The Road to Cordoba

At the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday morning, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf tried to turn crisis into opportunity, specifically an opportunity to broadcast the message of Islamic moderation.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

"In a paradoxical sense," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf said, "maybe in a poignant sense, this is an opportunity." He was speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York yesterday morning. He came back to the point several times. Having arrived in the United States as a boy, in 1965 -- in his opening remarks he recalled sailing into New York harbor on a wintry morning and admiring the Statue of Liberty -- Imam Rauf has been exploring the relationship between America and Islam for a long time. He said the point of his visit to the Council was to reach out to Americans about Islam and to reach out to Muslims around the world to "explain and share my love of America."

He had not expected the "Ground Zero mosque" proposal to bring on what he called "a time of great crisis and danger." When asked what, had he known, he might have thought to do differently, he said, "Maybe not even do it at all." But here he was, trying to turn crisis into opportunity, specifically an opportunity to broadcast the message of Islamic moderation, for which he has long been a spokesman. (He has led prayers at a TriBeCa mosque, 12 blocks north of Ground Zero, since 1983. A regular at international conferences on interfaith dialogue, he has made four outreach trips for the US State Department, two under the younger Bush, two under Obama.) He noted the irony of this apparently disastrous collision of religion and politics being, perhaps, an opportunity: "Now we've gotten attention for the voices of moderation, I'm accused of being an immoderate!" That got the biggest laugh of the morning. The Council on Foreign Relations is full of people who appreciate the humor in unintended consequences.

I was also reminded of the way President Bush, in the months after 9/11, spoke of the attacks as having created an "opportunity" for American renewal. The imam is a compact and pleasantly calm man, the more so in contrast to his interlocutor, Richard Haass, CFR president and former director of policy planning at the State Department, who is characteristically wound-up. Haass' frustrated farewell to the Bush administration was a book called, yes, The Opportunity, describing what America could yet do in the world, if only it would. That was in 2005, another opportunity missed. Chastened optimism is a frequently struck note at the Council.

Haass wanted Imam Rauf to take this moment to propose some compromise on the mosque, but the imam would only say that "everything is on the table" and "we are exploring all options." He clearly wanted to keep his opportunity alive. But how?

He did talk about his Cordoba Initiative, named as it was for the Spanish city where, prior to the Christian Reconquest, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together, "the most tolerant and enlightened" city in the world, as he said. He told us his goal was "to build a new Cordoba."

When Ayman al-Zahawiri said, in October 2001, that al Qaeda was determined not to repeat "the Andalusia tragedy," it was, for me, one of the more disheartening moments in a period that had been full of them. He was referring to the expulsion of Muslim armies from their European lands in Spain -- al-Andalus in Arabic -- in centuries between 1200 and 1614. Islam as an expansionist religious community had been on the defensive ever since, more or less; al Qaeda's idea was to regain the initiative, 400 years later, and restore the caliphate of which Andalusia had been a shining part. This must have struck a chord with some Muslims, perhaps many. Without being overly determinist about these things, one can still say that great defeats can inspire resentments and dreams of restoration for a very long time.

The naming of the Cordoba Initiative was either brilliant or disastrous. It is part of the battle over Andalusia. The Cordoba Initiative aims to invoke the "good Andalusia": the Andalusia of convivencia, of a Golden Age. Productive and innovative Andalusia. Anti-fundamentalist Andalusia. Al Qaeda of course had a different Andalusia in mind: a place dominated by Muslims for Muslims in the name of Islam. A very different, even opposite, sort of Cordoba Initiative.

Today the famous, many-pillared mosque of Cordoba, Spain, is an airy and beautiful mosque with a Catholic cathedral in the middle of it and chapels shuttered away in the alcoves on its periphery. It is a place for worshipping God, of course, but it is also a sort of parenthesis of stone, gilt and statuary, an architectural truce. The mosque/cathedral the mezquita feels much more like the end of a useless argument. It evokes not victory but unwinnableness. After all those centuries of religious conflict this was what you got: a stalemate, circa 1200. This was where everything ended.

Or so it seemed to me when I visited there in 1989, as the Cold War swords were being beaten into ploughshares. It was definitely a place for meditation but not peaceful meditation.

And now? Which Andalusia is next?

To my mind the most interesting thing Imam Rauf had to say this morning concerned his experience of America in terms of faith. When he was growing up in 1960s America, he said -- he's from New Jersey -- religion "was considered passé, a crutch for the feeble-minded." This made him think about religion as something to be actively pondered and chosen (or rejected). He sees this understanding of religious faith to be particularly American; he went from thinking the United States was particularly irreligious to thinking it was the most religious place he'd been precisely on this ground of individual, affirmative choice. He said that, in a way, he felt that America had given him his true understanding of Islam.

This was too specific and complicated a thought not to be somewhat true. It is also pretty much the thought of 16th-century Protestantism (and a few other religious reformations down the years).

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot