Memories of the Great Mosque

[Zomby Woof]

This article from today's Los Angeles Times summoned a treasured childhood memory - exploring the seemingly endless maze of arches and art that is La Mezquita, in ancient Cordoba, Spain.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-cordoba28mar28,1,950004.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true

The 1,200-year-old architectural wonder that is one of Spain's most renowned landmarks is at the center of a turf war over religious space, cultural recognition and rivalries that are both ancient and contemporary.

Known as La Mezquita in Spanish and the Great Mosque in English, its spectacular forest of striped arches and jasper-and-marble columns constitutes one of ancient Islam's most iconic legacies. But La Mezquita has served as a consecrated Catholic church for nearly 800 years — ever since Spain's Catholic monarchs ejected Islamic forces that had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula for more than five centuries.

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For a time in the late 1970's, in the aftermath of Franco's death (and yes, he is still dead), I lived for three years deep in Andalusia, once the proud frontier of the Moorish empire and the greatest western outpost of the Islamic world. Only Granada rivals Cordoba for exemplifying the cultural, artistic, scientific, and spiritual legacy of the Moors. In the classroom, I learned much about Islamic culture and the history of the Moorish conquest of Iberia. At this early, impressionable age, a visit to La Mezquita brought hours of class instruction alive under the brightly painted arches and grand columns.

At the same time in my personal life, at the tender age of 11, a deep skepticism of theistic faith and doctrine was stirring within me, and at the same I was pulling away from the accepted dogma of my childhood, I was drawn to the beauty of this grand structure and the intense dedication it represented, which in just under a half-millennium was wrenched from Islam and consecrated in the name of the Catholic church - a transition reflecting the greater western world. I was fascinated and awed by the depth of faith which led to the conception and construction of such a monument, resisting the easy scorn all too easily cast off by skeptics and non-theists. I could see, with all the empathy my young heart could muster, the attraction of faith and the promise of its fulfillment.

Yet, the ugliness of dogma, the same dogma behind the crusades of old and the jihads of now, has ever been thus; its antipathy to reason and tolerance, countering romantic notions of spiritual high-mindedness, is as firm, unyielding, and intractable as faith itself. Faith and dogma will always be at odds this way, each defining the other in contrast, in a yin-yang symbiosis. Tradition and modernity. Red and blue. Fear and courage. Hope and despair.

The dichotomy of La Mezquita is very much the dichotomy of our times. To the victor have gone the spoils of its splendor and grace. 1,200 years hence when its age has doubled, can the same be said of our progress? I am not confident that it will. But... perhaps it has ever been thus.