About the Fellowship
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is in many ways the epitome of an integrated American Muslim. He has lived in the United States since the 1960s, moving there as a teenager with his father, and is a graduate of Columbia University. For more than 25 years he has been leading prayers at a mosque based in a store in Lower Manhattan. But reactions to his plans to expand his work with the building of an Islamic cultural centre in New York, just a few blocks from Ground Zero, must have made him wonder about the country of which he has been a part for so long.
It has unleashed a storm of protests, fuelled by emotions about 9/11; developed into a row over freedom of religion; and become a tale of contemporary America, where PR, celebrity politicians, shock-jock radio and ignorance about the wider world all play their part. So huge is the row over Rauf's Islamic centre that even President Barack Obama weighed in last week, and it could become a key issue in the mid-term US elections in November.
Rauf, who now holds three Friday prayer sessions each week to accommodate all the faithful at his existing mosque in New York, is one of America's leading thinkers on Sufism, the mystical, pluralistic and moderate arm of Islam. For several years he and his wife, Daisy Khan, had been keen to set up a community-centre-cum-prayer room in New York along the lines of the YMCA. Indeed, they took as their template the 92nd Street "Y", a Jewish adaptation of the YMCA concept that is a leading New York centre for people of all religions or none to visit for lectures, debate and educational courses.
When Imam Rauf found his site and developed his ambitious proposal for a 13-storey building with a large prayer room, auditorium, meeting rooms, a swimming pool and a food court, he and his supporters sought backing from some Jewish and Christian groups. For them, the centre would be a symbol of a moderate Islam opposed to the hijacking of the faith by extremists and open to the non-Muslim community.
But a combination of naivety and events combined to turn their proposal into an explosive plan. While certain religious groups, willing to engage in dialogue, supported them, other New Yorkers still raw from 9/11 were outraged when they discovered that the ground bought for it is only two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center destroyed by Islamist terrorists on 11 September 2001.
To its critics, the project would be a provocative "Ground Zero mosque" that insults the memory of the 2,976 people killed by the al-Qaeda suicide attacks. Nor did it help that the people behind it went ahead with its first public presentation just after another American Muslim, Faisal Shahzad, was arrested for planting a car bomb in Times Square. A PR firm was appointed but by then the "Ground Zero mosque" had become meat and drink to talk radio programmes, cable TV hosts and politicians.
Local Republican politicians and activists from the right-wing Tea Party movement began protesting loudly in late May. They launched a campaign to protect the shuttered 1857 building on the site of the proposed centre from demolition because it was hit by falling debris from a 9/11 plane and was therefore "hallowed ground".
But there have been vocal supporters too. Some 9/11 relatives suggested that the project, called Cordoba House to recall interfaith cooperation in medieval Muslim Spain, would foster dialogue. While the state governor of New York, David A. Paterson, has urged Rauf to build further north of Ground Zero, given that emotions are running high, the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, urges that there should be no intervention that would link the state and religion. Bloomberg, himself a Jew, said: "I've always believed that the Government should not be involved in deciding who you pray to, what you say, or where you say it."
On 3 August, the city's Landmark Commission unanimously rejected the bid to block the project, which had won overwhelming support in two earlier votes at local community boards that approve new buildings. That swept aside the final procedural hurdle to the project, although its opponents have filed a last-ditch law suit to try to block it.
After the commission vote, Bloomberg, who is not America's most gifted orator, soared to Obama-like heights of eloquence with an approving speech that defined the issue as a fundamental question of religious freedom in the United States.
"This is the freest city in the world. That's what makes New York special and different and strong," he said, flanked by 10 faith leaders with the Statue of Liberty in the background. "Lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question - should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the Government must never favour one religion over another.
"We would betray our values - and play into our enemies' hands - if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave in to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists - and we should not stand for that. For that reason, I believe that this is as important a test of the separation of Church and State as we may see in our lifetime, and it is critically important that we get it right."
Another voice of calm was heard when the New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan wrote on his blog: "We Catholics are hospitable to newcomers, not just because we faced hostility and closed doors in the past, not only because our Church teaches this value, but because we are loyal Americans."
Critics had the right to ask about the background of Muslims behind the project, he said, but "what is not acceptable is to prejudge any group, or to let fear and bias trump the towering American (and for us Catholics, the religious) virtues of hospitality, welcome, and religious freedom". But hostility to the project went way beyond mild inquiries about the backgrounds of those involved. Opponents branded the imam as a dangerous radical plotting to spread strict Saudi-style Wahhabism from back rooms at the centre while former House speaker Newt Gingrich denounced it as "an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilisation". The comments underline the extent to which many of those in the US, fearful of Islam, see no distinction between the Sufism of Iman Rauf, which he shares with moderate leaders who have risked their lives for their beliefs in the Middle East, and the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia.
The "Ground Zero mosque" debate went national late last month when former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin called to "refudiate" (as she put it on Twitter) the centre because the pain caused by the 9/11 attacks was "too raw, too real".
Following the backlash from conservatives, President Obama appeared to row back from remarks he made to Muslim guests at the White House when he appeared to support plans to build the centre. He said that Muslims, like everyone else, had "the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances".
By last Tuesday he issued a clarification saying: "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have thatdates back to our founding."
But to Rauf, the American commitment to religious freedom does seem to have been shaken in a way he never foresaw.
"This politicisation of religion runs against the American ideal of the separation of Church and State, the idea that America is a home for everybody and a microcosm of the world," said the Kuwaiti-born imam, 61. "We're against radicalism, whether it's in Muslim, Christian or Jewish terms," he said. "If you believe in the Creator, believe we are responsible beings and live ethically, then we are one people. It's not about what name you call your god by. You basically subscribe to the same values.
"We want to establish this as the flagship Cordoba House and then open Cordoba Houses in other parts of the world," he added. "The people supporting this have far outnumbered those opposing it. A friend told me, ‘You're going through the same thing that Catholics and Jews faced here - so welcome to America!'" Rauf said.
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