HOLY TURF WARS
By RALPH PETERS - NY Post
Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."
April 20, 2004 -- WHENEVER I visit history-haunted Istanbul, my first stop is the cathedral of St. Sophia. The greatest monument of Christianity's first millenium is now a museum run by the Turkish government.
It never occurred to me to demand it back.
History moves on, and we must move with it. Those who cling to the shipwreck of the past drown their future. Apart from our ability to love, the most impressive human talent is our ability to rise up from our failures and start again.
The ultimate symptom of the collapse of Arab civilization isn't terrorism or abusive regimes, nor the persecution of minorities or even the baffling lack of creativity. Rather, it's the narcotic Arab embrace of past glories - always gilded, sometimes forged.
Those who live in yesterday cannot build tomorrow.
Even after last month's Madrid bombings, few Westerners take seriously the Arab extremists' obsession with reclaiming al-Andaluz, the vast portion of Spain where, from the eighth through the 10th centuries, Islamic civilization reached its pinnacle. The dream of lost Andalusia is an opiate for the disappointed souls of the Middle East - even though Cordoba's rulers would have rejected Osama bin Laden's puritanism, as well as his demonic will to destruction.
But the dream has little to do with any reality, past or present. The fanatic's vision ignores the tale of how Moorish Spain was lost. It wasn't Christian knights who wrecked the grandeur of Muslim Cordoba and Seville. Berber fundamentalists from North Africa shattered the golden age of al-Andaluz, invaders whose vision of Islam - like that of today's terrorists - did not include Aristotle, astronomy and tolerance.
The faithful slew the faithful. The Berber invasions enabled still-weak Christian kingdoms to nibble their way southward. For five centuries after the fundamentalist triumph, feudal strife, not strict religious wars, plagued the Iberian peninsula. Moorish and Christian nobles switched sides again and again.
Mercenaries from both faiths fought for gold, not God. The legendary Christian hero, El Cid, drew his title from an Arabic word for "leader" - after fighting in Moorish employ.
In 1492, Grenada, the last Moorish kingdom, fell. Weakened from within, it needed only one last blow from without.
It's a universal story. Constantinople, bastion of Christianity for a thousand years, fell to Ottoman armies aided by Italian gunners and Christian engineers - after being sacked by Western Crusaders. Following the Mughal invasions of India, Hindu princes danced over to the Muslim side. Within every faith, believers have been ready to slaughter their own kind over the number of imams in a religious succession or the contents of the Communion cup.
There is guilt and blood and loss on every side. And the past cannot be changed.
As a student of history alert to ugly surprises, my fear is that Islamic extremists may arouse passions dormant in the West. Muslim terrorists might do well to recall that there are far more Christian holy places in the Arab world than there are Muslim vestiges in Europe.
Suppose the Christians of tomorrow were provoked to demand the return of the apostolic churches of Asia minor? Or the vast lands of Orthodox Byzantium? Of historical Armenia? Or of Alexandria, the city that dominated early Christian thought? Before Mohammed's triumph, even Mecca had a Christian minority - and Jews had a vital presence in Medina.
The game of "this was mine and must be mine again," whether structured along religious lines or in terms of national identity, is as dangerous an enterprise as any in history. One great American strength has been our willingness to leave "the old country" behind, abandoning all claims to repossession.
Wherever opposing factions claim the same land for their gods, conflicts are insoluble without extremes of bloodshed. When we insist on chaining God to any patch of earth, we make Him as small as us.
Islamic terrorists will not reconquer Spain. But they may do colossal damage to their faith.
A few weeks ago in Istanbul, I paid my admission to St. Sophia's again. For perhaps the 10th time, I wandered alone through the vestibules and galleries, with the grand space beneath the dome pierced by the morning light and the luminous shafts of history. After the fall of Constantinople, Aya Sophia became a mosque for 500 years. Enormous shields with Koranic inscriptions hang above the remaining Christian mosaics.
But no congregation of either faith can claim the cathedral nowadays. Seventy years ago, with the wisdom of Solomon, Kemal Ataturk decided that St. Sophia's would be a mosque no longer, but neither would it revert to Christian use. Despite the anger of Islamic clerics, the building became a museum, open to all.
Ataturk's gesture was as visionary as it was courageous. If I see the ghosts of Christian martyrs inside those massive walls, Muslims see the shimmer of Ottoman glories and the shadows of the empire of faith. The compromise decreed by one great man allows us all to look beyond the masonry to another, better world.
In this world, every claim staked to a patch of "holy" earth reduces God to the status of a landlord. For my part, I hope to visit Istanbul's greatest museum in peace for years to come - as Muslims may visit the museum in Spanish Cordoba that once was the greatest mosque upon the earth.
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