It appears that Muslims want Christians to share their holy places.  It sounds so warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? Why can’t we all just get along? From Christianity Today:

Mansur Escudero, who is leading the push for Muslims to pray at the Cathedral, said the issue is not only important for Muslims but for humankind.

The Spanish convert to Islam told CNN recently that the sharing of Cordoba Cathedral would be “a beautiful paradigm of tolerance, knowledge, culture”.

“We want it to be a place where anyone – whether Muslim, Christian or Jew – can do his meditation or his internal way of worshipping, or praying or whatever he wants to call it,” he added.

Neat! But let’s start with a much older religious site where people can’t pray, just to set a good example, shall we? How about we start by letting Jews pray at the holiest site in their religion, on Temple Mount?

From Cubachi we learn today that the effort to reverse the Reconquista goes on. Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula, forcing conversion of much of the population of Spain and Portugal to Islam. Various European Christian powers spent the next 800 years getting it back. (I have touched on this history before in “The Right to Feel Offended.”) During the time that Islam was the local religion there were many mosques built, but the last great mosque in Spain was in Cordoba, once capitol of al-Andalus, and the capitol of the last area under Muslim control, the Emirate of Grenada.

Cubachi’s piece is about Muslims in Spain who want the right to worship in Spain’s Cordoba Cathedral. Her first paragraph is a great summary:

Hat tip to Raymond Arroyo on twitter. This is utterly insane, and an affront to Christianity. Muslims should leave Christian churches alone. They have their mosques and Christian have their churches. But this is more of a conquer issue. The Cordoba Cathedral is now being used as a political football by Muslims in Spain. They are pushing Catholic leaders to allow them to worship in this specific Catholic church.

The key to the Muslim argument seems to be that it was a mosque first. This ignores the fact that that the original structure was the Church of Saint Vincent. With the Visigothic Kingdom eliminated it was a simple matter for the Emir to arrange to buy the church. The monastery was closed and the site was reworked over the next couple of centuries into a mosque.

So if Christians should share this church turned mosque turned church again, shouldn’t the Muslims be willing to share their Temple turned mosque turned church turned mosque again? Most believe that the Dome of the Rock sits where the Second Temple (aka Herod’s Temple) stood, though there are other suggested locations on Temple Mount. Surely allowing Jews and Christians to worship within the Dome of the Rock would be ”a beautiful paradigm of tolerance, knowledge, culture” as the earlier advocate of sharing the cathedral in Cordoba put it.

Gosh, such NICE words. Let’s start with sharing the Dome of the Rock. Even if you believe the alternate theories about where the Second Temple stood both the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque would have been within the temple complex. Tradition places the Hall of Solomon at the current location of the Al-Asqa mosque. And Justinian once built a church on the site too, so Christians should be able to share the Al-Aqsa Mosque too.

Tolerance is a two way street, or it is nothing more than a demand that you get your own way. If you want to build bridges that are functional the bridge must be anchored on both banks, or else the bridge collapses.

Try making these words fit the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque and we’ll know you’re sincere:

“We want it to be a place where anyone – whether Muslim, Christian or Jew – can do his meditation or his internal way of worshipping, or praying or whatever he wants to call it,” he added.

Related posts: (automatically generated)

1. The Right To Feel Offended