Sultans I've Known

[I am just back from two weeks in Spain and cannot resist filtering current events back here at home through my touristic reflections.]

Triumphant Catholics aren’t known for letting stand rival temples, so when Ferdinand III of Castille conquered Córdoba in 1236, the Umayyad mosque the size of a city block atop the highest hill in the middle of town was slated for some serious renovation. The 63-year reign of his successor Alphonso X (‘the Wise’) provided plenty of time to overlay the Islamic house of worship with symbols of the True Faith, and the victors filled the place with Christian art of a most lurid tendency—naked Jesuses, saints celebrating their mortified flesh, magi, bishops and Roman centurions. All of which the defenestrated Muslims, who shun representations of the human form, would have considered gross idolatry and an extra slap in the face, if anyone were asking their opinion.

So how does the tourist literature spin this potentially embarrassing display of cultural rapine? No problem at all. The cathedral’s present owners recall that the pre-Moorish Visigoths, Catholicized during their relatively brief domination of the Iberian peninsula, had built a church on the same site and that the marauding Muhammedans built right over top of it. Not content with the ‘Johnny-hit-me-first’ line of defense, the tourist brochure adds with a badly-translated snarl that this act ‘questions the theme of tolerance that was supposedly cultivated in the Córdoba of the moment’.

Do we detect a tiny note of defensiveness here, perhaps stemming from the weight of the subsequent record of the Catholic kings of Spain, the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the worthy exploits of the Holy Inquisition?

The history of cultural tolerance is one of the slimmer volumes in the biped encyclopedia, and we can sneer at the narrow-mindedness of medivals only by failing to register the utter modernity of their hubris. What really is the difference between the thirteenth century Catholic determination to mold human society according to its particular ideological straitjacket and the blank cluelessness of the neocon Bushites 800 years later as they insisted that Thatcherite capitalism as propagated by the Caliphate in Washington, D.C., must reign over all the globe? Not surprisingly, both regimes utilized waterboarding to enforce their wishes.

I could only hear the echo of the Middle Ages in Cheney’s pathetic defense of his failed record last week. The impressive cathedrals weren’t built by people plagued by doubt; Pope Cheney would have fit right in. Power will persuade any human tribe that its rule is mandated by heaven; our grandchildren will realize that as Americans are replaced by the next self-referent, double-dealing biped empire.