Standing in front of the derelict hulk of the Burlington Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf made what historians will regard as the most explicitly peaceful statement of any Imam in the post-9/11 era.
I have been Imam of a mosque ten blocks from here for the last 27 years. Our congregation, our faith community, has been... victims of 9/11. From my congregation there have been people who died. From my congregation, my faith community, we were part of those who gave water to the firefighters. We are part of this community, and we intend to be part of this community. We want to rebuild this community. We are working with the other faith communities, because this is what this is all about. This is about the vast majority of moderate Muslims -- who have been and want to continue to be part of the solution.
I have worked with the law enforcement agencies. I was invited by the FBI right after 9/11 to address and to speak to all 1,200 agents in New York City as to how we Muslim Imams can ensure that our mosques will not be grounds for the recruitment of terrorists. We condemn terrorism. We recognize that it exists within our faith community, but we are committed to eradicate it. We cannot do this by ourselves. We need your support. We need your cooperation. We need a coalition of Muslims and non-Muslims together to achieve the common objectives that we as patriotic Americans want to achieve.
I thank you for expressions of support, and I pray that God bless us all -- and bless all of us from the faith communities. I wish to acknowledge the support from other members of other faith communities like Holy Trinity Church and... others from the Tannenbaum Center who have come here to stand with us on this day, and the many other faith leaders who have come to express their expressions of support. I thank you all and may God bless us and bless you all.
Imam Feisal founded the Cordoba Iniative, a project to build an interfaith community center to be named Cordoba House, in Lower Manhattan with a host of programs to serve the Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike.
Imam Feisal's vision of cross-cultural engagement was inspired by the glittering Cordoban Period of intercultural peace, enlightenment, scholarship and science when the Spanish city was the undisputed global center of cultural advancement with remarkable achievements in mathematics, medicine, science, language, scholarship, the arts and classical studies.
Imam Feisal's branding is brilliantly cutting edge. At the time of the first millennium, 1000 AD, Cordoba achieved a massive population for urban centers at that time of 500,000. Not only was Cordoba one of the world's leading urban conurbations, it was also the center of medieval learning, arts and sciences and just as importantly -- Cordoba was the financial and economic powerhouse of the Mediterranean world.
Given the above information, it might seem odd that the Republican Party is now centering the juggernaut of political momentum and their entire autumn campaign strategy on a plan to oppose the construction of Feisal's cross-cultural center in Lower Manhattan.
With two wars raging and an economy in the doldrums, the Republicans have chosen to fight the Democrats on the hallowed ground of 9/11 -- just like they did in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. The Republicans are now in open warfare against cross-cultural engagement with the most peaceful Imam on the planet. They are now shifting gear in support of a global holy war -- a crusade as President Bush put it -- against the 55 Muslim nations and their 1.2 billion people.
But it gets worse -- because the Republicans are now planning a huge hate rally on 9/11 to condemn Cordoba House -- and they are uniting with Geert Wilders, a European radical so extreme that Glenn Beck has labeled him, "fascist." John Bolton and Newt Gingrich have committed to share the podium with Wilders to rally the Republican brown shirts against the Islamic center of the peaceful Imam.
Rumors linking Imam Feisal to terrorism have fallen on their face. Every day since 9/11, Feisal has worked with US law enforcement agencies to "eradicate terrorism." More -- since 9/11, Imam Feisal has worked with the US Department of State (including during the Bush-Cheney years) to combat terrorism throughout the Muslim world, from Manhattan to the Persian Gulf, to Pakistan, to Indonesia and even to Malaysia.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has a unique background. Born in Kuwait to Egyptian parents, as a child he lived in Egypt, Great Britain and Malaysia. In his teens, his family moved to America, and Feisal studied Theoretical Physics at Columbia University, eventually earning his Masters degree in Plasma Physics. But, 27 years ago, Feisal became the Imam at the Masjid Al-Jarah, the Mosque nearest the financial community in Lower Manhattan. The Republicans would know all of this if they had read the recent edition of Time, where they would have found a profile titled, "The Moderate Imam Behind the 'Ground Zero Mosque'."
Here is a quote from Imam Feisal's Time profile:
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, are actually the kind of Muslim leaders right-wing commentators fantasize about: modernists and moderates who openly condemn the death cult of al-Qaeda and its adherents -- ironically, just the kind of "peaceful Muslims" whom Sarah Palin, in her now infamous tweet, asked to "refudiate" the mosque. Rauf is a Sufi, which is Islam's most mystical and accommodating denomination.
American Muslims have more informed and more nuanced views on the Middle East than mainstream Americans. Muslim American views on the politics of the Middle East and political trends in Europe, Africa and Asia are quite distinct from those of the Republican Party -- very different, indeed. Perhaps, that is why the Republican Party is so adamantine in opposition to the cross-cultural understanding that Imam Feisal and his faith community are threatening to bring to Lower Manhattan.
In the case of Cordoba House, America is being given a huge Rorschach Test. America must decide whether she is prepared to live up to the ideals enshrined in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Or not.
Follow Michael Carmichael on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alchemistoxford
Joseph Ward III: Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Speaks Out (AUDIO, TRANSCRIPT)
Qasim Basir: I Am a Muslimerican
Clarence B. Jones: A Call to Conscience
Imam Abdul Rauf, who also speaks Arabic fluently, told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Islamic centre will be financed through contributions from Muslims in the US, as well as by donations from Arab and Islamic countries. He also acknowledged that the location of the mosque, which will be able to hold over 2,000 worshippers, is the subject of much controversy and criticism from families of 9/11 victims.
http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=1&id=20990
Does Imam Rauf need physical protection during his Middle East tour?
Is this why he will not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization?
None of that addresses my post.
http://www.park51.org/mission.htm
the only thing we have to fear here is fear,
Ramazan Mubarak
"Forced conversion, as a result, was never a policy of Muslim conquerors during the period of Islam’s spread. Instead, Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule simply had to pay a tax to finance their protection by their Muslim overlords."
http://www.cordobainitiative.org/?q=content/about-muslim-west-engagement
Islamic law:
THE OBJECTIVES OF JIHAD
o9.8 The caliph (o25) makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians (N: provided he has first invited them to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya, def: o11.4)—which is the significance of their paying it, not the money itself—while remaining in their ancestral religions) (O: and the war continues) until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax (O: in accordance with the word of Allah Most High,
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden—who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book—until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled” (Koran 9:29)
Rauf's description of jihad at the above site is similarly untrue.
The Sufi brand of Islam this cultural center represents is known for tolerance and love; the poetry of the Sufi poet, Rumi, are expressions of love and joy, not extremism.
http://www.khamush.com/love_poems.html#IfAnyoneAsksYou
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Faith-and-Ecstasy.html
However he conducts diplomacy for the same entity and ideology for which the terrorists are soldiers--the umma.
Oh, and remember the labeled TURRUST Arafat - who with Yitzhak Rabin came up with the Oslo Peace Accord between Palestine & Israel?
So much for labels, huh?
For that matter can I infer from Vietnam and WW2 that American culture consists solely of dropping agent orange, Napalm and bombs on villages, torture and rape and murder of children, Nuclear assault on civilians, mass killings at schools, supersized lardasses and revenge attacks on an entire religion?
(that should get the right-wing heads spinning)
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."
---Winston Churchill
Churchill was merely nauseating that a man of Ghandi's education and stature could appear living like a caveman.
Chapter 3 excerpt from "What's Right with America is What's Right with Islam.
“(it) also would not be a violation of church-state separation to have a
subsidiary entity within the judiciary that employs religious jurists from diverse religious backgrounds to comment on the compliance of certain decisions with their religious laws and to provide guidance to their religious communities on how kosher or Shariah compliant these decisions are” [end of excerpt]
And the most damning in my eyes:
"What Muslims want is to ensure that their secular laws are not in conflict with the Quran or the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad."
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/feisal_abdul_rauf/2009/04/time_to_update_islamic_law.html
The last quote is nearly identical with the statement of Tariq Ramadan, an Islamist in reformer's clothing.
P.S. It's not a 1st amendment issue; my right to practice a religion does not give me or any religious group the right to put up a church, mosque etc. anywhere I please.
These are the ones we should be encouraging, not trying to marginalize.