re: #167 wozzablog

Well, one of my concerns is that organizations don’t choose names accidentally. Here, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and the other backers of this project initially called it the “Cordoba House.” As Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out, Cordoba has different meanings depending on the audience and the time period involved:

The very name of the initiative itself, “Cordoba,” offers different connotations to different people: In the West, the Andalusian city of Cordoba is regularly touted as the model of medieval Muslim progressiveness and tolerance for Christians and Jews. To many Americans, then, the choice to name the mosque “Cordoba” is suggestive of rapprochement and interfaith dialogue; atop the rubble of 9/11, it implies “healing” — a new beginning between Muslims and Americans. The Cordoba Initiative’s mission statement certainly suggests as much:

Cordoba Initiative aims to achieve a tipping point in Muslim-West relations within the next decade, bringing back the atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago.

Oddly enough, the so-called “tolerant” era of Cordoba supposedly occurred during the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Rahman III (912-961) — well over a thousand years ago. “Eight hundred years ago,” i.e., around 1200, the fanatical Almohids — ideological predecessors of al Qaeda — were ravaging Cordoba, where “Christians and Jews were given the choice of conversion, exile, or death.”

A Freudian slip on the part of the Cordoba Initiative?

Personally, I find it hard to believe that the double meaning of the project’s original name was lost on Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and the other project supporters. And, strangely, since Mr. Hanson wrote this piece in late July, the Cordoba Institute has changed both the name for the community center, which is now the very secular sounding “Park 51,” and its own mission statement, which now makes no reference to the city of Cordoba.