CORDOBA MOSQUE NAME SPARKS ROW

Cordoba, 14 Safar 1436/7 December 2014 (MINA) – Bids by the diocese of Cordoba to erase the history of the city’s mosque by changing its name to the Cathedral of Cordoba has sparked a row between the diocese and the regional government that called the replacement “absurd”.

“Hiding its past as a mosque is like calling the Alhambra the palace of Charles V – it’s absurd,” Andalusia’s minister for tourism Rafael Rodríguez told El País, the Guardian newspaper reported, OnIslam.net quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA) as reporting.

Over the past years, Spain’s Catholic Church has been trying to annex the centuries-old Cordoba mosque, drawing criticism from rights groups that demanded the recognition of the Islamic rich history in Spain.

At the historical religious site, visitor’s leaflets and tickets include misleading information by ignoring reference to the 500-year-old history of the mosque.

The diocese appeared to be “prioritizing religious beliefs over common sense and the natural history of the monument. It doesn’t seem either reasonable or acceptable to me,” the United Left politician Rodríguez said.

Deeming the church move as “fundamentalist”, the minister said the Government of Andalusia will raise its concerns with the diocese later this month.

“It’s an essential tourist site for Andalusia, the second most important after the Alhambra,” Rodríguez satted.

“It seems absurd that they are not exploiting all the possibilities for tourism due to religious reasons.”

The Great Mosque of Cordoba was built between 784 and 786 during the reign of caliph Abd al-Rahman I.

Serving as a place for Muslim prayers for five centuries, the mosque was consecrated as a church since Ferdinand III, the king of Castile, took Cordoba from the Muslim rulers in 1236.

However, the place is still being called by both Spaniards and tourists as mosque, not cathedral.

The mosque became the center of debates recently after Catholic Church efforts to take it out of public hands were made public.

The church has announced its control over the religious site since 2006 without informing the government which had granted the church the right to run the site earlier.

Fierce debates erupted after it emerged that the local archbishopric is in the process of registering itself as the owner of the entire building – which is public property – a move that will be irreversible by 2016.

Many in the city believe this is part of an effort by the Córdoba Catholic authorities to suppress the monument’s Islamic identity.

Artificial Debate

Rejecting concerns by the regional government over changing the name of the historical site, a spokesman for Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral called it an “artificial debate”.

“We have leaflets that say mosque-cathedral or the other way around,” José Juan Jiménez Güeto said.

“And some that just say cathedral. We’re not denying its history – it was a mosque and now it’s a cathedral.

“Nobody is going to deny this.”

An online petition, launched by “the platform for the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba: Everyone’s Heritage”, against managing the religious site by the Catholic Church has collected more than 350,000 signatures in 2013.

Last March, a similar petition by a secular group has collected about 156,000 signatures demanding the reorganization of the mutual Islamic and Christian history of the religious site.

Muslims ruled much of Spain for centuries starting from 711 to 1492.

Their last king was defeated by Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492.

After that, Muslim mosques were either left to ruin or converted into churches.

There are nearly 1.6 million Muslims in Spain, making up 3.4% of the country’s 47 million population, according to an Andalusian Observatory.

About 1.1 million of Spain’s Muslims re foreigners, while 464,978 are Spanish Muslims.

Islam is the second religion in Spain after Christianity and has been recognized through the 1967 law of religious freedom.

A recent survey found that 70% of Spain’s Muslims feel at home in the European country and that 80 percent feel they have adapted well to the Spanish way of life. (T/P011/P3)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)