Georgetown, the Oldest Catholic University in the U.S., Opens a Big Mosque on Campus
BY ROBERT SPENCER
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Georgetown University, which was founded as Georgetown College in 1789 and is the oldest Catholic university in the United States, has earned yet another distinction: it is now the oldest Catholic university in the U.S. that has a large new mosque on campus. This is great news, right? This is just the sort of openness and good-heartedness that will erase misunderstandings, melt hostility and mutual suspicion, and usher in a new era of peace. Won’t it? Meanwhile, we eagerly await the announcement of which Islamic university anywhere in the world is planning to open a Christian chapel on campus.
The College Fix reported Friday that Georgetown “recently completed a major construction project erecting a large mosque on campus.” The university happily proclaimed that the Yarrow Mamout Masjid, which was named after a famous Muslim freed slave and entrepreneur who lived in the Georgetown area in the early nineteenth century, is “the first mosque with ablution stations, a spirituality and formation hall and a halal kitchen on a U.S. college campus.” How exciting! And really, what could possibly go wrong?
The Georgetown mosque has been happily welcomed at the highest levels. The College Fix stated that it has actually been operating since 2019 while construction continued, but finally the building “was completed earlier this year to much fanfare, with a dedication ceremony March 18 drawing Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who issued a proclamation recognizing the mosque.”
Yet even with a proclamation from the mayor and proud Catholic university administrators boasting about ablution stations and a halal kitchen, the university didn’t seem eager to talk about its grand new structure. The Fix noted that “Georgetown University’s media relations, as well as representatives of its Catholic Faith Communities, Catholic Ministry and alumni center, all ignored requests over the last week from The College Fix seeking comment on the mosque.” Now, that’s downright strange. Are they proud of their new mosque or not?
They should be if they have any interest in being consistent. The College Fix also points out that “the Catholic Georgetown is not shy about embracing Islam. Its news release touted the fact that Georgetown was also the first U.S. university to hire a full-time Muslim imam 24 years ago.” And “in 2016, students at Georgetown University elected a Muslim student to serve as their student association president, a first for the school.” Fr. Mark Bosco, the vice president for Georgetown’s Mission and Ministry division, explained the underlying rationale for all this when he said: “We need to embrace interreligious dialogue.”
Fr. Bosco has several million reasons to say this. The Daily Caller reported back in June 2019 that Georgetown was among the American universities that have “taken hundreds of millions of dollars from the government of Qatar, a middle eastern nation with suspected links to international terrorism.” Long before that, the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal gave Georgetown $20 million for the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which pumps out “Islamophobia” propaganda by the bucketload, gives Sharia supremacist and pro-slavery and rape apologist Jonathan A. C. Brown and other disingenuous Islamic apologists an aura of respectability, and sponsors the Bridge Initiative, which endeavors to hoodwink Catholic institutions into thinking there is no jihad threat and that “Islamophobia” is the real problem (as if they needed much convincing).
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The links to Saudi Arabia and Qatar make it clear: Georgetown is bought and paid for, like so many other American universities today. The new mosque is more about that than about a genuine attempt to foster interfaith understanding and dialogue. And regarding that dialogue, a parting question for Fr. Mark Bosco: where is the Islamic university that is opening a Catholic chapel, or any kind of Christian chapel? Why does the “interreligious dialogue” to which you are so indefatigably committed, despite the fact that it has not saved a single Christian from persecution or prevented one church in a Muslim country from being destroyed, always and in every case go only one way?
The renowned twentieth-century Muslim Brotherhood theorist and Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb put it plainly: “The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah [the society of unbelievers] is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people on the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam.” Georgetown, still supposedly a Catholic university, has become one of those bridges.