If built as its founders intend, what a relentless media blitz has ginned up as the "Ground Zero Mosque," will be called the Cordoba House. An odd pundit or two mentions that Cordoba "invokes tolerance," but almost no one has commented about what Cordoba was and what it means to Western Muslims.
This is sad. Cordoba under Muslim rule hints at what the Western inclusion of Muslims can accomplish.
Cordoba was the capital of Al Andalus, Muslim Spain, during the height of its commercial and cultural expansion in the eighth and ninth century. Cordoba demonstrates that we need look no further than the West for a spectacular experiment in a flourishing polity that included Muslims, various Christian sects, and Jews.
Some may object that the name glorifies the Muslim conquest of the West. Since Muslims are now routinely compared to Nazi genocidaires, I guess this would be a pretty benign objection. It would also be wrong. Cordoba reached its pinnacle only after the Franks checked and then pushed back the surge of Muslim arms starting at the Battle of Poitier/Tours in 732.
Cordoba blossomed after 750. At this time, most Europeans lived savagely, grunting and dragging women around by the hair, in awe of the crumbling buildings of the ancients. Rude workmen labored to pull down the marble blocks of ruins to convert them in the lime kilns of Rome.
Anyone who visits the Roman Forum can still see scars from rope cables meant to topple the columns of the Temple of Antonius and Faustina. Yet such was the backwardness of Medieval Europeans that those columns still stand firm, ringing round a Renaissance church built over five-hundred years after Roman pagans consecrated the original temple.
The medieval, barbarous West could not even muster the technological means to destroy what Roman architects had wrought with routine dexterity half a millennium before.
What a contrast to Cordoba. Abd al-Rahmen I established his rule there after fleeing political upheaval in the Arab heartlands. His Friday Mosque employed lacy, pointed arches centuries before this innovation appeared in Gothic architecture.
Al-Rahmen I was a scion of the Umayyad dynasty that ruled the Islamic empire after the Shi'a-Sunni split sundered the fist Caliphate. He founded his emirate at the very time that a new dynasty moved the capital of the Islamic world from Damascus to Baghdad. He escaped almost certain assassination in Damascus when his family fled to Spain, the outback of the empire.
Although deposed in Arab heartlands, the Umayyads ruled for a splendid quarter millennium in Spain. They presided over a polyglot, cosmopolitan society. During this era, the Christian kingdoms of the Franks, the Merovingians and Carolingians, typically embarked upon holy wars, not Al Andalus.
The modern-day economies of Syria or Iraq present a grim picture. They compare unfavorably to countries like Angola, Belarus, or Kazakstan, and without oil, the Arab heartlands would compare even less favorably. In per capita terms, a citizen of poor Caribbean countries like Jamaica and Cuba are over twice as wealthy as those of the great cities of Damascus or Baghdad today.
But a thousand years ago, Cordoba was the Westernmost anchor of a global economy born by Muslim caravans. They stretched over the Silk Road through the Eurasian steppes and along the northern coast of Africa. In Spanish markets, merchants traded rare fabrics, precious metals, glass, and spices for currency.
Among the goods heatedly exchanged in the streets of Cordoba was also knowledge. A flourishing intellectual life served as a transmission belt of ancient texts from Greece and Rome over the Pyrenees into the Kingdom of the Franks and the Papacy.
In Christian Europe, by contrast, markets were almost wholly local. Exchange took place in barter unchanged since tribal times. Even in Charlemagne's grand capital of Aachen at the dawn of the 9th century, coins were struck mostly as ornamental gifts, not units of money. Charlemagne had to scavenge rare stone for his throne room from blocks quarried in Roman times. Some, like the purple porphyry, were no longer quarried anywhere in Europe.
And although Charlemagne is celebrated as reclaiming the glory of ancient Rome for Europe, his empire collapsed quickly after his death. By contrast, Umayyad Spain endured for hundreds of years.
But a millennium can work mysterious reversals. No dynasties last forever, and the House of al-Rahmen I eventually collapsed in factionalism, infighting, and invasion at its borders.
Meanwhile, the backwards, savage, and religiously intolerant Christian West emerged as the birthplace of capitalist expansion, the political experiment of mass democracy, and civil rights, among them religious tolerance.
The erstwhile Islamic Empire is now a patchwork of despotism, economic stultification, and civil war. These include culture wars of religion in which stoning and beheading persist as grisly performances of devotion to the cause.
The Cordoba Initiative is a counterpoint to this violence and extremism. It seeks to recapture the legacy of Islam as it existed in the West during its Golden Era, an era not of "clashing civilizations" but of their commingling, coruscating efflorescence.
How can the this desecrate the memory of September 11th? And how can that which seeks to recapture Islamic Spain challenge "Western Civilization" when it is, in fact, part of the West. We have everything to gain from a movement that seeks a Renaissance of Islam's Western Civilization.