Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero by 52% to 31%. A Rasmussen poll shows 54% of the nation is opposed to its building. One of the most surprising opponents is the liberal Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group, which issued a statement saying that while the Muslim organizers had the right to build, the specific site is “counterproductive to the healing process.”

If the people behind the Ground Zero mosque were really interested in improving Islam’s image, they would build the planned mosque somewhere else. They were offered another location and turned it down. They would be respectful of the sensitive nature of Ground Zero in the American psyche. They aren’t. One has to wonder why. Either they are witless or else they know exactly what they are doing.

Daisy Khan, the wife of Feisal Abdul Rauf and a partner in the Cordoba Project, conceded in a recent NPR interview that Islam had been hijacked by the extremists, and this center is going to create counter-momentum which will amplify the voices of the moderate Muslims.” Yet her husband refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is a terrorist organization. “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question,” Rauf said. But while he can’t quite bring himself to grapple with the complexities of blaming terrorists for being terrorists, he has no problem blaming America for being the target for terrorism: “I wouldn’t say that the United States deserved what happened [on 9/11], but the United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened.”

Andrew McCarthy, a writer for the National Review, has documented that Imam Feisal Rauf”s book, What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America, has a very different title when published abroad: A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post 9/11. “Dawa” means Islamic proselytizing – which means imposing sharia law in this country. The book was published by the Muslim Brotherhood, sponsors of Islamic terrorism, particularly Hamas.

The Muslim Brotherhood, by the way, is not a nice organization. Its founder, Hasan al-Banna, said: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” It believes in the radical application of jihad against America and Israel. In 1991, its American leadership prepared a mission statement calling for a grand jihad to destroy Western civilization from the inside so that Islam is victorious over all other religions. Feisal Rauf”s father was a member of this organization.

Feisal Rauf won’t reveal the source of the funding for the $100 million Cordoba Project, which is one concern of those opposed to it. In particular, they want to know if Saudi money is involved, since Saudi Arabia is the seat of Wahhabi radicalism. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute has shown how Wahhabi hate literature and educational materials have made it into American mosques, encouraging Muslims to spill the blood of infidels and Jews. Ironically, if Saudi money is substantially involved, the same people who funded the 9/11 radicals who created Ground Zero will have helped build the mosque that outrages the families of its victims.

It is also troubling that one of Feisal Rauf’s partners, Sharif el-Gamal, who provided the $5 million to purchase the property for the Islamic cultural center and mosque, is in his 30s and was waiting tables a few years ago in New York City restaurants before becoming a multi-million dollar real estate investor. He is the one who holds the title to the property and says a yet to be created nonprofit will control the Islamic center. Rauf is one of 23 directors whose names el-Gamal declines to reveal as well as the name of the center’s Executive Director. Regardless of Rauf’s vision for the cultural center and mosque, he isn’t in charge; el-Gamal is, and one has to wonder how so young a man could come into so much money in so short a period of time unless it was given to him for a purpose.

America’s culture of religious toleration renders it unable to prevent the construction of mosques that become centers of preaching Islamic supremacy and create a fertile ground for producing future jihadists. The Washington Islamic Center in the nation’s capital distributed a tract calling for the death of apostates, homosexuals, and infidels (Americans.) The Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque near LAX in Los Angles distributed radical literature and was the place where two of the 9/11 hijackers went when they arrived in America. The Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn promoted jihad through literature and the sermons of Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheik, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia was constructed with the help of the Saudi embassy and has a history of radical connections including Anwar al-Awlaki who helped radicalize Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian “underwear” bomber, and six radicals who planned to “kill as many soldiers as possible" in Fort Dix several years ago.

The adherents to Islam know its history. They will understand the significance of building a mosque virtually on top of the site where 3,000 people died at the hands of Islamic radicals. They understand the symbolism of Cordoba.

Thomas Mann, the German novelist, once said, “Tolerance is a crime when applied to evil.” He was speaking of the rise of Nazism in Germany, but it remains good advice when applied to those who exploit American freedom to do us harm.