The leaders of the Muslim community of Spain [You remember the Muslim community of Spain, right? They killed 191 people in the Madrid bombing.] have written a letter to Pope Benedict XVI demanding that their co-religionists be allowed to conduct formal prayer services at a Catholic church in Cordoba. Bishop Juan Jose Asencio of Cordoba rejected the demand saying that such a move "would not contribute to peaceful coexistence between the different creeds" and that it would "merely generate confusion among the faithful and give way to indifferentism as to religion."

The church in question, sometimes called the Cathedral-mosque of Cordoba, was indeed once a mosque for several centuries after the Muslim invasion of the 8th Century AD. After the Catholic Spaniards returned to the area in the 1200s, they found a mosque superimposed on what had once been a Visigoth Spanish church.

So, before the Muslims came in and raped and pillaged their way to salvation, it was a church. They defiled and defaced it, turned it into a mosque, and now they're whining because the Catholics got it back? Why the hell should the Catholics allow Muslims to pray there? Give us back the Hagia Sophia, and we'll talk about it.

Catholic worship is not allowed at the Blue Mosque nor at the museum in Istanbul that was a mosque before the inception of the modern Turkish state. It had been built as the Hagia Sophia Church by Byzantine Christians beginning in the 5th Century AD. Priceless mosaics and holy objects were destroyed by iconoclastic Muslims when the church was converted into a mosque in 1453 AD. Christians face persecution throughout many Muslim countries: in Saudi Arabia, for instance, all worship but that of Islam is strictly forbidden and punishable even by death.

Until then, what's good for the goose....

Labels: Islam, Religion