{"id":45435,"date":"2015-07-16T17:41:56","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T17:41:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=45435"},"modified":"2015-07-16T17:41:56","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T17:41:56","slug":"when-one-life-sprouts-inside-another","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=45435","title":{"rendered":"When one life sprouts inside another"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — some ugly comparisons, you have been warned — but it is only the exaggerated ugliness that drives my point home ]
\n.<\/p>\n

The first DoubleQuote<\/strong> of three I’m posting here shows two views of sacred sites taken over by conquering religions<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"SPEC<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You may have seen this DoubleQuote<\/strong> before — the upper panel shows the Mezqita <\/strong>or Grand Mosque of Cordoba, an extraordinarily beautiful building in the middle of which Spanish Catholics grafted a baroque cathedral, an act of which King Carlos V<\/strong> of Spain said: <\/p>\n

You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere else, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lower panel shows the Hagia Sophia<\/strong> or Basilica of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul, which was turned into a mosque by Muslim conquerors, and subsequently made into a museum<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

The question this sort of transformation of sacred places — from one faith to another, often by conquest but also on occasion by commercial transfer or simple generosity — leaves me wondering what it must feel like for those who lose their place of worship, especially in case of conquest. And I should make it clear that my question applies as much to Jews unable to pray on Temple Mount as it does to Christians in Istanbul or Muslims in Cordoba.<\/p>\n

By its visual nature, the Cordoban example sticks in my mind, however — the relatively new cathedral sprouting quiute visibly from the ancient mosque.<\/p>\n

And so it is that my mind, habituated to seeking visual analogues, stumbled on the disgusting — if brilliant — birth of the alien in Ridley Scott<\/strong>‘s The Alien<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"SPEC<\/a><\/p>\n

I know: Giger<\/strong>‘s aliens in the movie — and even more so, in the now canonical “chestburster” scene — are hideous, as Ridley Scott himself said, “in the unique manner in which they convey both horror and beauty.”<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Granted, these comparisons from “fiction” (above) and “nature” (below) to what is now one of the world’s more interesting architectural oddities seem obscene — we are used to the church-in-a-mosque as a tourist attraction, and in its own way a minjor miracle — <\/p>\n

\"SPEC<\/a><\/p>\n

— my interest here, hiowever, is in looking at it, not through Muslim eyes, but through the eyes of those Muslims for whom building a church inside what was not only a mosque but one of the most beautiful mosques in the world feels like a grievous insult<\/em>. <\/p>\n

For them, the cathedral in the Mezquita is a blasphemy — the insertion of a polluted form of worship in a place once dedicated to God’s own preferential service. And this is important not so that we can understand the ideation of those who wish to return the cathedal to a mosque and more generally Spain to al-Andalus, but so that we can comprehend the depth and intensity of the associated emotion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The passion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Which some Christians must surely also feel whewn they enter the museum of Hagia Sophia, once so proud a place of Christian worship and history — or some Jews with respect to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the movement to permit Jewish worship, at present forbidden, is gaining momentum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The passion behind (sacred) revanchism<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — some ugly comparisons, you have been warned — but it is only the exaggerated ugliness that drives my point home ] . The first DoubleQuote of three I’m posting here shows two views of sacred sites taken over by conquering religions. You may have seen this DoubleQuote before — the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[948,526,627,635,67,533,32,1207,429,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-charles-cameron","category-doublequotes","category-israel","category-movies","category-religion","category-science","category-spain","category-turkey","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45435"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45504,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45435\/revisions\/45504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}