In these dog days of summer the biggest political issue in America suddenly is a mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero in New York City. Over the weekend, President Obama waded into the mosque issue, probably to his political detriment.
The controversy has reversed the usual political roles: property rights conservatives say no to building a mosque on private property so close to Ground Zero; secular liberals, who would fight a Nativity scene on the courthouse lawn or a cross on public land, suddenly embrace the Islamic mosque in the name of religious freedom.
Here are three reasons, secular, religious and historical why this mosque should be moved to some place other than Ground Zero.
Ground Zero is hallowed land; everyone will admit that, given what happened there. But there is a lot of hallowed ground in America, and we have fought about it for a long time. I have cousins in Orange County, Virginia, who live on a farm that’s been in the family for 250 years. There is an overgrown cemetery on this farm, and there lies the grave of the direct ancestor of my cousins who was killed nearby just six days before the end of the Civil War, the final battles having occurred in this part of rural Virginia.
Not so far away is the Wilderness Battlefield, where 20,000 men were killed or wounded in a brutal battle in May 1864. Wal-Mart wants to build a super store just adjacent to the battlefield. Needless to say, my cousins want no part of that, and neither do I. Now, generally, I am a free market property rights kind of guy, but I make an exception when it comes to Civil War sites, being a member of the Civil War Preservation Trust that buys battlefield land to preserve it from development. I don’t care where in Orange County, Virginia, Wal-Mart builds its store, except not on that hallowed ground. No way. Period.
Well, the mosque is religious, not secular, you say, so let’s look at a religious case. At a place today called Oswiecim, Poland, is the Auschwitz Birkenau Nazi death camp. You can tour the preserved concentration camp, where 1.1 million people were gassed, 900,000 of them Jews. You can see the zyklon gas cans that were used, the crematoria where the bodies were burned, and personal belongings of the victims, even their hair. Auschwitz is Ground Zero for the Holocaust, and visiting it is certainly a religious experience.
So Jewish groups were quite disturbed about 20 years ago when the Catholic Carmelite religious order announced it was building a convent near the site to pray for the souls of the dead. Yes, this was a sign of religious toleration said some, but to others it reminded them that the Holocaust happened mostly in Catholic Poland, a country with a long sad history of anti-Semitism. It took intervention from the Polish-born Pope John Paul II to get the convent moved. The church had every right to buy the land and build its convent, but wiser heads saw that it was not the right thing at that place.
Finally, there is the name of the Ground Zero mosque, Cordoba. For most Americans the name does not mean much, and the imam of the mosque points out that in the 10th Century, Islam ruled Cordoba, Spain, was Europe’s most advanced city and a symbol of religious tolerance.
Cordoba is today a pleasant city in Southern Spain and its ancient Moorish mosque, the Mezquita, is a tourist destination. But the Caliphate of Cordoba symbolized the Moorish conquest of Christian Spain in the 8th Century, and the caliphate was not always a place of religious tolerance. The Moors stayed in Spain for 700 years until the Catholic "reconquista" that culminated in the fall of the last Moorish city, Granada, in 1492, the same year the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sent a fellow named Columbus to find the New World.
It is probably in no one’s interest to have a huge debate on whether a mosque named Cordoba at Ground Zero somehow symbolizes an Islamic conquest of Christian America. In the end the mosque will probably be moved a little way away to defuse this crisis. Now if we could just get rid of the Wal-Mart at the Wilderness.