A Wretched Offense

In a bow to prejudice and political pandering, the Cordoba House, the mosque/community center planned for downtown Manhattan has been renamed as Park51. There is more than a little irony to hear our strident reactionaries charge that the developer's secret Western antipathies were revealed by the original name itself. If our schools and universities did a moderate job of education the American public could have been spared its own embarrassment. It was in cities like Cordoba, Spain that Muslim caliphs like Harun al-Rashid encouraged religious diversity and the preservation of the Classical texts and icons from Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquity.

While the Christian hordes were busy burning books and tearing down libraries those barbaric, apostate Muslims were tenderly preserving Sophocles, Hypatia and Pythagoras. Dating from the 6th century, like the Abbasid caliphs who founded the "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad, Western-hating Islamists were carefully translating Latin and Greek into Syriac and Arabic and developing astronomy and algebra.

The current farce about Muslim 'aggression' and 'insensitivity' highlights the ease with which religious bigotry can always be stirred up and exploited for the sake of geopolitics. Rather than out of some hidden hostility the center's original name was a sop pleading tolerance. As a famed emblem of Western hegemony, Prince Charles of England, admits himself:

"Islam nurtured and preserved the quest for learning, believing, 'the ink of the scholar more sacred than the blood of the martyr' and Cordoba in the 10th century was by far the most civilised city of Europe. The lending libraries in Spain contained more books than all the libraries of the rest of Europe put together, made possible because the Muslim world had acquired the skill of making paper more than 400 years before the rest of Europe."

Despite the ignorance of the likes of Glenn Beck, many of the traits on which the West now prides itself came directly from Muslim Spain. Among them are diplomacy, free trade, protocols of academic research, anthropology, etiquette, fashion and modern medicine. All this and more came from a town whose name is now slandered as a backward, wretched offense.