A Mosque at Ground Zero

I dearly wanted to avoid this issue, but Sir Harry would have none of it.

"Are they going to build that Cordoba mosque or not?" he barked over the secure line. "And what are the ramifications?"

"As to your first question," I replied, "it could go either way. Depends, as these things usually do, on the money. And more importantly, where the money is coming from. As to the ramifications, which also will bear on the possible construction, how you interpret the symbolism will be the deal breaker."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a bit complicated, but it will be in my report. Along with the invoice."

"Send it by tomorrow. Use encryption code D."

"That's rather elaborate. Something in London gone awry?"

"Fruit not yet ripe for the plucking," Sir Harry stated brusquely. "Now mind. By tomorrow." At which point the line went dead.

Now the real reason I was shying away from the New York mosque issue is that one must wrestle with symbolism and, with symbolism, things can get very complicated in a hurry. Let me give you an example drawn from Northrup Frye's magnificent The Anatomy of Criticism. Frye notes that when a critic of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene encounters St. George, the Redcross Knight, bearing a red cross on a white ground, he has some grasp of the figure. Frye then goes on to state that "when the critic meets a female in Henry James' The Other House called Rose Arminger with a white dress and a red parasol, he is, in the current slang, clueless."

They are symbols, you see, but where one is easily discerned, the other is not.

Which brings us to the proposed Cordoba mosque.

First, let us dispense with the Cordoba aspect. In any symbolic interpretation, one must have at least an idea of what the symbol means. I put out a call to Tilly Hatt, who was currently in New York having a romantic interlude with some Romanian she had met in the Bronx. At my request, she asked a number of New Yorkers -- fifteen to be exact -- what they thought 'Cordoba' meant. Seven simply stared at her blankly, while eight said it was a 1975 Chrysler. (Americans may be no hell on Spanish history, but they know their cars.) So away goes Cordoba, the Moorish capital of Al-Andalus, along with the the Mezquita, (the Great Mosque) and the taking of the city by Christians in 1236. No symbol there.

With 'mosque', however, we are in entirely different territory.

I did some research here, and discovered that prior to the attack on the World Trade Center, Americans held little animus against mosques. Indeed, they thought them quaint, and of course no rivals to those palatial Pentecostal palaces that were springing up everywhere. In short, any symbolism simply escaped them, much like Frye's critic in the Henry James example. After the attack, however, Edmund Spenser's example leaped to the fore. Mosques became to a slew of Americans a symbol of aggression and the slaughtering of innocents, a Redcross Knight gone berserk.

And Muslims wish to erect one near Ground Zero? Madness.

Unless....

1) The funding is entirely by American Muslims, as an act of atonement and an expression of the regard in which they hold America, their pride in being American citizens, and their deep belief in the separation of church and state. (Shut up, Sarah.)

2) No foreign capital to be sought, particularly from Saudi Arabia, whose interpretation of the Qur'an is, to put it bluntly, nonsensical and from time to time, vicious. (The Saudis are not alone in this.)

3) A number of 'meditation' rooms to be available to people of other faiths; that is, a small chapel, a little temple, and perhaps a small shul. I mean, if you're going to atone, do it right.

If these conditions fly, then, as I wrote Sir Harry, the building should go ahead. I am afraid, however, that when it comes to something flying, it will be pigs.

Then there is Newt Gingrich's condition, and I hate to admit it, but part of me (and not the best part) agrees with the old Republican curmudgeon. Newt simply stated that permission to build the mosque be conditional upon Saudi Arabia permitting a cathedral to be built near the Kaaba in Mecca.

Works for me.