Deal between Capuchins, Muslims illustrates perils of reciprocity

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome

Westerners sometimes assume that Europe and North America are always on the side of the angels when it comes to religious freedom, so that the “reciprocity” question dear to Pope Benedict XVI is largely a matter of bringing the Islamic world up to Western standards of tolerance and liberty.

In fact, however, the reciprocity question can be complicated in the West too, in a way that certainly doesn’t escape the attention of Muslim eyes.

The rubber hits the road in places such as the blue collar neighborhood of Cornigliano in the Italian port city of Genoa, where plans by Italian Muslims to build a new mosque – it would be Italy’s fourth largest, after those in Rome, Milian, and Catania – in recent years have hit a series of roadblocks, based initially on local opposition, which became amplified and ideologized in Italian political debate.

In the latest twist, a controversial new deal struck between Muslims and the Capuchin Franciscans in Genoa would allow the mosque to be erected alongside an existing Capuchin monastery, thus offering the striking prospect of both a cross and a minaret soaring side-by-side on the neighborhood’s skyline.

It would be a marvelous sign of inter-religious brotherhood to some, of a perverse form of Western cultural suicide to others.

The hard case of Genoa illustrates the growing pressures facing Western politicians and religious leaders, who must assure that as they “talk the talk” of religious liberty and reciprocity in dialogue with Islamic nations, they also “walk the walk” back home.

By some estimates, there are now as many as 1.2 million Muslims in Italy out of a total population of 57 million. Across Europe, the rising Muslim population is generating intense debates over both immigration policy and cultural identity.

Genoa’s Muslims have been looking to build a mosque for at least six years, and in 2004 they secured initial approval from municipal authorities for the purchase of an old ironworks factory for 300 million Euro. The factory would be converted into a mosque and other facilities for the Islamic community.

The plan, however, aroused considerable opposition from locals, who argued that the Cornigliano neighborhood of Genoa is not a Muslim area, so that construction of the mosque would mean a heavy traffic of people from outside the neighborhood, thereby altering its historic character. If Genoa wants a mosque, the locals argued, it’s not fair to make a neighborhood which has no real Muslim population carry the weight for the entire city.

That position was echoed by four local Catholic pastors, who wrote in opposition to the mosque to civic authorities and also to the man who was their archbishop at the time, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone – who is today Pope Benedict XVI’s top lieutenant as the Vatican’s Secretary of State.

In 2004, Bertone largely backed the opposition. He said the Muslims have a “sacrosanct” right to a place of cult, but that it should be built in a more “neutral” location where a largely non-Muslim population would not have to bear the consequences.

Those arguments were picked up with vigor by center-right political forces in Genoa, who opposed the project on the basis of cultural arguments as well as security concerns.

In the end, approval to build the mosque at the Cornigliano location became bogged down in local politics, so it looked for a moment like the local Muslims would end up with a rusting 300 million Euro factory on their hands, but no possibility to turn it into a place of worship.

All of which brings us to this week, and the news that the Genoa-based Capuchin “Foundation of the Franciscan Smile,” which works with needy children and families, especially immigrants, has agreed to a property swap with the local Muslims. In exchange for the factory, the Capuchins will give the Muslims a piece of property alongside one of their nearby monasteries. In order to equalize the exchange, the Capuchins have even agreed to put up the skeletal frame of a new structure on the property – meaning, in effect, that the Capuchins will build the foundation of an Islamic mosque.

That might seem a perfect “happy ending” to the story, except that the new arrangement was subjected to a stinging critique in the Oct. 16 Corriere della Sera by Magdi Alam, an Egyptian ex-patriate in Italy who has become one of the country’s most prominent journalists and a severe critic of Islamic radicalism.

Over the years, Alam has become a close friend of the Comunione e Liberazione movement in Italian Catholicism, which often serves as a network for center-right politicians inspired by Catholic values. At the annual “Meeting” organized by the ciellini in Rimini, few figures draw more rapturous responses than Alam.

In his Corriere essay, Alam argued that the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy, or Ucoii, which is the sponsor of the Genoa mosque, spreads “an extremist version of the Qu’ran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule.” Alam also argues that the group has links to the radical Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and has been responsible for blocking the emergence of a moderate Islam in Italy.

Alam asserts that the new mosque in Genoa will have the same line as the mosque in Milan, whose spiritual leader, Alam writes, has stated publicly his aspiration of converting Italy to Islam within ten years.

In the end, Alam concludes, allowing Ucoii to gain another major foothold will not serve “the good of all Italians.”

The essay will no doubt reinvigorate debate over the mosque, and at this stage it’s difficult to predict how the story will finish.

Granted, even if the mosque ends up being relegated to an isolated spot outside of town, the Italian debate is still light years removed from the situation in places such as Saudi Arabia, with its total ban on non-Muslim places of worship. In the next few years, Ucoii has plans to erect 13 new mosques in Italy, and no one seriously doubts that if they have the money and the will, they’ll eventually be able to do so.

Yet the tensions in Genoa nevertheless illustrate the delicate balance that Western governments, as well as Catholic leaders, have to strike as they press the reciprocity issue. On the one hand, fighting the construction of a mosque in Italy invites accusations of hypocrisy when Westerners demand greater religious freedom in the Islamic world. On the other, many would argue that allowing the unimpeded spread of a radical form of Islam in Europe that rejects the very cultural premises of the West is a dangerous form of naïveté.

At a minimum, what all this suggests is that the “heavy lifting” in the pope’s campaign for reciprocity won’t begin when he arrives in Turkey next month – it’s already underway, in his own backyard.