Spain’s most famous mosque is at the center of a dispute between activists seeking to preserve its Muslim heritage, and the Catholic Church, which has claimed it as its own. The result could determine the future of Islam in Europe.
CÓRDOBA, Spain — For a few weeks last fall, the Mosque of Córdoba, Europe’s most important Islamic heritage site, disappeared from the map.
Or, at least, from Google Maps. If a tourist had Googled directions to the mosque in mid-November, he or she would have only found a reference to the Cathedral of Córdoba — the Catholic house of worship that lies within the mosque’s ancient walls.
The disappearance of Spain’s most famous mosque (and also one of its main tourist attractions) spawned a public outcry. Spaniards flooded Google Maps’ editor with indignant emails, and a group of citizen activists in Córdoba launched an online petition demanding that Google Maps restore the word “mosque” to the monument’s name. The petition accused the bishop of Córdoba of a “symbolic appropriation” of the monument, and it warned that the change to the monument’s name “erases, in the stroke of a pen, a fundamental part of its history.” The petition received over 55,000 signatures in less than three days. On Nov. 25, Google reinstated the mosque, under the official name that has been in use since the early 1980s: the “Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba.”
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