Should a Muslim community center and a mosque be permitted to be built four blocks from Ground Zero in New York? The proposed Cordoba House, so named to invoke Cordoba, Spain, between the 8th and 11th centuries, where Muslims, Christians and Jews are said to have co-existed peacefully, has sharply divided Americans. According to columnist Ignacio Camacho of Spain’s ABC newspaper, the failure of Muslim states to reciprocate and allow churches to be built in their cities complicates matters considerably.
For ABC, columnist Ignacio Camacho writes in part:
Of all the sites in all of the cities in all of the United States, this is probably the least appropriate to build a mosque, because it reopens hardly-closed wounds in the consciousness of a people that have been attacked … The New York debate isn’t about freedom – but sensitivity.
At the root of this controversy, which is so familiar to us, living as we do in a country that has also been hit by Islamic fundamentalism, isn’t so much the issue of tolerance, as that of reciprocity. The liberal state provides for freedom of religion and makes it possible without major problems, as evidenced by the massive Ramadan celebrations in Europe and America. But such peaceful coexistence shouldn’t be clouded by gestures that could be interpreted as unnecessary provocations.
This is an issue assumed as a matter of course within democratic societies; however, it doesn’t receive reciprocal treatment in the majority of Islamic nations, where the erection Christian churches or the celebration of Christmas and Easter are often prohibited. It is this lack of corresponding fairness that leads to suspicion and aggrieved sentiments.
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