Ground Zero Mosque a clash of symbols
By Robert Sibley, The Ottawa Citizen September 9, 2010 8:00 AM
Demonstrators attend a rally to oppose the
construction of an Islamic Centre and
mosque near Ground Zero in New York on
Aug. 22, 2010.
Photograph by: Don Emmert, AFP via Getty Images
OTTAWA — The "Ground Zero" mosque has plunged Americans into a clash of cultures.
Those who support building the mosque regard it as a matter of freedom of religion, a litmus
test of liberal principles of tolerance. Opponents see the mosque -- a 13-storey, $100-million
"community centre" two short blocks from the World Trade Center site -- as an insult to the
memory of those who died in the 9/11 Islamist terror attacks.
Can there be a compromise in this clash? To answer that question requires a consideration of
the motives of those promoting the mosque. Are they genuinely supportive of the American
constitution's guarantees of freedom of religion, or are they, as some suggest, using the
constitution against itself? Such consideration, in turn, entails a grasp of the mosque's
symbolic significance.
The American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton once wrote that the fundamental dynamic of the
human psyche is the "drive to symbolization." We are "an animal symbolicum, beings that
live and die, succeed and fail, delight and suffer, work and play, with, by and through their
symbols."
Geographical landmarks, historical artifacts, holy books; such things provide the symbolic
structure by which we attach ourselves to a community. Every society depends on
transcendent symbols with which people identify and from which they derive a sense of
meaning and purpose.
There is, however, a dark side to our symbol creation. We invest such existential meaning in
our symbols -- the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, for example -- that people are willing to kill
others whom they judge as having violated their symbolic order.
This, I suggest, is the deep backdrop to the debate surrounding the Ground Zero mosque. The
clash of cultures is really a clash of symbols.
Consider the original name of the mosque, Cordoba House. The name itself is redolent with
symbolic import for Muslims around the world.
By some interpretations, Islam separates the world into the Dar al-Islam, or the House of
Submission, which is governed by Shariah, or Islamic law. That part of the world temporarily
outside Muslim rule is called the Dar al-Harb, or House of War. It is called House of War
because it has so far not submitted to Islamic rule.
In the eighth century, Muslim armies began their invasion of the Iberian peninsula, eventually
taking the Spanish city of Cordoba. The invaders eventually razed the Christian Visigoth
Church of St. Vincent and built the Great Mosque of Cordoba. It remained in Muslim hands
until 1236, when, during La Reconquista, the Roman Catholic Church reclaimed it for
Christianity and renamed it the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin.
Proponents of Cordoba House like to claim Muslim rule in Spain was relatively benign. There
are historians who question this view, but regardless of where the preponderance of historical
judgment resides, there is no question during Muslim rule non-Muslims were regarded under
Shariah law as second-class citizens.
Historically, as scholar Gabriel Scheinmann points out in a recent essay, Islam tends to
convert the temples of those it has conquered into mosques and madrassas. Islam's holy of
holies, al-Kaaba, in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, was a pagan shrine for hundreds of
years before Muhammad and his army slaughtered the residents in 630 A.D. Likewise, after
Muslim armies seized Jerusalem, the Umayyad Caliphate built the Dome of the Rock in 689
A.D., on top of the Jewish holy site on Temple Mount. A church in Damascus dedicated to
John the Baptist was turned into the Grand Mosque in 705. The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul -- or
Constantinople under Byzantine Christianity -- had been a church for 1,000 years when it was
converted into a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in 1453.
The practice continues even in modern times, Scheinmann observes. Libyan dictator
Moammar Gadhafi ordered the closure of 78 Jewish synagogues and their conversion to
mosques in the 1970s, and, in 1975, the Algerian government similarly converted the Great
Synagogue of Oran into a mosque.
Given this history it is naive to ignore the symbolic import of naming a Muslim "community
centre" in New York City -- the heart of the American economy -- after a mosque built to
symbolize Islam's first successful foray into Europe 1,200 years ago, particularly one so close
to another symbolic victory against the West; that is, the toppling of the World Trade Center.
Those who argue that the Ground Zero mosque has to be allowed if liberalism -- and the
American constitution -- is to remain true to its principles may be right, in theory. In practice,
though, such arguments betray a deluded self-righteousness in which abstract principles are
allowed to trump intelligible common sense.
Even Christopher Hitchens, a staunch liberal who has argued in favour of Cordoba House,
admits to being troubled by the fact that the mosque's main promoter, Imam Feisal Abdul
Rauf "endorses the most extreme and repressive version of Muslim theocracy."
You only have to look at the situation in Europe to see how the symbolism of Cordoba House
would be used to further the Islamist enterprise. Europeans, formerly the loudest supporters of
multiculturalism, have found to their chagrin that large-scale immigration from Muslim
countries has allowed the spread of radical Islam through the establishment of thousands of
mosques and madrassas, many of which are funded by fundamentalist Islamists bent on
promoting Shariah. Such efforts were recently praised by Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes of our helmets, the minarets of
our bayonets."
Once Muslim populations reach a certain percentage of the total population, Muslim leaders
begin to demand their "rights" even when what they want -- recognition of polygamous
marriages, censorship and the hate-crime prosecution of those to offend or criticize Islam, the
segregation of boys and girls in schools, Muslim-only hours at swimming pools and
community centres, for example -- betrays intolerance toward non-Muslims and violates
fundamental liberal principles. In effect, western principles of freedom and rights are
deployed against western societies.
The West's ruling elites, along with moderate Muslims, seldom, if ever, acknowledge such
inconsistencies. Such matters, they say, are of little relevance nowadays. There are no Muslim
armies waiting at the gates. Most Muslims want to live peaceably with their non-Muslim
neighbours. That may be true, but what the majority want is largely irrelevant in the clash of
symbol systems. Most Russians didn't want the Czar and his family executed after the Russian
Revolution, but the views of a few ideological fanatics carried the day. The same, I suspect,
will hold ultimately hold true for Islam. The fanatics will out. Everyone else will submit or, at
the very least, keep quiet.
In this regard, the purblindness of western leaders is incorrigible. Such weakness has many
reasons, but one, I suspect, is that they are no longer able to mount a defence of western
traditions because their acceptance of the postmodern idea of cultural relativity -- that is, the
equality of all cultural practices -- and self-induced guilt about the West's imperial past has
left them intellectually impotent. The greatest fear of progressive elitists is that they might be
regarded, horror of horrors, as intolerant.
The situation is paradoxical. Western elites, secularized and imbued with progressive notions
of tolerance and diversity, effectively find themselves supporting the agenda of religious
fundamentalists, who, if they had their way, would replace western liberalism and
constitutional democracy with Shariah and theocratic rule. Hoist on the petard of their own
principles, they are unable to see that the Ground Zero mosque will be regarded in much of
the Muslim world -- and, no doubt, among many Muslims living in the West -- in much the
same way as the terrorist strikes on the Twin Towers were; that is, a symbolic victory in the
endless campaign against the Dar al-Harb.
Robert Sibley is an editorial writer with the Citizen. His column appears Thursdays. His new
book, A Rumour of God, is forthcoming this fall from Novalis Publishing.
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