Sakirin Mosque, Istanbul

Sakirin Mosque, Istanbul

Architect, Hüsrev Tayla

Interior Design, Zeynep Fadillioglu

Mosque designed by a Woman

Bloodbath in Jerusalem just around the corner?

If they ever rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, how many sheep, cows, pigeons are going to get their throats cut on an hourly, daily basis? How much blood will get splattered onto the sacrificial altar all day long? How much smell of burning carcasses thrown into the fire will fill the air all day long in that ancient heathen town? How much barbecue gets sliced up with the tourist worshipper and how much burned flesh gets doled out to the new priest class that needs to be supported?

A lot of questions. It is part of a lot of fundamentalist Christian preachers’ idea that the Temple should, in fact must, be rebuilt. Of course it means scraping thirteen hundred years of history off the Noble Sanctuary and turning it back into Temple Mount and reopening the charnel house of animal bones and reinstituting the holocaust (place of fire and sacrifice).


Reality check. Time check.


That all sounds gruesome, but this is for many fundamentalists Christians and Jews a requirement for the return of or the first time appearance of the Christ, the messiah etc.


I hope I am using these terms correctly. I do not have a degree in theology or doctorate in divinity. Just using all these terms and invoking these images kind of scares me. I am not necessarily an animal rights person but I can see where the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem will in its own way elevate the souls of animals, of God’s creation in general, to new higher global standards of respect in reaction to such revived ancient cruelty.


Can you imagine the smell of barbeque, the smell and chatter of the tourist crowds, the noise of the money changers, the occasional blaring of trumpets and bang of drums? This is what Jesus would have seen in his day. This is what Jesus was in rebellion against.


When did a simple, formed in the desert, concept of a single deity, of one God get turned into such a circus and business machine? (Jesus wept.)


Well as I say this is what some say is what is needed to bring the stage actor, plastic Jesus thing to earth to enhance the already stage presence and drama of public worship of the local deity also know as God, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Shiva etc.


It is easy to forget that the whole Greek drama thing, the theatre thing, the entertainment thing, the thing that fills a majority portion of our entertainment time to this day aka as TV, the box, Cable – how it all started as religion – as sacred morality plays – of men and their flaws living their lives and being judged or rewarded by the gods, the many gods of antiquity.


Indeed, we monotheists, primarily have our Trinity god – Yahweh/Jesus/Allah carved out of our local beliefs and backed up by our local deities, sacred texts and other Modus Operandi.


Drama, drama, everywhere and not much sanity in sight.


Someone sent me a piece about some White Bread Fundamentalist preacher from White Bread Town aka Pasadena that spoke, preached, that Osama Bin Laden went to Hell because he did not repent of his sins or accept Jesus as his exclusive official broker to get into Heaven. Poor Osama.


But wait a minute! Osama did not die in Pasadena. Thank Allah!


He died in Pakistan where he was hiding off the grid and with the help of his local friends at the military academy that recognized that it was good for local business, the military academy, salaries, promotions, pensions, loot, spoils of war, the local military industrial complex and atomic bomb making thing – that these things were a good thing for the local economy and under the local deity of Allah.


Osama was a martyr in that part of the world and went straight to his sixty odd virgins in Paradise. What happened to the seventy two virgins, as it is stated in the Koran? Hell, Osama’s agent gets ten percent of the action. Right? (business is business).


My fear about dying is where do I end up? Pasadena or Hell? Is there a difference? ( a little attempt at humor )


Well anyway, this week I talked to several people whose local ethnic church in Bethlehem, Pa. has come onto the real estate market for the sake of cash flow in the Allentown diocese. Problem with the catholic thing is that the local bishop has the deed to St. Joseph’s Church.


That is one reason bishops and or priests can’t get married. You don’t want all these deeds and properties to get confused with a priest or a bishop’s personal estate going to his wife, boyfriend, or children and get confused with the diocese bank accounts etc. (sorry, getting off subject here).


Studying that situation, I would not be surprised if St. Joseph’s RC church gets sold, scraped of ornamentation and turned into the Yusuf Mosque and Islamic Center for the Muslim students at the nearby Lehigh University. Probably more Muslims on campus than surviving members of the Slovenian community on the border with that ever growing, ever land consuming, urban institution.


I am just kidding myself on that. Whatever Lehigh University has planned for that property it is not a recycled and or new Islamic center for Lehigh students. Maybe another chemistry lab above a tiered parking garage and to be used for animal testing. A new Temple of Science? Whatever.


Science has no conscience and therein lies the rub between traditional values, myths, local belief systems and the new atheist world (global) view of things.


Times change and we all apparently willing or not have to change with them.


The Catholic thing is celibacy and no deed for the local church. The Prot thing is to keep the deed local and in the hands of the preacher. In a way the local god of Rev. Whomever in Pasadena is not much of an improvement over the minds of men and women in need of the simple love of one’s local and global neighbor.


Getting back to the animal sacrifice thing. I was looking at the floorplan of the old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the one that stood there for a thousand years, and there in the front of the church is the altar. Altar. For a sacrifice? Of course, the sacrifice of Jesus (once was surely not enough), his blood, the martyr, the doorway to Heaven etc.


Problem with changing times is that when they destroyed Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D./C.E., they got rid of the live stage thing in the Greek drama. The ideas of the Jewish faith got turned into two different abstracts, one part that stayed Jewish to this day and the other part that got rewritten in the Jesus script/play.


The irony of it all is that Saul of Tarsus was probably trying to convert gentiles to Judaism, a Jewish sect, as it still was in his day and not as he supposedly envisioned it in the later day Roman pagan rewrite of the script.


I saw a picture of the front of St. Joseph’s Slovenian Catholic church in Bethlehem Pa, that I cannot show you here. I was not taken by the predictable gothic architecture or need of sand blast cleaning of dirty old stones. I was impressed by the balance of the handicapped entrance ramp to the front of the church. I saw that whether designed by an architect or done with old world craftsmanship, it looked as if it was a labor of love. It was built with a purpose in mind and to a need of an aging congregation. It shows even to this agnostic type person.


I respect everyone’s right to worship as they see fit to whatever local or universal god they see fit to pray to and not pray to. It is the cornerstone of our written constitution. It is the stone the builders reject in much of the rest of the world. My Jesus, I know, would back me up on that point.


I see how a living piece of European history like St. Joseph’s gets discarded in the new godless, new fangled MBA spreadsheet way of dealing with humanity or in fact eliminating humanity – and eliminating that humanity from the bottom line of Diocese profit and loss statements - and by some green, white bread temporary cleric in charge on Chew Street in Allentown – well I could just about cry.


The world is not getting larger. The world is not getting smaller and or global. The world is getting reduced to decimal points on a spreadsheet for some of us. “Oh! The Humanity!”


Whatever.


And so it goes.

Mosque - Definition

From the free on-line dictionary a definition for mosque and its origin.

A Muslim house of worship.

[French mosquée, from Old French mousquaie, from Old Italian moschea, from moscheta, from Old Spanish mezquita, from Arabic masjid; see masjid.]

Mosque is quite a European word and seems to have been in the language forever. Little strange wonder how the idea of a Muslim house of worship anywhere is an idea that offends people.

With empty churches for sale and the like, and a large immigration influx, the nation turns from Christian to multi ethnic and multi cultural and global.

FYI

Cordoba House - WTC - Columbia College - NYC

College and University is a place to broaden one’s knowledge of the diversity of the world in all its aspects.

Some American universities such as Harvard started out as places to study theology. While a degree in Theology at Harvard is a noteworthy thing, it does not say much about the individual that holds the degree.

Life is about Experience. The experience many had on 911 at the World Trade Center effected all of American culture including its thinking. While the theme behind 911 was anti-American, it was also anti- western Christian Culture. 911 began as a domestic American day. It ended as a day of global reflection.

The Cordoba House/Mosque complex in New York City to be built in an office tower structure of 13-15 stories sits exactly on part of the foundation stones of part of the original King’s College building – later to become Columbia University uptown. Literally, this is true.

It is rather fitting that a place, a Muslim culture place, be part of the world and or global culture and that it is to sit on a place dedicated to learning that goes back almost two hundred and fifty years. The beginnings of a Global Culture, of a new human race, I believe starts at the New World Trade Center rising from the ashes of the old.

So like the secular colleges of today, the Cordoba House/Mosque center will be a place of learning and broadening outlooks from the very narrow focus that began the day of 911. The end of that day sent us looking for many answers.

Sometimes the answers are right there in our midst. A mosque in downtown NYC is as natural as the wind as a place to be. And a place for cultural growth.

Tolerance. Learning. Diversity. Just a few global words to throw out there today.

Proposed Mosques

Whether seen or unseen, American immigrants usually bring their religious brand with them as culture. While Muslim is not a typical immigrant category except by religion, the uniqueness and difference from standard European Christian religions stands out when any immigrant brings their religion like Islam with them.

The Vietnamese come to mind. They were different in looks and they started to gather in clusters at various points around the United States after their Diaspora from Vietnam. Close to twenty three percent of Vietnamese Americans are Roman Catholic. It was not their religion that possibly made them stand out when they settled in a Midwestern town, it was their skin color.

News begets news and a Mega Mosque in Tennessee is now being plagued by protests. The mosque viewed above is proposed for Cologne Germany. Architecture worth looking at can house any religious belief system.

Small Town Residents Boycott 'Mega' Mosque

Several residents in the small community of Murfreesboro, Tenn., are outraged over plans to build what some are calling a "mega" mosque.


About 600 people recently crowded a county commission meeting at the Rutherford County Courthouse, urging officials to reject site plans for the mosque. Residents say the proposal for building the 52,000-square-foot center south of Murfreesboro was never put in a public notice.

"I think we're very disappointed in the fact that that you did not give us ample notice," one resident told city officials.

"I'm sorry. [Muslims] seem to be against everything that I believe in and so I don't want them necessarily in my neighborhood spreading that type of comments," Stan Whiteway, another mosque opponent, said.

In any case, mosques are here to stay. They are part of the great American Immigrant dream thing.

Cordoba House - NYC - Mosque - Columbia College

Recalling memory of perhaps forty years past, I have to say one of the best basic cookbooks of all times on basic American cooking is the Settlement Cook Book. It’s recipes are derived from a cultural secular phenomenon called Settlement Houses that existed in the heyday of mass immigration into American culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Reading the various things being put out there, I go back to the concept of Cordoba House as a community center. I am reminded of the settlement movement, a secular movement in the 19th century both in England and the United States.

Having done some research on Islam, the Mosque as the center of a community is more secular a building than the west would treat a church as sacred. A church might have a community center but rarely do you see children in churches doing homework or reading, memorizing the bible.

The Mosque as community center and as planned in Cordoba House sounds more like an old-fashioned settlement house where someone like Eleanor Roosevelt did her Christian charity and taught some classes to the poor in a secular settlement house in the slums of NYC.

As the name suggests, in the American model, a settlement house that taught English, civics, hygiene, cooking and provided a gymnasium in the midst of crowded tenements, it, as a community center was also like an assimilation center for immigrants to ease into the American culture.

Cordoba house, especially for a fundamentalist or a Sufi specialty branch of study is perhaps a settlement house of sorts. The difference is that Islam is the center of community, secular like, structure?

Settlement houses went out of existence with the social safety net of government established and expanded over the decades. I have often thought that as in the case of influx of Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, that an old-fashioned concept of a settlement house teaching English and American customs might be an old idea that would ease some tensions between the existing culture and the influx of a foreign culture(s).

There is now some credible evidence surfacing that the Proposed so-called World Trade Center mosque, Cordoba House will sit on approximately forty percent of the original land that was under the original Columbia College Building, now Columbia University, when it started in colonial times on what is now the street called Park Place in downtown Manhattan.

Columbia College Building 1857

Cordoba House being proposed on this historic American spot is perhaps a good marriage of the old native culture blending into the new secular global cultural still forming.

Jihad - Nazi - Anti-Semitic -- Banned Hate Words

It is time to remove little bits, words, of auxiliary verbal HATE from our language. To Ban then!

I am writing this off the cuff. I removed the Jihad from my earlier article about Cordoba House / Mosque in lower Manhattan.

There is a great FOX NEWS monitored or sponsored visual rally against the mosque this coming Sunday, a so-called Christian day of rest.

I have seen what amounts to hate literature regarding the building of this porposed mosque.

JIHAD is a Muslim Hate Word.

NAZI is an antichrist or derived from Western Christian culture Hate Word – hate word when used to describe anybody other than Nazis in the Press, Radio, or TV.

Anti-Semitic is used to throw at any non-Jew or real Jews (Self Hating supposedly) who disagree with the Military Junta that runs Israel.

ANTI-SEMITIC is the most abused phrase in the English language in it double usage – it’s original meaning and now its permanent political “shut up” meaning. Used to silence the protestors against the Military Junta running Israel and its despicable and inhumane foreign polity – it is used as a HATE WORD the majority of the time these sad days in human history.

These three hate words related to the three monotheistic religions must be banned for a few decades in order to move forward to a civilized global future of all the human race.

Amen. Amen. I say to you. Roadblocks to World Peace and roadblocks to genuine communications amongst the brothers and sisters of humanity will no longer be tolerated.

Mosque / Resort Planned for Manhattan

I am getting mixed signals in the news about talk of a new high rise, 13 story mosque and spa to go up within two city blocks of the World Trade Center on Park Place in Manhattan. Park Place in that area is a mix of seedy old 19th century loft buildings and rising office spires and luxury apartment buildings.

New York's fury at plans for Ground Zero mosque

It (the property) formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory store. The store's two selling floors were destroyed when the landing gear from one of the planes tore through them during the attacks.

Construction is due to begin on September 11 next year – the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack.

A massive rally protesting the plans has been scheduled for June 6 as anger grows.

Rosemary Cain, whose fireman son was killed, said: ‘I think it’s despicable. That’s sacred ground. It’s a slap in the face.

'How could anybody give them permission to build a mosque there?’

And:

Bill Doyle, whose son was also among the 3,000 victims, said: ‘What I’m frightened about is that it’s almost going to be another protest zone – a meeting place for radicals.’

There is a need for a mosque in the downtown Manhattan area for many foreign born vendors and taxi drivers especially for a Friday service. There has in the past few years been a place for Islamic worship in an old loft building at 20 Murray Street where they lost their lease in 2008. Prices go up. Perhaps $20 million dollars worth of luxury lofts now occupy that building in a tight market split between gentrification and the slow comeback of office space and the new rising World Trade Center.

That mosque, Masjid Mosque, in now in smaller quarters at 12 Warren St. Plans to move one block south from Warren Street to Park Place seems to be crossing a line in the sand. It seems to be affront to the families and citizens of New York who are still very sensitive to the 911 attack by so-called Muslims in Jihad not against Christianity but the Secular West that Islam cannot separate in their view or mindset about America.

Nobody has disturbed private Muslim services held three blocks from Ground Zero these past few years. But when you want to do a tax free non-profit publicity stunt to insult New Yorkers in order raise Saudi blood money for a good Manhattan investment, the Masjid Mosque seems to have worn out its welcome in the formerly tolerate neighborhood.

Plans for a mosque at the old Burlington Coat Factory outlet were approved in December 2009 by the 12 member finance committee of the local Community Board. A full vote by the full 40 members of that Community Board is set for May 25 and the current controversy stems partly from that.

The heart of this controversy lies with the money. It is one thing to occupy a plain mosque within two blocks of the WTC and used by local New York Muslims. It is quite another thing to start raising money for a full blown bells and whistles Mosque and Spa for foreign Muslim tourists along with likely private luxury condo apartments for visiting Saudi Princes.  This  is what really pisses New Yorkers off!

Ground Zero is not Disney Land!  It is hallowed American ground.  Even if our country is mortgaged to these Muslim oil warlords, we have not all sold our souls to them yet.

In terms of official real e$tate maps, Warren Street lies in TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal) and Park Place is in the Financial District. Good investment territory, hallowed WTC ground be damned.

There is a question according to FOX News if the Masjid Mosque does in fact hold title to the property in question now causing so much controvery.

Muslims in NYC Planning to Build Second, Smaller Mosque Near Ground Zero

As controversy surrounds the construction of a 13-story mosque just two blocks from Ground Zero, FOX News has learned that an effort to place a second mosque close to the hallowed site in New York City is in its advanced stages.

The Masjid Mosque has raised $8.5 million and is seeking an additional $2.5 million to begin construction. While it apparently has not settled on a final location, it has told donors it plans to build very close to where 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 terror attacks.

In fact, the website appealing for donations boldly states that it plans to “build the 'House of Allah' next to the World Trade Center. Help us raise the flag of 'LA ILLAH ILLA ALLAH' in downtown Manhattan."

One source said he believed the planners are considering a five-story building on 23 Park Place, closer to Ground Zero than the 13-story mosque the Cordoba Initiative is planning to build. But a tax record search shows that 23 Park Place is in private hands and has not changed owners since 2008.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf sounds more like a promoter, P.T. Barnum type than a religious cleric in his money raising tactics for a thirteen story mega mosque, spa and private luxury condos for visiting Saudi Princes in Downtown Manhattan.

I do not think any New York Unions will touch, build, this PR failure, insult to New Yorkers from this Investor Cleric from Malaysia.

So it goes.

Minarets Here There Everywhere

I waited for the Swiss plebiscite on the banning of Minarets at Mosques to go off the front page of the news before writing this.

In short, the Swiss, a country with three languages and cultures, German, French and Italian decided that it would be okay to ban Minarets, the Islamic Tower attached to a Mosque, from all future construction in the country. Traditionally the Minaret is a place where Muslims are called to prayer by human voice, Mohammed did not like bells.

There are already four minarets in Switzerland. I don’t know how many Mosques or Islamic Centers there are but out of a population of approximately eight million Swiss, three to four hundred thousand are Muslim. From the news I have read, most of these Muslims are Albanian and many of them refugees more than likely escaped from the Kosovo conflict in the breakup of Yugoslavia of a decade ago.

From what I have read, these Muslims are quite secular, not fanatical. In appearance and dress they are like everybody else.

So what’s the problem? I would have to imagine it stems from the fact that Switzerland has over twenty percent of its permanent and temporary population as non-Swiss born foreigners. The Swiss in a global world are having to deal with cultural shocks that Americans takes mostly in stride with it diverse history and population.

Perhaps a minaret painted or decorated in bright middle-eastern colors conflicts with the dull gray tones of traditional Swiss architecture. In any case, this ban is symbolic of a resistance or a grass roots feeling that change is not a good thing in Switzerland.

Even if Islam is not overtly threatening to the average Swiss citizen, there must be overflow of media from Germany and France where tensions with Muslims exist. The Germans have a large foreign based worker population and in particular from Islamic countries. The French are obsessed with Muslim women wearing traditional headdress in every day society. With the French I have wonder if their attitudes would change if Muslim women wore designer Hermes scarves – oh just a thought.

In all fairness to the Swiss there is no reciprocity in Saudi Arabia where only a few churches are allowed, without bell towers for diplomats and foreign workers only. Even then these plain church buildings are usually out of sight and reached down low traffic streets and alley ways. But the Saudis are not really the issue here.

Europe is changing. The world is changing. Even in the Muslim world, westernization continues in some degree, if only in the use of western style technology and the Internet, even if there is not outward signs of change. East meets West. West meets East and frictions exist.

The picture of a mosque above is of the local one here in Staten Island, not the only one in New York City. The building you see is a recycled factory. The Minaret is non functioning. It is decoration and a recycled chimney from that old factory. Albanian Muslims also escaped here to America from Kosovo. They are European in outward appearance and they have revitalized a dying neighborhood, saving it from urban blight.

I remember after 911, Police cars were parked in front of the gates of this complex 24/7 for a few weeks. The Police were there is insure the freedom of worship clause not directly mentioned but inherently implied in our Constitution. Other than that I do not think many people notice or care that the building is there. It blends in with the rest of a mini-global culture of everyday America.

Day by day and year by year we are all becoming more alike in a Global sense. The ride from here to the future can at times be bumpy. In the future the road gets paved and local customs and habits will still exist but more or more people will be thinking globally and still acting locally. That may seem to be a strange paradigm and dynamic. But that is the likely energy flow of things going forward to a global culture and future.

Mosque of Miriam Paris?

America used to be called the dumping ground of Europe. Europe, now with so many immigrants, will be twenty percent Muslim by 2050 by stats I have seen lately. Nothing outwardly wrong with that unless you fear Islam. (And the GOP vehemently complains about the many Catholics coming north from Meso-America.)

Is it possible to envision the sale of an unused obsolete house of worship like Notre Dame in Paris around 2075 with the plaza outside to accommodate daily Muslim prayers? Anything is possible. Whatever.

Anti-science campaigns by fundamentalists in this country have brought forth a kind of false science with the resurrection of dinosaurs to stand along side Jesus in popular local belief and myth as creationism.

Creationism, by default, would seem to be slipping into Islamic common beliefs or lack of them. It is not that I am campaigning for or against Charles Darwin, patron saint of modern science, but only three or so of twenty-two Muslim majority population countries even touch upon the topic of evolution in their education systems.

Creationism would seem to happen by default by either believing in the literal myth of creation in Genesis or by the lack of any Genesis like text in Islam.

As such, educated scientific minds of all persuasions, Muslim or not, gathered in Cairo this week to discuss the western, European concept of evolution.

Egypt’s Darwin debates

She (Dr. Eugenie Scott) objected to science being viewed through a religious filter and said the two should not be confused. "A biologist who studies enzymes that cause cell division does not bring the Qur'an or Bible into it. It does a great violence to science to run your explanation through a religious filter for this understanding to be accepted."

Lots of uncharted grounds here in the merging of cultures, religions, sciences, myths and human nature.

Islam as a culture carried on basic science while Europe wallowed in the ignorance of the Dark Ages. It would appear that there is at present no real dividing line, concepts set in stone by words, by culture, or in thought about the idea of science or evolution or even the strictest sense of creationism across the Islamic world.

Creationism Gains Ground in Europe

Prof Reiss will tell the gathering that many European nations are yielding to pressure exerted from both East and West in the growth of creationist beliefs, with Muslim immigrants on one side and the importation of Christian fundamentalism on the other…

“What the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries,” he told The Guardian newspaper yesterday. “These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries.

In London ... there are increasingly quite large numbers of highly intelligent 16, 17 and 18-year-olds doing advanced-level biology who do not accept evolution. That’s either because they come from a fundamentalist Christian background or from Muslim backgrounds.”…

But Prof Reiss said although Islam does not suggest that the world was very young – a tenet of Christian creationism – its texts say different organisms had separate origins.

The world continues to merge in thoughts and deeds. The future global society is one of a mix of many things both of scientific and religious myth.

The future is full of possibilities real, imagined and unimagined. The tidal wave of humanity and mixed ideas are already washing over the landscape in the growing Global Culture. Many perspectives are too close to focus on at present. I do not care whether Darwin or Jesus’ pet dinosaur wins in the end. I will not likely be alive in any case to see that future cultural landscape.

Food for thought.

Oh God of our many understandings

"O God of our many understandings..." -

That phraseology from Bishop Robinson of New Hampshire says many things.

Without being in the know of the latest PC thoughts from a Jesus Seminar or an ivy league divinity school, these words reach out for intelligence and tolerance and empathy. These words say that what we each may believe, though our various cultural contexts may be varied, we all, most of us, basically believe the same thing in the concept of the One God.

I am sometimes disheartened when on the news I see the lack of tolerance or understanding between the various monotheistic religions. Too many centuries of comfort in a region and too little reaching out makes for present friction between those who to this day will say that the God of the Jews or the God of Jesus or the God of Mohammed are not one and the same God.

Different names, different understandings but in truth, in our hearts, they invoke the same God.

There is local and there is global. There is sacred and there is secular. There is God and the inability of many who do not try to walk a mile in their brother’s shoes. There are those who do not realize how God has revealed himself in the same way many times throughout the ages but with different accents, and interpretations of the same language and same message from the Source of the Universe...
______________

(there is some hype on TV commercials about what do you tell your grandchildren about where you were when Obama was sworn in)
______________

I began to write the preceding early this morning. It was left unfinished and before the Inaugural of President Barack Hussein Obama. I had been out driving and doing some necessary urgent errands. I caught his swearing in oath on the car radio. I heard the oath of office just before turning onto another road here in Staten Island. Half a block away I saw the minaret of a mosque recycled from an old factory up ahead. The Muslims there of that particular congregation are from Albania. America has changed. The world is changing. We of necessity must change in those things that brings forth more tolerance and understanding to all matters local and global.

I saw the later part of President Obama’s speech on television and was struck by one line as part of a larger paragraph. It was: “…that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace…”

Perhaps our common humanity as it is uniquely blended in the USA will help form the comfort of our using some words first that elsewhere will one day be used that will help thaw cultural differences by their use and in faithful translation. Words and or phrases like “O God of our many understandings …” is a good start.

Temple Mount / Noble Santuary Compromise

With all the current bloodshed in Israel/Palestine these days, I am thinking of the future. Where do two cultures, political states, religions go from here?

I do not wish to document past hopes or failures. I wish to consider how hard it will be for both sides to sit down and negotiate in good faith for the future of the immediate nation state and the greater region. Examples about the end of the cold war between the U.S. and the former U.S.S.R. or the falling down of apartheid in South Africa are not good examples to use or learn from. Those scenarios fit other times and places in other parts of the planet.

I have pondered this situation and think that some symbolic gesture(s) by both sides could pave eons of highways to the future. I use one example here. I am certain that those directly responsible will have better and more practical ideas than my own. That is okay. The important process is the beginning of visualization of a peaceful, prosperous Israel/Palestine in the future by all parties concerned.

I do not wish to intrude on the two cultures and religions but I have some observations. I do not think that a bi-cultural country is immediately possibly. In a global village sense, maybe a hundred years from now nobody will care who your neighbor is across the street in terms of culture or religious background. In an immediate sense I see a divided geography perhaps with walls but a reduction of violence and an escalation of trust between all parties of the region. A successful peace in Israel/Palestine will deflate political agendas in the region and hiding behind religious masks at the present time.

Picture Israel/Palestine or Palestine/Israel whichever way you want to look at the coin. Picture joint economic ventures, common public utilities, high standards of living.

The thing that sticks in a lot of Israeli throats is the division of Jerusalem with a joint political state sharing a joint capital. This is something nobody from the outside can impose. This is something the two parties have to agree upon and work together on to make it work. It is not impossible but it will be extremely difficult to maintain if the current levels of friction and mistrust continue.

I say take the Temple Mount or Haram-esh-Sharif (noble sanctuary) and borrow a page from the wisdom of Solomon. If there is to be a divided capital of Jerusalem then I think that this elevated property gets cut down the middle. The price for peace for the Palestinians should exact a price or such. They at the moment do not have the upper hand in the military equation of the situation. The Israelis are looking at their enemies, though in facts their neighbors, getting up front and personal in a very ancient symbolic piece of Israeli identity in the form of the city of Jerusalem.

This is not easy. But what if the Palestinians say okay, cut Harem-esh-Sharif down the middle if that is what it takes to make a permanent, stable, universally recognized state and capital for Palestine. I think that the Palestinians will opt to keep the half of Temple Mount that has the most symbolism in a structure for them, the Qubbat al-Sakhra or Dome of the Rock. If that happens, then the plain structure or Al-Aqsa Mosque is now on Isreali territory. I do not think that the Israelis will stop the function of this mosque but what if in the terms of binding eternal peace treaty Israel can turn the mosque into a synagogue or even tear it down to build a Third Temple.

A lot of hot points here. Al-Aqsa mosque is the big work horse mosque of the Noble Sanctuary area on Temple Mount.

Israel, if you look close enough, is more a secular state than a theocracy that it had ideally been in the ancient past. A Third Temple is only a dream for a handful of the extreme religious community. If we cannot do these things mentioned above, what can both sides do to show good faith, both literally and symbolically.

I believe that the two mosques could stay in place. A joint police force in the city of Jerusalem could administer control the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary and - and somewhere in the middle of this joint historic site, archeology and research could start on a small scale, a few square meters a year, and could go on for decades and fill a yet to be built museum for artifacts found that touch the history of two nations, two cultures, and two religions on common ground - the Earth.

It is just a thought for a possible win-win compromise for peace to accidentally break out and spread throughout the region and on to the planet as well.