Michael Ejercito
2017-07-18 16:52:46 UTC
Qatar, Saudi Arabia to Islamize One of Europe's Greatest Cathedrals
by Giulio Meotti
July 18, 2017 at 5:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10685/cordoba-cathedral-islam
In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate. Political authorities
in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church's claim of ownership of
cathedral by declaring that "religious consecration is not the way to
acquire property". But this is how history works, especially in the lands
where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are secularists
not pressing Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give Christians back
the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that "Christendom's greatest
cathedral has become a mosque".
The Spanish left, governing the region, would like to convert the church
into "a place for the meeting of faiths". Nice ecumenical words, but a death
trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. If these Islamists,
supported by the militant secularists, will be able to bring Allah back
inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic supremacism will
submerge Europe's decaying Christianity. There are thousands of empty
churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of muezzins.
The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been condemned
as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize and
Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the Middle
East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season of
enlightenment.
Muslim supremacists seem to have fantasies -- as well as a long history --
of converting Christian sites to Islamic ones. Take, for example,
Saint-Denis, the Gothic cathedral named for the first Christian bishop of
Paris who was buried there in 250, and the burial place of Charles Martel,
whose victory stopped the Muslim invasion of France in 732. Now, according
to the scholar Gilles Kepel, this burial place of most of France's kings and
queens is "the Mecca in Islam of France". The French Islamists are dreaming
of taking it over and replacing the church bells with the call of the
muezzin.
In Turkey's greatest cathedral, Hagia Sophia, a muezzin's call recently
reverberated inside the sixth-century church for the first time in 85 years.
In France, Muslim leaders called for converting abandoned churches into
mosques. thereby echoing The late writer Emile Cioran once predicted of
Europe: "The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque".
Now it is the turn of Spain's greatest Catholic site, the Cathedral of
Córdoba. Spanish "leftists" and secularists would now, it seems, like to
convert to Islam the cathedral of Córdoba, the symbol of a time when "Islam
was on the verge of turning the Mediterranean into a Muslim lake". Now that
Islam is again conquering large swaths of the Middle East and Africa, is it
not a coincidence that this campaign is gaining ground?
In 550 the Cathedral of Córdoba was a Christian basilica, dedicated to a
saint; then, in 714, it was occupied by the Muslims, who destroyed it and
converted it into the Great Mosque of Córdoba during the reign of Caliph Abd
al Rahman I. The site was returned to Catholic worship by King Ferdinand III
in 1523 and became the current great Cathedral of Córdoba, one of the most
important sites of Western Christianity. Now an alliance of secularists and
Islamists are trying to turn the church back to Islamic worship.
The Wall Street Journal called it deconquista, playing with the word
reconquista, the time when Spain was returned from Islam to Catholicism.
"The Great Mosque of Córdoba" is what UNESCO -- also torturing, upending and
turning history on its head to rewrite the past of Jerusalem and Hebron --
calls it. In the last six centuries, however, only Catholic mass and
confessions have been officiated there. The WSJ charges "left-wing Spanish
intellectuals" with trying to "de-Christianize" the site.
The main altar of the Cathedral of Córdoba. (Image source: Wikimedia
Commons/© José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 3.0)
A recent Islamic State map of domination includes not only the Middle East,
but also Spain. ISIS calls it "Al-Andalus". Gatestone's Soeren Kern, among
others, has detailed ISIS's call to retake Spain. Osama bin Laden, who
targeted Spain in a terror attack in 2004, frequently referred to Al-Andalus
in his videos and speeches. Daniel Pipes has further explained, "even
centuries after the reconquista of 1492, Muslims continued to long to
recreate Muslim Andalusia". Bin Laden's heir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also
weighed in: "The return of Andalus to Muslim hands is a duty for the umma
[Muslim community]". Syrian Jihadists call Spain "the land of our
ancestors". In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate.
It is self-destructive and surreal that Spanish secularists -- those who
claim to care about separation of church and state -- are now supporting
Muslim supremacists in their "reconquista of the Mosque of Córdoba".
The recent wave of immigration has brought many Muslims to Spain; the
Islamic Spanish population has almost doubled from about a million in 2007
to 1.9 million today. 350,000 people signed a petition promoted by the
Spanish "left", calling for the expropriation of the Christian building.
Political authorities in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church's claim
of ownership of cathedral by declaring that "religious consecration is not
the way to acquire property". But this is how history works, especially in
the lands where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are
secularists not pressing Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give
Christians back the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that
"Christendom's greatest cathedral has become a mosque".
The Spanish "left", governing the region, would like to convert the church
into "a place for the meeting of faiths". Nice ecumenical words, but a death
trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. In 2010, a group of
Muslim activists tried to pray inside the building. To raise support from
American Catholics, the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández González,
recently explained that the law of Andalusia would allow the expropriation
of the cathedral if a court ruled that the Catholic Church failed to
preserve the building. "It has become fashionable on the left to romanticize
the Islamic past of Spain", noted the Wall Street Journal.
"The Catholics of the Reconquista are thought of as crude fanatics, whereas
the caliphate is presented as a haven of tolerance and learning where Jews
and Christians—never mind their second-class status—lived side-by-side with
Muslims in happy convivencia. Barack Obama even cited Andalusia as an
example of Islam's "proud tradition of tolerance" during his 2009 speech in
Cairo".
Our secular establishment in the newspapers, universities and popular
culture damns the Crusades as a proof of Western guilt towards the Islamic
world. The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been
condemned as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize
and Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the
Middle East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season
of enlightenment. Nobody, however, seems to have any concern about Islamic
muezzins rising from the roofs of many cities in the West. While the West
whips itself for slavery, it never raises any questions about slavery in the
Islamic world, currently in full force (although officially "abolished") in
Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and West Africa, among other places.
The question about Córdoba's cathedral now on everyone's lips is: Who will
fund the campaign to bring Islam back to the great Christian site? The
answer is Qatar. The emirate is supporting the campaign of Islamic
organizations to convert the church to Islam. The Middle East is full of
churches transformed into mosques, such as the Omayyad of Damascus, Ibn
Tulun of Cairo, and the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul. Islamists are
now eager to do the same in Córdoba. The Catholic Church has taken a
position. As the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernandez, said, "sharing the
space with Muslims would be like a man sharing his wife with another man".
An analyst at the Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies of the Ministry of
Defense, Colonel Emilio Sánchez de Rojas, recently gave a lecture in which
he explained that Córdoba is "a reference for Islam". He charged Qatar and
Saudi Arabia with "campaigns of influence in the West", and as "a source of
funding for the campaign for the re-Islamization of the Cathedral in
Córdoba".
If these Islamists, supported by the militant secularists, will be able to
bring Allah back inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic
supremacism will submerge Europe's decaying Christianity. There are
thousands of empty churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of
muezzins.
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and
author.
by Giulio Meotti
July 18, 2017 at 5:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10685/cordoba-cathedral-islam
In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate. Political authorities
in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church's claim of ownership of
cathedral by declaring that "religious consecration is not the way to
acquire property". But this is how history works, especially in the lands
where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are secularists
not pressing Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give Christians back
the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that "Christendom's greatest
cathedral has become a mosque".
The Spanish left, governing the region, would like to convert the church
into "a place for the meeting of faiths". Nice ecumenical words, but a death
trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. If these Islamists,
supported by the militant secularists, will be able to bring Allah back
inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic supremacism will
submerge Europe's decaying Christianity. There are thousands of empty
churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of muezzins.
The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been condemned
as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize and
Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the Middle
East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season of
enlightenment.
Muslim supremacists seem to have fantasies -- as well as a long history --
of converting Christian sites to Islamic ones. Take, for example,
Saint-Denis, the Gothic cathedral named for the first Christian bishop of
Paris who was buried there in 250, and the burial place of Charles Martel,
whose victory stopped the Muslim invasion of France in 732. Now, according
to the scholar Gilles Kepel, this burial place of most of France's kings and
queens is "the Mecca in Islam of France". The French Islamists are dreaming
of taking it over and replacing the church bells with the call of the
muezzin.
In Turkey's greatest cathedral, Hagia Sophia, a muezzin's call recently
reverberated inside the sixth-century church for the first time in 85 years.
In France, Muslim leaders called for converting abandoned churches into
mosques. thereby echoing The late writer Emile Cioran once predicted of
Europe: "The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque".
Now it is the turn of Spain's greatest Catholic site, the Cathedral of
Córdoba. Spanish "leftists" and secularists would now, it seems, like to
convert to Islam the cathedral of Córdoba, the symbol of a time when "Islam
was on the verge of turning the Mediterranean into a Muslim lake". Now that
Islam is again conquering large swaths of the Middle East and Africa, is it
not a coincidence that this campaign is gaining ground?
In 550 the Cathedral of Córdoba was a Christian basilica, dedicated to a
saint; then, in 714, it was occupied by the Muslims, who destroyed it and
converted it into the Great Mosque of Córdoba during the reign of Caliph Abd
al Rahman I. The site was returned to Catholic worship by King Ferdinand III
in 1523 and became the current great Cathedral of Córdoba, one of the most
important sites of Western Christianity. Now an alliance of secularists and
Islamists are trying to turn the church back to Islamic worship.
The Wall Street Journal called it deconquista, playing with the word
reconquista, the time when Spain was returned from Islam to Catholicism.
"The Great Mosque of Córdoba" is what UNESCO -- also torturing, upending and
turning history on its head to rewrite the past of Jerusalem and Hebron --
calls it. In the last six centuries, however, only Catholic mass and
confessions have been officiated there. The WSJ charges "left-wing Spanish
intellectuals" with trying to "de-Christianize" the site.
The main altar of the Cathedral of Córdoba. (Image source: Wikimedia
Commons/© José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 3.0)
A recent Islamic State map of domination includes not only the Middle East,
but also Spain. ISIS calls it "Al-Andalus". Gatestone's Soeren Kern, among
others, has detailed ISIS's call to retake Spain. Osama bin Laden, who
targeted Spain in a terror attack in 2004, frequently referred to Al-Andalus
in his videos and speeches. Daniel Pipes has further explained, "even
centuries after the reconquista of 1492, Muslims continued to long to
recreate Muslim Andalusia". Bin Laden's heir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also
weighed in: "The return of Andalus to Muslim hands is a duty for the umma
[Muslim community]". Syrian Jihadists call Spain "the land of our
ancestors". In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate.
It is self-destructive and surreal that Spanish secularists -- those who
claim to care about separation of church and state -- are now supporting
Muslim supremacists in their "reconquista of the Mosque of Córdoba".
The recent wave of immigration has brought many Muslims to Spain; the
Islamic Spanish population has almost doubled from about a million in 2007
to 1.9 million today. 350,000 people signed a petition promoted by the
Spanish "left", calling for the expropriation of the Christian building.
Political authorities in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church's claim
of ownership of cathedral by declaring that "religious consecration is not
the way to acquire property". But this is how history works, especially in
the lands where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are
secularists not pressing Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give
Christians back the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that
"Christendom's greatest cathedral has become a mosque".
The Spanish "left", governing the region, would like to convert the church
into "a place for the meeting of faiths". Nice ecumenical words, but a death
trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. In 2010, a group of
Muslim activists tried to pray inside the building. To raise support from
American Catholics, the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández González,
recently explained that the law of Andalusia would allow the expropriation
of the cathedral if a court ruled that the Catholic Church failed to
preserve the building. "It has become fashionable on the left to romanticize
the Islamic past of Spain", noted the Wall Street Journal.
"The Catholics of the Reconquista are thought of as crude fanatics, whereas
the caliphate is presented as a haven of tolerance and learning where Jews
and Christians—never mind their second-class status—lived side-by-side with
Muslims in happy convivencia. Barack Obama even cited Andalusia as an
example of Islam's "proud tradition of tolerance" during his 2009 speech in
Cairo".
Our secular establishment in the newspapers, universities and popular
culture damns the Crusades as a proof of Western guilt towards the Islamic
world. The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been
condemned as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize
and Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the
Middle East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season
of enlightenment. Nobody, however, seems to have any concern about Islamic
muezzins rising from the roofs of many cities in the West. While the West
whips itself for slavery, it never raises any questions about slavery in the
Islamic world, currently in full force (although officially "abolished") in
Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, and West Africa, among other places.
The question about Córdoba's cathedral now on everyone's lips is: Who will
fund the campaign to bring Islam back to the great Christian site? The
answer is Qatar. The emirate is supporting the campaign of Islamic
organizations to convert the church to Islam. The Middle East is full of
churches transformed into mosques, such as the Omayyad of Damascus, Ibn
Tulun of Cairo, and the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul. Islamists are
now eager to do the same in Córdoba. The Catholic Church has taken a
position. As the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernandez, said, "sharing the
space with Muslims would be like a man sharing his wife with another man".
An analyst at the Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies of the Ministry of
Defense, Colonel Emilio Sánchez de Rojas, recently gave a lecture in which
he explained that Córdoba is "a reference for Islam". He charged Qatar and
Saudi Arabia with "campaigns of influence in the West", and as "a source of
funding for the campaign for the re-Islamization of the Cathedral in
Córdoba".
If these Islamists, supported by the militant secularists, will be able to
bring Allah back inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic
supremacism will submerge Europe's decaying Christianity. There are
thousands of empty churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of
muezzins.
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and
author.