BackA church is a mosque is a church
At this uniquely syncretic structure, far more people come to pay obeisance to pillars, arches and stones than to gods
Premium
To enter the church, I had to go inside a mosque. The street signs outside said Mezquita, the Spanish word for mosque. But inside, you could not pray to Allah, and once you walked past the pillars and arches, in the distance, you could see Christ on a cross.
Mezquita looked like a mosque, with its hundreds of curved, horse-shoe shaped arches, symmetric patterns, muted colours, and the absence of icons or idols. But most of all, those pillars were unique—there were hundreds of them, in red and white, surrounding us from all sides. In the courtyard outside, orange trees stood. “A piece of Eastern architecture with a Baroque cathedral stuck in the middle of it," Salman Rushdie had described it in The Moor’s Last Sigh.
In this uniquely syncretic structure in Córdoba, Spain, there was arithmetic precision behind the rows of pillars, with red and white stripes placed along the curve of the arches at precise intervals, so that when I walked slowly from one angle to another and saw the pillars, the stripes seemed to move at the same pace that I walked.
If I stood at one spot and then walked in a circle around that spot, and then looked around, I would see these red and white stripes continuously moving, and yet going nowhere, in an eternal animation, like in a drawing of Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch graphic artist. The forest of pillars and the red-and-white striped arches that hemmed me inside seemed to convey a perception of infinity.
The Umayyads built the mosque over a 200-year period. It was built on the remains of a Visigoth church, which in turn had displaced a pagan temple. Abd al-Rahman I came to power in 756 AD, making Córdoba the capital of the Moorish caliphate. He began building the mosque, a task completed only two centuries later. In the years that followed, Córdoba gained fame as a city of intellect and civilization, with poets writing love poems, astronomers tracking the skies, and the city’s urban waste disposed off in pipes.
Eight centuries later, Christians conquered Moorish Spain. Charles V of the Habsburg dynasty did what conquerors like to do in their flag-planting zeal. He built his own monument at the site of the big mosque. He had several arches taken down, and built a cathedral inside the periphery of the erstwhile mosque. This church within a mosque is not a mosque any longer, but with hundreds of arches still standing, it continues to weave its magical illusions.
Their plea: to be allowed to offer Muslim prayers. But the city’s bishop has refused. Muslims from elsewhere, some inspired by Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric (he wanted to reclaim Al-Andalus, as Andalusia is known in Arabic, for Islam), have attempted to pray collectively inside what they still consider a mosque, leading to guards evicting them.
There is one god, the one permitted to be worshipped. Demetrio Fernández González, the city’s bishop, has already appealed to the town to refer to the structure as a church, and not a mosque, to avoid confusing visitors. In an article in ABC, a right-leaning Spanish newspaper, he asked: “In the same way, it would be inappropriate to call the current mosque of Damascus the Basilica of St John or to expect that it could be both a place of Muslim and Christian worship," referring to an Umayyad mosque in Syria which has been built above a church which reportedly had St John the Baptist’s remains.
But shopkeepers, motivated by tourist-dollars and not consumed by atavistic longings, react differently. Ask any shop: Where the church is; and the shopkeeper is likely to ask: “Which one?" Then you ask where Mezquita is, and instantly he points in the right direction. Shakespeare asked in Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". Perhaps; but the bishop is talking about something more serious—formidable faith, not a fickle flower. Yet, what draws people to Mezquita is not the faith, but beauty—an overwhelming proportion of the 1.5 million visitors who visited it last year came to admire its architecture, and not to connect with the supernatural, of this or that faith.
Syncretism is at the heart of Córdoba. As I walked through the old town, towards Mezquita, I came across a statue honouring Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish philosopher, who was born in Córdoba, and whose home is now a well-kept museum. The homes in the area proudly display their menorahs, and inside the homes, I could see beautiful courtyards with water fountains, with resplendent flowers adorning windows.
Outside the mosque, the mood is convivial, not combative. There are stands selling Christian religious artefacts and photographs of the mosque and church. Besides the chilled soup gazpacho, the restaurants serve tapas made naturally from pork, and Rioja wine, once consumed eagerly by former Muslims who had converted to Christianity after the fall of Moorish Granada to demonstrate their fealty to the new faith.
But one dark hotel stands ominously, facing Mezquita. There is a mannequin outside, in steel armour, looking like a crusader. That he is, the hotel reminds us; it is called El Conquistador, as the soldiers who defeated the Moors were known.
Some battles continue, even if only in people’s minds.
Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.
Also Read | Salil’s previous Lounge columns
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
