“Have you heard about the mosque they want to build at Ground Zero?” a friend asked me on August 4, 2010. She went on to tell me how insensitive and provocative she thought that was, and when I asked her why, she said, “Well, they killed three thousand innocent people. And the man who’s in charge is always saying he hates America.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and it turns out, neither did she.
I was in New York three days later, and my friend sent me a follow-up message with a link to Pat Condell, “a Brit who often speaks his mind about the rise of Islam in the West.” This piece “took on” the building of the Mosque at Ground Zero.
I watched the video on a screen underneath the heading Jihad Watch. It was vitriolic. The friend who sent it to me is one of the kindest, warmest people I know. The idea that she could watch this and pass it on as something reasonable startled me. I sent the link to my son, whose computer I was using while he was working downtown in Manhattan. I’d already told him about my friend's earlier comments about Ground Zero. He sent me a link to The New Yorker’s refutation of the fear-mongers’ message.
This article was part of The Talk of the Town and entitled "Zero Grounds" as in there are zero grounds for all the fear about the building of the mosque at Ground Zero. Hertzberg said, "Well, for a start, it won't be at Ground Zero. It'll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it won't be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops, (electronics, porn, you name it), churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash." So there went one of the fears. It wasn't a monument to terrorism towering and taunting at Ground Zero. What about the information that the man in charge is always saying he hates America? Feisal Abdul Rauf turns out to be the author of a book called What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America, and he doesn't mean Far Right. Hertzberg reports that Rauf is the vice-chair of Interfaith Center of New York. Hertzberg quoted him from an article in The Daily News as saying, "My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists." He denounces terrorism in general and denounced the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in a lengthy statement. He was chosen by the FBI to conduct sensitivity training for FBI agents and police officers. His wife Daisy Khan runs American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with Rauf, and promotes "cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women's empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange."
So those were the facts, but I decided to see for myself, so I took the subway to the site and looked around. What I saw was hardly remarkable. How could people feel so threatened? Was it just a lack of information or was in an ingrained fear of The Other? I think it's both. But it concerned me so much that I changed the focus of my study sabbatical from Sustainability Issues to the Middle East with the idea that I would see what my school, City College of San Francisco, offers and I'd also adapt what I learned to use it with my ESL students. This led to my taking Demystifying the Middle East, Politics and Government of the Middle East, Intro to Islam, Comparative Religions, and--just so the Board of Directors would know I was still part of mainstream USA--Western Culture and Values. Before I stick to the chronology of my experience and insights, I'd like to say that just this past week, in Western Culture and Values, we looked at the Song of Roland, which totally distorts both history and Islam. As is clear from Robert Harrison’s introduction in his 1970 translation, it has the French fighting the King Marsilla Caliph of Saragossa, who, being a Muslim, “does not love God, but worships Mohammad and Apollo." This is absolutely Apolling (pun, Spelling Check) because the basic tenet of Islam is "There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet." In our Comparative Religion class as well as in Intro to Islam, we've learned that this is stating that Mohammad is ONLY his prophet. He's an important prophet, yes. He's the most important prophet, too. But Mohammad is NOT God, and it's a sin in Islam, (a shirk—idolatry or polytheism) to worship him. Only God, one God, is to be worshipped. How could it be that the writers of Song of Roland (passed on through oral tradition before being written around the 1098) didn't know this? After all, the Muslims knew back in the 600’s that the Jews and Christians were "people of the book," those who believed in one God, and Muslims respected them accordingly. So why does the Song of Roland get Islam so wrong? Was this intentional mis-representation to rouse the killer instinct in the French? Think about it. It was put into written form around 1098, and the First Crusade was between 1096 and 1099, with the capture of Jerusalem by the Christians. To be continued...
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