Addressing Phobia - The Islamic Centre is two blocks, or a two-to-five-minute walk, from the site where the World Trade Center once stood
- It doesn't overlook Ground Zero, can't even be seen from there
- It is planned as a community centre for Muslims living in the neighbourhood
- It also aims to promote inter-faith interaction and dialogue
America—formidable bastion of freedom, glorious exemplar of religious tolerance, magnet to talent from across the world, bewildering salad bowl of people of different faiths, nationalities, ethnicities.... It's this America that finds its cherished values threatened by a raging debate over a proposed Islamic centre in Lower Manhattan. The lines are sharply drawn, facts have been twisted, and dissimulation dominates. The biggest falsehood—which triggered the debate—has now been forgotten in the fury of impassioned speeches: that the proposed centre is to be built at the site where the World Trade Center stood till 9/11.
The truth is different, definitely not provocative enough to have the entire nation agitated. The fact is, the proposed centre is to be built at least two blocks from Ground Zero, considered hallowed ground in the American consciousness, consecrated as it is by the blood of those killed in the attack on the twin towers. The centre won't even overlook Ground Zero: the two are separated by a two- to five-minute walk. For critics, though, the centre is still two blocks too close, and reflects the insensitivity of its proponents towards the victims of 9/11.
At the site of the proposed centre stands a decrepit building that once housed a Burlington Coat Factory, a clothing chain. It's in a stripclub-pocked neighbourhood through which tourists amble to glimpse Ground Zero. The Islamic Centre, officially named Park 51, will house a mosque, a swimming pool, a basketball court, an auditorium, a library, a day-care facility and restaurants. The centre is the brainchild of Imam Feisal Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan of the New York-based Cordoba Initiative. They say the community centre will be based on the model of the Jewish Community Centre in Manhattan, serve the needs of a large community of Muslims in the neighbourhood, and promote inter-faith dialogue.
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| Obama first spoke in specific support of the centre in Manhattan. But the very next day, he backpedalled. |
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The debate received fresh impetus because of President Barack Obama's comments at an iftaar dinner at the White House on August 13. Obama said Muslims had the right to practise their religion just like everyone else in America. "And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in Lower Manhattan," he added. A day later, as a firestorm raged over his remarks, Obama appeared to backpedal, saying he was only speaking on the issue of religious freedom and "not commenting...on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque" in lower Manhattan. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, says, "Obama raised an important argument the first night and hedged the second day. When he hedged, he opened the door wide for this debate to persist." Into this debate jumped the irrepressible Sarah Palin, the Republican Party's self-anointed 'Mama Grizzly'. Unable to contain her excitement at sniffing out a potent vote-getter, she shot off misspelt tweets criticising plans to build the centre near Ground Zero. In one such malapropism-bearing missive she wrote: "Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate." Another influential Republican, Newt Gingrich, described plans to build the centre as "a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites".
Such rhetoric has shocked people like Zogby. "The doors are now open for bigots and bigotry," he says. He believes the controversy will cause more damage to America's reputation than Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay combined. "How you treat an Iraqi prisoner is one thing, but how you treat your own is a measure of who you are. I think in this instance we are failing badly," he told
Outlook.
A few luminaries refused to budge from their initial support for the Islamic centre, considerably burnishing their secular credentials. For instance, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Jewish American, said, "The WTC site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan." He further warned that to "cave (in) to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that."
But the tide of popular opinion seems decidedly against the Islamic centre. A CNN poll found nearly 70 per cent of Americans opposed to the mosque. A Time Abt srbi survey found 61 per cent in opposition; as many as 46 per cent thought Islam was more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against non-believers. The Pew Research Centre found that 18 per cent of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim.
No doubt, conservatives have exploited the issue to attack the president and his Democratic Party ahead of the mid-term elections in November. But the xenophobic bluster is likely to have detrimental ripple effects worldwide. Scott Atran, a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, who studies Islamic terrorism, says Muslims around the world are "outraged at what is perceived as the bigotry of 'the majority' of Americans" but they support what is viewed with admiration by intellectuals as Obama's articulated 'minority' stance.
Even closer home, the debate over the location of the centre in New York has triggered off protests in states as far away from Ground Zero as California and Tennessee. "It's not about the location. It's about Muslims. Period," Zogby says. Quite depressingly, nobody is prepared to listen to Rauf, who has presided as imam at a mosque 12 blocks from Ground Zero for the past 27 years. The imam has been repeating what the Cordoba Initiative notes on its website: "As Muslim New Yorkers and Americans, we want to help and be part of rebuilding our neighbourhood in lower Manhattan. It is important for all of us to show the world that Americans will not be frightened or deterred by the extremist forces of hatred."
For now, some Americans have stirred a storm of hatred. And it's the Cordoba Initiative which has refused to buckle under. Dismissing the suggestion of New York state Governor David Paterson to shift the centre to a different part of town as a gesture of peace, the Cordoba Initiative shot back: "No one should be driven out of his or her own neighbourhood—especially for religious reasons." And then to remind Americans about their values, it said it would be "unconstitutional and un-American" to shift the centre elsewhere.
The high-pitched rhetoric is not only a dangerous symptom of a metastasising Islamophobia, but threatens to change what being American really means.
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