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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
The Legacy of the Looming Tower
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| How a proposed Islamic centre near the WTC site is testing tolerance and religious freedom in the United States |
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Published : 1 September 2010 |
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AP PHOTO |
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| This aerial photo shows the New York city block (lower right), where the 13-storey Islamic centre would be built, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (centre left).
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N THE EVENING OF 27 JULY, a mild sun shone on the elegant and imposing New York City Hall building in Manhattan. Commuters headed underground to subways departing for outer boroughs and bedroom suburbs. In a dance studio adjacent to City Hall, a Korean-American boy practised physics-defying moves with a Mexican-American girl. |
A short flight of stairs up, a few hundred people had gathered in an auditorium for a public meeting of the Lower Manhattan Community Board. The meeting was supposed to be one of the city’s regular exercises in local representation, where people can raise with board members issues that concern them. Citizens spoke about walking tours, extending bus routes, hospitals … and then a man from the audience shouted: “What about the mosque!” In an instant the auditorium was charged with angry shouts of “No mosque! No mosque at Ground Zero!”
A shrill debate about religious freedom, limits of tolerance and the meaning of 9/11 has been raging for the past two months in the US around the plans of a New York imam, Abdul Faisal Rauf, and a developer, Sharif Gamal, to build a 13-floor Islamic centre with a prayer space, three blocks from Ground Zero. Supporters say the Cordoba House project will be a venue for reconciliation between Islam and the west, delivering a powerful rebuttal to the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the trade towers; opponents call it an offence to the memory of those who died in 2001. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a group named 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, and several interfaith leaders from New York churches and synagogues are among those who want to see the centre built. Lined up against them are the leaders of Tea Party Express—a highly conservative socio-political movement of mostly white male Republican supporters who have been accused of racism—Republicans such as Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, rightwing bloggers and some families of 9/11 victims.
At the public meeting, the crowd continued to chant, “No mosque at Ground Zero!” as a speaker, Helen Friedman, took to the podium and held up a card: “Unmask the Mosque!” She described herself as belonging to a group called Americans for a Safe Israel and, to more cheers and claps, said: “This mosque is a Trojan horse. Remember, that too came as a gift. We are letting the enemy inside the gates!” Friedman was followed by New York State Senator Daniel Squadron, who concentrated on other local issues. Then someone asked him what he thought about the Islamic centre. “We are an open, diverse community—and no community shall be prohibited from being in lower Manhattan,” he replied. He was jeered.
Pamela Geller, a feisty, 51-year-old rightwing blogger from a group called Stop Islamization of America, spoke next. Geller, who has Tea Party links, is the co-author of a book, Post-American Presidency, which makes a series of unfounded charges against Barack Obama. In her words, the book describes “his socialist internationalism, his ties to America-haters and anti-Semites, his race-baiting, and more. He is betraying Israel; warring against free speech; refusing to take real steps to stop Iran’s nuclear program.”
Geller achieved prominence among American right-wing groups after she posted a video blog from an Israeli beach, in which, wearing a bikini, she denounced Hamas and Hezbollah. She is running a controversial poster campaign on New York City buses that directs Muslims to a website urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.” The ads pitch these questions directly to Muslims: “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?” Geller described 9/11 as an attack on “each one of us” and the Islamic centre as a source of discord. She waved in jubilation after her speech, provoking more cries of “No mosque!”
Across the room, Sharif Gamal, the developer behind the Islamic centre, stood quietly in a blue suit, typing on his iPhone. “I am not from someplace else. I am American, a New Yorker,” said 38-year-old Gamal, an athletic man with blue eyes and short curly hair, who was born in Brooklyn to an Egyptian-American father and a Polish-American mother. Gamal, who has been in the real estate business for a decade, heads a successful company, Soho Properties, in downtown Manhattan.
| CRAIG RUTTLE / AP PHOTO |
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Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, executive director of the Cordoba Initiative, has been branded a radical by opponents of the project. In fact, he has previously supported several interfaith initiatives. |
A few years after 9/11, Gamal walked into a small mosque in Tribeca, a lower Manhattan neighbourhood, for Friday prayers. The imam leading the prayers was Faisal Abdul Rauf, a Columbia University physics graduate, who had moved to New York as a teenager. Rauf had studied religion with his father, a scholar trained in Egypt at al-Azhar University, and had been working in New York with Jewish and Christian religious leaders to promote interfaith relations. He also acted as an advisor to the Muslim community on questions of religion and integration. His small mosque, which had been around for 28 years, was 12 blocks from the towers.
At a time of intense curiosity and scrutiny of Islam and Muslims in the US, Rauf found himself propelled into a world of television studios, think-tank lectures, international conferences, FBI briefings and meetings with American politicians. In the process, he has achieved prominence as a moderate Muslim leader, shaped by and comfortable with both the worlds of Islam and the US. A book deal followed and he published What’s Right with Islam, after which The Christian Science Monitor described him as “a bridge builder between Islam and America,” adding that the book could easily be subtitled What’s Right With America. Imam Rauf used the suggested subtitle when the book came out in paperback.
Gamal was impressed by Rauf’s sermons and became a regular at Friday prayers. When Gamal got married, Rauf conducted the ceremony. In 2004, Rauf set up a small tax-exempt foundation, the Cordoba Initiative (the initiative has no connection to the British-based Cordoba Foundation). Its goal was to achieve “a tipping point in Muslim-west relations within the next decade, bringing back the atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago.” The foundation has organised conferences on Muslim-west relations, and commissioned films with a message, such as one on the life of Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian diplomat in Paris who saved several hundred French Jews from the Holocaust by granting them Iranian passports.
Meanwhile, Gamal’s Soho Properties was in the process of acquiring—for 4.85 million dollars—a five-storey building on Park Place, three blocks from the trade towers site. The building was a warehouse for the Burlington Coat Factory, an American clothes manufacturer, until it was abandoned after the landing gear of one of the hijacked aircraft tore through its roof. Initially, Gamal had planned to build a condominium complex at the site, but was convinced by Rauf’s idea for a cultural centre with a prayer space, especially as the Muslim community in New York had been growing for some time.
The plans for the centre were ambitious. At a cost of 100 to 150 million dollars, its 13 floors were intended to house a cultural centre, a 500-seat performing arts centre, culinary school, exhibition space, swimming pool, gym, basketball court, restaurant, library and art studios. The top two floors would house a domed space for prayers. “We insist on calling it a prayer space and not a mosque, because you can use a prayer space for activities apart from prayer. You can’t stop anyone who is a Muslim despite his religious ideology from entering the mosque and staying there,” said Imam Rauf’s wife and partner, Daisy Khan, who runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, from an office housed on the Upper West Side’s famed Riverside Church. “With a prayer space, we can control who gets to use it.”
Imam Rauf is a soft-spoken man, with a trimmed salt and pepper beard, who prefers well-cut suits to traditional clothing. He modelled Cordoba House on a Jewish-run cultural centre, 92nd Street Y, a much-loved New York space for literary readings and public conversations on cultural and global affairs, where writers such as Ian McEwan, Javier Maries and Salman Rushdie have read from their work. Rauf imagined that Cordoba House would play the same kind of role for American Muslims that institutions such as 92Y played in helping the Jewish community become part of mainstream America.
He was conscious, of course, of the significance of the centre’s location: a building damaged in the attacks, three blocks from the trade tower’s site. “I have been part of this community for 30 years. Members of my congregation died on 9/11. That attack was carried out by extremist terrorists in the name of my faith,” Rauf said. “There is a war going on within Islam between a violent, extremist minority and a moderate majority that condemns terrorism. The centre for me is a way to amplify our condemnation of that atrocity and to amplify the moderate voices that reject terrorism and seek mutual understanding and respect with all faiths.”
Before the idea could morph into reality, it had to survive the bureaucratic process of approvals from New York City authorities and the lower Manhattan community boards. On 5 May this year, Rauf and Gamal took the proposal to the Lower Manhattan Community Board’s financial committee, adding that it would create 150 full-time jobs. The submission included an image of the proposed centre’s façade: a blue and green, glass and steel, modernist tower. The committee voted unanimously in support.
As word spread, a debate started about whether it was appropriate. Within a few weeks, the proposed Cordoba House was being talked about across the US as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” On 25 May, the community board planned to have a vote on the project, a vote that doesn’t have any legal power but is seen as crucial to gauge whether the local community supports it or not. A week before the vote, Tea Party leader Mark Williams called the planned centre “a monument to 9/11 Muslim hijackers.” The board meeting was charged with emotion. Some opponents shouted down a Muslim teenager who spoke in favour of the project; a supporter called activists opposing the project “brown shirts.” After four hours of testimonies, the 40-member board voted: ten abstentions, one no, and 29 yeses. New York mayor Bloomberg and Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer came out in support.
What was conceived as a project to foster inter-faith cooperation and improve relations between the west and the Islamic world now threatens to increase polarisation. The debate has moved far beyond what is legal, into the territory of national politics and questions of morality, legitimacy and meanings of 9/11. Sarah Palin tweeted, calling all peaceful Muslims to “refudiate” it. The National Republican Trust, a conservative group that runs ad campaigns to support Republican candidates, released a screen advertisement juxtaposing images of the falling twin towers and gun-toting jihadis. The accompanying narration says: “On 11 September, they declared war against us. And to celebrate that murder of 3,000 Americans, they want to build a monstrous 13-storey mosque at Ground Zero. That mosque is a monument to their victory and an invitation for more.”
| MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS |
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Sharif El-Gamal, the developer of the Cordoba House project, speaks to the press after a meeting of the New York City Landmarks Commission on 3 August. |
The former Republican speaker Newt Gingrich said the very name of the proposed project, Cordoba House, was an insult: “It refers to Córdoba, Spain—the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolised their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex. Today, some of the Mosque’s backers insist this term is being used to ‘symbolise interfaith co-operation’ when, in fact, every Islamist in the world recognises Córdoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.” Gamal dropped the name. “We are calling it Park 51 because of the backlash to the name Cordoba House,” he said. “It will be a place open to all New Yorkers and that is a very New York name.”
Republican Rick Lazio, who is running for the New York governor’s seat, has made the funding of the proposed centre a key campaign issue. He sees it as funded by suspect foreign sources, and has called for an inquiry into where the 100 million dollars is coming from. Several others are calling for transparency in the money flow. Imam Rauf insists the 100 million has yet to be raised and Gamal owns the property. I asked Gamal about the purchase of the building on Park Place for 4.85 million. “I bought it with my own money and with the help of some goodwill investors,” Gamal said about his donating the land for the project.
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