By PHK
There was a short AP story on December 27 that reported an appeal to Pope Benedict XVI from Spanish Muslims asking that the Cathedral of Cordoba be turned into an ecumenical temple in which Christians, Muslims and believers from other faiths might worship the same God.
“Mass at the Mosque”
Unfortunately, this is the kind of wire service story that conceals far more than it reveals because although it tells us that the Spain’s Roman Catholic Church had previously rejected the Muslim community’s request to relinquish sole possession, nowhere does the reporter explain that the cathedral in question is, in reality, still called the Mezquita (which means Mosque) – or sometimes more accurately - the Mosque-Cathedral or Cathedral-Mosque depending on the source. Its name “Catedral de Cordoba (Antigua Mezquita)” on the entry ticket is probably the most accurate of all.
From the AP story with its Madrid dateline, one would have, therefore, no idea that the Muslims’ request makes any sense at all. Yet it does from historical, architectural and even, in my view, financial perspectives.
In reality, the Mezquita’s history and its architecture – omitted from the terse wire service report – explain why. Neither aspect of this incredible building is a forgotten – hard to unearth – story either. All you have to do is read a single guidebook or webpage on Cordoba or the basic literature distributed by the Cordoba Tourist Information Office, located at Calle de Torrijos 10 just across from the west side of the Mezquita to understand the reasons behind the Muslim community’s request.
The Mezquita’s site on a low bluff of the Guadalquivir, the principal river that meanders through much of
Andalucia (or al-Andalus in Arabic) Spain’s southern-most province, has for at least two thousand years held religious significance. It began as a Roman temple dedicated to the god Janus that was transformed into St. Vincent’s, a Christian church under the Visigoths, after the fall of Rome.
When the early Muslims arrived and looked for a place to practice Islam, they made a deal with the Christians. For a short while the partitioned building (much smaller than the one occupying the same location today) contained both Christian and Muslim services. Then, so the story goes, the leaders of the rapidly increasing Muslim population purchased the building in 785 CE from its Christian owners. The Muslims demolished all but one wall of the church. They expanded their new mosque three different times so that it grew to 80 percent larger than its first incarnation.
Religious center for western Islam
For centuries thereafter, the Mezquita, or Cordoba’s main mosque where the faithful gathered for Friday noon prayers, was the religious center of western Islam and the seat of the descendants of Abd al Rahman, the sole survivor of the early Umayyad Damascus-based Muslim dynasty who had escaped the rival Abbasid slaughter of the rest of the ruling family and made his way surreptitiously across North Africa and north into southern Spain.
By the 10th century, Cordoba had become the largest, most prosperous city in Europe. It “outshone Byzantium (the capital of eastern Christendom) and Baghdad” (the capital of the eastern Islamic caliphate under the Abbasids) “in science, culture and scholarship.” In 929 CE, Abd al-Rahman III, Cordoba’s then ruler, took on in name – as well as in reality – the politico-religious title “caliph” dropping forever whatever titular allegiance Cordoba had previously paid to the Abbasids. At the same time, Cordoba’s thriving Jewish community also quit its subservient relationship to the Baghdad rabbinate. Coincidentally or not, the new caliph’s grand vizier or chief advisor, himself was Jewish. From Cordoba, the caliph ruled Muslim Spain and good portions of North Africa sometimes in a strategic alliance with the Greek Christian Byzantines in defiance of their mutual eastern Islamic rivals. The Muslim caliphate at Cordoba ended in 1236 when the city fell to Roman Catholic forces under Ferdinand “the Saint.”
Revolutionary architecture for a revolutionary caliphate
At its largest, the Mezquita totaled over 23,000 square meters with 1293 recycled and newly constructed columns holding up its enormous, mostly flat roof. Its “open courtyard design” resembling that of “the yards of a desert home that formed the original Islamic prayer spaces” broke with, in the Lonely Planet’s description, “the verticality of all previous major Muslim mosques.” Its red brick and white granite horseshoe arches – a unique architectural characteristic of the Spanish Muslims – drew their design from the region’s past.
Not only did Cordoba become rich in science, culture and scholarship, hospitals and libraries, at its height this city was also the most religiously tolerant city in Europe in which Muslims, Jews and Christians lived, worked and intermingled. Ideas including modern hygiene and scientific instruments like the astrolabe used to navigate the globe were transported from China, India and ancient Greece to Cordoba via Baghdad where the works of the ancient world had come alive through Arabic translators. It was from the libraries and scholars in Cordoba that wisdom and knowledge of the Ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Hindus had passed from the Middle East through Al Andalus to Western Europe ultimately shaking the then sleeping continent’s very foundations.
Yet the decline of Al Andalus that had begun in the early 11th century intensified under the religious Puritanism of imported Berber Islamic tribal warriors who refused to go home when the battles for which they had been summoned to fight had ended.
Conversion to Catholicism: turning something extraordinary into the ordinary
After the Spanish Reconquista that retook Cordoba in the 13th century, the Mezquita, the building that
had once been the largest mosque in the world after the Kabah in Mecca, was immediately converted into a Roman Catholic Cathedral. It wasn’t until the 16th century, however, that the church obtained permission – over strong objections from the town council but with the sanction of King Carlos V who came to regret the resulting architectural eye sore after he saw it – to erect a cathedral within in the middle of the mosque.
As artist, writer and interpreter Lawrence Bohme aptly describes it, “What one sees from outside is confusing indeed: a huge, flat-roofed low-lying square building with a gigantic baroque church jutting up in the middle like a rather unsightly stone wedding-cake.” In my view, what one sees inside the cathedral within the former mosque resembles more than anything an overdressed and gussied up floozy.
This Renaissance cathedral coro, represents in my mind, the worst aspects of the excesses
of empire from the tons of beautiful New World mahogany used for the choir to the gaudy, saint-encrusted cupolas presumably paid for by the fruits of Spanish colonial victories.
Other aspects of Christian decor are less obtrusive and out of keeping with the unique, sophisticated lines of the building although the Christian decision to brick in most of the outlying arches to create altars for various saints - among other reasons - has produced in this once naturally sunlit expanse a dark, dank, shadowy interior lit primarily by a few skylights and a forest of electrified fake oil lamp chandeliers.
Today, only a portion of the Mezquita is being used by the church. From what I remember when I visited Cordoba two years ago, most of this enormous building is, in reality, a museum and a tourist attraction- a UNESCO World Heritage Site – that plays host to millions of visitors of all religious creeds each year from around the globe.
Unlike Granada’s spectacularly kept Alhambra, however, I think Cordoba’s Mezquita needs substantially more care, attention and restoration than it presently receives. If the current owner – the Spanish Roman Catholic Church – is unwilling or financially unable to do so, then another solution needs to be found – whether religious, secular or both. This is why I think the Spanish Muslim community’s request that this spectacular building be turned into an ecumenical religious temple needs serious consideration. I hope the pope and others will also take the suggestion seriously.
Sources: The Lonely Planet’s Guide to Spain; the Rough Guide to Andalucia; the Green Guide to Andalucia; Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, Boston: Little Brown and Co, 2002; Lawrence Bohme, The Mosque. See also Part III, “City of Cordoba” in the PBS Series “Islam Empire of Faith.”
Photo Credits: Mezquita from the Alcazar, PHKushlis 2005; Mezquita, Alcazar and Cordoba Old Town and Guadalquivir, JEHogin 1981; Three interior scenes of the Mezquita, PHKushlis 2005. Note: interior photos were lightened to make the architectural features easily visible.