One of the memes I’m hearing on the Ground Zero mosque from the anti- crowd is that it is customary in Islam to build a mosque on the site of a military victory and that makes this doubly offensive.
Keeping it GQ – how much if any historical truth to this characterization of mosque-building-to-commemorate-winning-battle?
frequently through our turbulent history between crusaders and their prey we built victory chapels when we took towns and cities. What is the difference?
Mosques built on battlesites? As far as I know, that didn’t really happen. When Muslim armies would take over a city, they’d build a mosque or convert an existing place of worship to a mosque (see the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople or the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem), but that wasn’t so much a victory commemoration as it was that the Muslims had come to town and needed someplace to worship.
Couldn’t help yourself, could you? I posted in GQ for a reason.
One thing to consider is when the last time a Muslim army had a victory. It’s hard for something to be customary if it hasn’t happened in over a hundred years.
The Great Mosque of Cordoba was built on the site of the former Cathedral of Cordoba. After the Reconquista, it was converted back to a Cathedral.
“The mosque is regarded as perhaps the most accomplished monument of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba.” Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba - Wikipedia
I’ve heard another account of this (sorry, no cite). The Muslim conquerors destroyed all the churches in the city except the cathedral, promising they would let it stand. At a later date they changed their minds and decided they needed a new mosque.
Naming this new center the “Cordoba Center” is highly significant. That is what makes this a big deal.
“Moderate Muslims oppose location of Cordoba Mosque — on religious grounds” Moderate Muslims oppose location of Cordoba Mosque — on religious grounds | The Daily Caller
If they just “needed someplace to worship”, they could’ve just built new mosques.
They could have, and in some cases, like al-Aqsa, they did. But I think that, for instance, in the case of Hagia Sophia, Mehmet II figured, “This is already the predominant religious building in the city. To build a new mosque that’s nicer than this will be cost prohibitive, and what sort of message am I sending if a church in the city is nicer and more elaborate than the mosque?”
And I made the response in all seriousness.
What else would you call shuffling off to conquer some place not to relieve population pressures but for religious purposes … and in the march along the way kill people that were also purportedly of the same religion? Look, I did medieval recreation since 1978, and have read more than enough about pretty much any random subject that occurred between the fall of Rome and 1600 [the end date for the SCA] and there is a lot out there about the crusades. The crusaders were rapining savages who got to what is now Turkey and started killing their way to Jerusalem. I am sure that a few of them were serious about their religion, but the majority of them were there for the loot.
Where ? Medieval cities were terminally cramped, and the practical necessity of keeping them securely walled up made expansion and sprawl more problematic than it is today. It was either re-purposing existing houses of worship (which, considering most of the people using them had just been driven off or killed, were essentially just taking space) or tearing down housing. Gods don’t protest when you squat in their house the way private owners do 
Put it another way : do you consider it offensive that temples of Mars or Zeus were torn down ? Most of them were, either to build something up on that spot or just because hey, free building materials. Only the particularly impressive ones (like the Parthenon) were kept out of respect, not for the religious or cultural significance of the building, but because it’s an architectural wonder. Same about the Cordoba cathedral/mosque/cathedral.
Besides, as has already been stated, it’s not like the Christians showed any more respect to existing mosques when they took ground from Muslims.
I mean, you said it yourself : after the Reconquista, the Great Mosque of Cordoba (which had been a mosque for ~700 years at this point, while it had only been a cathedral for just over a century when the Umayyads took it) was turned back into a cathedral. If they needed a cathedral, they could have built a new one, innit ? Sauce for the goose…
And then when they got around to it, they built a giant freaking mosque pretty much across the street from the Hagia Sofia anyway.
Anyway, if Muslims do this, it’s not exactly a revolutionary idea. Lots of early Christian churches were built on top of Roman temples. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is built on top of the site of a Temple of Aphrodite. Constantine’s mother, Empress Eleni, went off to Jerusalem and pinned it as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion because the temple was there, on the theory that the Romans had moved in on the site in order to keep it from becoming a Christian holy site. (It is almost certainly not the true site of the crucifixion.)
Right. It is essentially the usual and customary practice of *BOTH *historic Christianity and historic Islam, and quite a few of their precursor cultures, to take over the sites of the prior occupants’ places of worship and put their own there (or even just convert the very same building).
But in recent times what’s more common when you seek to make a point about your great success is to just find a well-located lot and build yourself a grandiose, expensive new cathedral/mosque and say it is in praise to God for your great accomplishments - and make sure everybody knows who built it. The only recent-times “victory” mosques I know of were those sponsored by S. Hussein himself to commemorate his self-declared victories, and those were located in Baghdad, nowhere near any of the battlefields.
Actually wikipedia’s cite notwithstanding, whether the Mezquita was actually built on the cite of a Cathedral of St. Vincent ( or that such a church actually existed at all ) is a little uncertain. Roger Collins notes:
The first mosque in the city was, according to later Arab accounts, half of the Church of St. Vincent, one of the three principal saints of Cordoba. This claim requires to be treated with considerable caution in that it parallels a story relating to the founding of the great Umayyad mosque in Damascus…In an even more elaborate form of the story the Church of St. Vincent itself was made out to have been built on the site of an earlier synagogue erected by King Solomon. Thus in itself the Muslim building symbolized the stages of of the progressive revelation of true religion. This in its developed form was probably a later mystical rationalization, but the possible selection of a major Christian church for the location of the first mosque can be paralleled in a number of North African cities, and may have some fatual basis.
From The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710-797 by Roger Collins ( 1989, Blackwell Publishers Ltd. ).
Since Abd ar-Rahman I was an escaping survivor of the overthrown Umayyad dynasty to the east, the close similarity of the Cordoba story to the Damascus story has raised some red flags as to its veracity with historians of Islamic architecture ( Collins cites Cresswell for one ). As Collins notes, it could be true and such things did occur. But it also might be just a fanciful tale, like the synagogue story probably is.
Not quite.The story goes that first he confiscated half the Church to build the initial mosque. Then he later decided to confiscate the other half, compensating the Christians by allowing them to build a new church in the city’s suburbs, and demolished that half to build a new, more modern structure to expand the initial mosque.
Well it’s already been covered, but there is no such thing as a “victory mosque”, just the winners needing somewhere to worship. The most logical place is often the big beautiful church/mosque/whatever that is already standing in the middle of the city. In a way, I’ve always seen it as a sign of respect. Instead of pissing on it and burning it down, the conquerors thought the building was so beautiful that they wanted to locate their place of worship there.
The community center in New York is probably named “Cordoba” because the people who started this whole community center idea had earlier founded the Cordoba Initiative.
Why did they name it the Cordoba Initiative?
Ok maybe that’s a cover story and they really picked the name because it represented tearing down a church, but I doubt it. The Great Mosque of Cordoba isn’t really a black eye for Christians nor are Muslims proud of it because it may have been built over a Christian church. It is seen as a thing of beauty and that period and location actually are known for being a prosperous center of intellectual, spiritual, cultural and commercial life where everybody coexisted pretty well. The idea of it being built on that site has never meant anything to anyone until opponents of the Cordoba Center found it could help them.
I won’t even bother quarreling with any of that. You’re unduly anti-Christian, in my view, but you’re far from ridiculous in your opinions on the Crusades. I might even agree with some of them in more nuanced form.
In GD.
My frustration was borne of the fact that you introduced opinions, on the Crusades, as the first answer to a highly-factual, GQ, question, as to which I tried to head off any religious debate on at the pass. That’s deemed poor etiquette, no? I honestly didn’t know (have some better idea now) whether the “victory mosque” meme had a historical basis. I posted my eye-rolling response to you because your post did nothing to help me resolve my factual question, and threatened to detour this into a GD thread that I never started about “the Christians were no better” or “the mosque is no threat” that can be/probably is being much better covered in GD or the Pit.
What is being called the “Cordoba Center?”
Or, for that matter, they were converted into Christian churches, for example the Pantheon (now officially the Basilica of Sta. Maria ad Martyres), or the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, or the Maison Carrée in Nimes, or the temple of Hephaestus in Athens.
(Then there’s cases like when they build a church on top of a temple and then, just to name the point home, name it Santa Maria Sopra Minerva – St. Mary on top of the goddess Minerva.)
It’s only very recently that people began preserving buildings for their historical value. Throughout most of human history, a building was only kept around if it had an ongoing use. The Parthenon wasn’t preserved because it was an architectural wonder; it survived because it was converted into a church and then a mosque and then a warehouse.
How about some cites as to the claim of “victory mosques”? The OP asks if this is true and nobody, including the OP can come up with a “victory mosque”, much less enough of them to establish a pattern. I believe that Mythbusters would call this myth “busted”.
More accurately, what would need to be established that community center is nothing but an affront is establishing that the people putting up the community center somehow approved of killing thousands of innocent people, which they specifically condemned and mourned. Do Muslims as a whole have a tradition of erecting mosques or monuments to the successful slaughter of thousands of people? No.
Did any large Muslim sect condone, fatwa or authorize the 9/11 bombings before they happened or take credit afterward? No. Virtually all of them were horrified and repulsed and condemned it. The Iraqi and Iranian governments condemned the attacks.
The attacks were conducted by the modern day equivalent of anarchists with religion: a splinter group of rich, intelligent, disaffected sociopaths who want to burn the whole world unless they personally are in a position of dictatorship. These people are no more representative of worldwide Muslims than that asshole Terry Jones in Florida is representative of Christians.
The people putting up the community center in Manhattan have a long history of being productive, contributing, charitable and upstanding members of the greater community in that area. They are putting up the Muslim equivalent of a Jewish community center. Islam as a religion did not attack the United States any more than Judaism attacked Wiemar or Nazi Germany and the Becktardian reaction is just as ugly and destructive towards Islam and our national principles as the Nazis were before they took power in Germany.
Until we have a cite to a responsible historian or theologian supporting “victory mosques” and hard evidence that the particular community center isn’t a recreation and meeting center that also has a religious room or two, we can fairly presume that the Becktards are just stirring shit up in general and here for personal and political gain at the expense of the free exercise of religion.
The two are hardly antithetical.