Blogmocracy in Action

Guest Poster: Guggi

Guggi debunks the lie about how Cordoba was a center of tolerance.

This sentence of Gingrich caught his special attention:

“the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.”

He answers:

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.

I) Nowhere does Gingrich say that the Mosque was the third largest from the very beginning. As with a lot of buildings the Mosque expanded over the centuries, since more and more Christians converted to Islam.

II) It is correct that in the first decades both (Muslims and Christians) used the former church of St. Vincent. With the Muslim forces Arab Christians came to Cordoba from North Africa as well as converts of mixed Christian/Muslim marriages. The use of both Religions of the church created a new social class: Mozarabs. But the use for Christians was limited, they were not allowed to sing their hymns or to ring the church bells.

III) The original invaders, Arabs and Berbers, were nomads. Their goal was to plunder not to build mosques or anything else (the word Arab means nomad). They used what was already there and only later they became settled.

He goes on:

Then there’s the matter of the two odd verbs in Newt’s summation of Cordoba’s history: “transformed” and “symbolized”. Surely, a mosque as great as The Great Mosque of Cordoba has symbolized a lot of things to a lot of people over the years. But Muslim historians writing about the Great Mosque don’t point to it as a symbol of Muslim triumph over Christians; rather, they treat it primarily as a symbol of Muslim victory over other Muslims.

I couldn’t find a source for this statement but I can quote another one:

When the victor returned to Cordoba the Moslems were greeted with the sight of a host of Christian captives carrying the bells of Santiago and the doors of the Cathedral on their shoulders through the streets. These finely wrought doors were placed in the Mosque, and the bells seem to have been turned into lampholders. The display of these trophies and the large number of Christian prisoners, who were put to work on the extensions being made to the Mosque, convinced the Moslems that the final rout of the enemies of Islam had taken place. (Enrique Sordo, Moorish Spain: Cordoba, Seville, Granada (London: Elek Books, 1963), p. 51)

Does this look like a symbol of Muslim victory over other Muslims ?

I don’t have the time to point to other questionable claims but this one is interesting:

This is, incidentally, probably why the Great Mosque–unlike almost every other Mosque in the Muslim world–is built facing south. Usually, Mosques are built facing Mecca, as Muslims are meant to pray towards the holy city. But the Great Mosque is oriented as if it were actually built in Damascus, the original capital of the Umayyads and the city from which abd-ar-Ramman had had to flee in exile when it was conquered by the Abbasids. Damascus is north of Mecca, while Cordoba is much further west. By pointing his Mosque south, Abd-ar-Ramman I was telling his Muslim rivals, “This exile to Iberia is a temporary thing; you may hold Damascus for now, but in the eyes of our god, my family still controls it.”

Not the Mosques are built facing Mecca but the “mihrab” and therefore a more reasonable explanation would be:

The Mosque of Abd al-Rahman I had eleven naves running from north to south, and because the walls of the Christian basilica were used the mihrab was set facing south and not on the azimuth of Mecca. In the years that followed the building underwent several alterations and extensions. Under Abd al-Rahman II the wall at the southern end was built in order to lengthen the naves; this involved the transfer of the mihrab to the end of the new wall. The present façade was erected in the reign of Abd al-Rahman III along the north side, with pillars and horse-shoe arches. This façade had become necessary to strengthen the northern end, designed only for the old structure, which threatened to collapse because the earlier alterations had lengthened the naves excessively and these were open to the courtyard at this point. (p. 41)

Btw.: the Great Umyyad Mosque in Damascus is also built on the structures of a church. And there too at the very beginning Christians were allowed to pray there. To point to the resemblance of the two Mosques doesn’t say anything about the dominance of Islam over Christendom. On the contrary: it only shows that the al-Walid’s Mosque in Damascus set the standards from Cairo to Cordoba and from Isfahan to Ghazna. (Finbarr Barry Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture, Brill 2001,

Beside all this points it is without question that the Mosque of Cordoba had become the principal Mosque of the caliphate. How tasteless and insensitive has one to be to name an Islamic Center with a huge Mosque in visual range of Ground Zero after the principal Mosque of the Western caliphate when the terrorists aim is nothing less than the establishment of a new caliphate ?

At least there is a footnote which is a real jaw dropper:

***If your eyes glaze over at the sea of Abds, Umayyads, and Abbasids, let me put it another way. If it’s legitimate for Newt Gingrich to say the Great Mosque of Cordoba was built by Muslim Conquerors in their capital city wishing to symbolize their victory over the Christians, then it’d be just as legitimate to describe the Statue of Liberty as being built by English conquerors in their capital of New York to symbolize their victory over the Dutch.

This is a student of history ? Really ? Sorry me, but this is sick. The Statue of Liberty was a present from the French people nearly hundred years after the War of Independence when the English masters were kicked out of America. At the time the Statue of Liberty was placed the USA had already become a melting pot of all ethnic groups of the world.