In the Indian city of Ayodhya, Hindu extremists want to build a temple on the site of a mosque they razed to the ground ten years ago. So far they have not achieved their end, but have managed to cause the deaths of many thousands in the communal riots resulting from the sacrilege.
In marked contrast yesterday, in the Spanish city of Granada, once the capital of the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula, a muezzin called the faithful to prayer for the first time in over 500 years in a brand new mosque built without intimidation, without riots, without violence.
It shows what can be done by peaceful means. The mosque, standing opposite the beautiful Alhambra palace, has been built not because there happens to be a large and growing Muslim community in Granada. It is a symbol — it is there to demonstrate in living stones Spain’s Arab and Islamic heritage.
In fact, the local populace, now staunchly Catholic, had stubbornly opposed the construction for 25 years. Through dialogue and quiet cooperation they were brought round to the idea, as much by Spanish officialdom as by the country’s small Muslim community, for whom Granada symbolizes a glorious past. As a result the opposition has largely faded.
Spaniards are not worried in the slightest by the new mosque. They know that this is not the start of a new conquest of their country. They know that the notion, cherished by romantics on the wilder shores of the imagination, that Spain will one day return to being Arab and Muslim is no more credible than that Istanbul will one day again become Greek and Christian.
Moreover, the Spanish have themselves changed. While deeply attached to their own faith, they now happily live with others in their midst.
There is no corner of the world that remains religiously monoglot. The global village and mass travel have put an end to that. Just as mosques are being built in Spain and throughout Europe for those live, work or visit there, so churches are being built in places such as Qatar and the Emirates for the expatriates who live and work there. It is for the good. Contact brings dialogue; it brings tolerance; it brings understanding. Ignorance breeds hatred — and we have experienced too much of that in recent times.
Yet the way of Granada — the way of cooperation and diplomacy, of dialogue — is the way of the world, not the way of intolerance, of arrogance, of violence — the way of Ayodhya, the way of Al-Qaeda. They may make the headlines, because they are wildly abnormal; but they are not the way of the overwhelming majority of us.
