How the “Monster Mosque Monument to Terror at Ground Zero” Became Park 51:
Reflections on Islamophobia and How an Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan
Affected My Sabbatical Course Study at City College of San Francisco
“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, it’s like a monument to terror. A victory mosque to murder. 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 tirade “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 rational and persuasive 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 a refutation of the fear-mongers’ message.
This article, part of The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, was 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 was always saying he hates America? Feisal Abdul Rauf turned out to be the author of a book called What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America, and he didn't mean Far Right. Hertzberg reported that Rauf was the vice-chair of Interfaith Center of New York and quoted him from an article in The Daily News as saying, "My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists." He denounced 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." How did my friend get the idea that the co-founders “hate America”?
I now had the facts, but I decided to see the location 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 it an ingrained fear of The Other? I think it was both plus a concerted effort to make people fearful. It concerned me so much that right there on the spot, which is not quite at Ground Zero, I decided to change the focus of my study sabbatical from Sustainability Issues to Islam and the Middle East. I would see what my school, City College of San Francisco, offers and I'd also adapt material to use it with my ESL students.
On August 11, 2010, the day I left New York City to return to San Francisco, there was another article in the New York Times. “For Muslim Center Sponsors, Hopes and Clear Oversights” by Anne Barnard reported on the advice Joy Levitt, the executive director of the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, had given Daisy Khan when Khan had consulted her about the proposed Cordoba House (the first name for Park 51). Far from thinking that there would be a national protest against the Islamic center, Levitt advised Khan that running a community center involved practical matters like attending to 500 strollers down in the lobby. “Clearly, the idea that Ms. Khan and her partners would one day be accused of building a victory monument to terrorism did not come up.”
When I got back to San Francisco, I saw a paragraph on “Ground zero mosque” in the San Francisco Chronicle’s News across the Nation section, reporting on how President Obama had weighed in for the first time on the controversy. “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.” This was the statement Jon Stewart showed on The Daily Show, followed by another clip of Obama seeming to backtrack on his statement.
The same week Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times also expressed disappointment in Obama and the nation. In “Going Mad in Herds” on August 21, she reminded readers that Obama, during his hope-and-change (and hope for change) campaign, had inspired comparisons between him and the noble Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, a book he’d been seen buying for his daughter at the same book store that gave him Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which Maureen Dowd said was apt because it’s about a dysfunctional family and “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America—a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.” She went on to say that the dispute over the Cordoba Islamic Center “has tripped some deep national lunacy” and that “many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.”
In late August Time Magazine came out with a cover story “Is America Islamophobic?” by Bobby Ghosh, and the answer appeared to be yes.
Soon after I returned from Park Place 51 to San Francisco, I filled out my sabbatical request for courses in Demystifying the Middle East, Politics and Government of the Middle East, Intro to Islam, Comparative Religions, and--just so the CCSF Board of Directors would know I was still part of mainstream USA--Western Culture and Values. Then I wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, which was starting to print articles and opinions on the Cordoba House/911 Monster Mosque Memorial Monument to Terrorism.
Dear Editors:
The SF Chronicle does a fact check on what politicians say. Maybe the newspaper should take on all the distortions pertaining to the “mosque at Ground Zero.”
Feisal Abdul Raif and Daisy Khan, the couple in charge of Park 51, the Muslim center modeled after a Jewish Community Center and the YMCA, are Muslims who have always spoken out against terrorism. Feisal Abdul Rauf is the author of What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America and vice-chair of the Interfaith Council of New York.
How interesting that some of those protesting against the building of the Muslim center seem to want the U.S. to imitate Saudi Arabia in its exclusion of other faiths.
We should also remember that Muslims were among the innocent victims when the World Trade Center was attacked.
In addition to the classrooms, auditorium galleries, restaurant, swimming pool, gym, and –yes, a prayer room that will be at Park 51 {as there was at the World Trade Center before the attach}, there will be a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001. Daisy Khan, who runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, promoting “ cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange, ” consulted the director of the YMCA on 92nd Street to get advice on how to set up the center. Neither of them anticipated that the building would be seen as a “victory monument to terrorism. I think that the people who choose to see it that way should do some soul-searching of their own.
Chris Rovzar’s report “News Corps. Remains Silent on Daily Show’s Accusations of Hypocrisy Park 51 Fearmongering” reported on Jon Stewart’s accusing Fox News of “glaring hypocrisy” in stirring up controversy about the Cordoba House when one of its founders, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owned 2.3 billion in stock with News Corps, Fox’s parent company.
This prompted me to start looking into the origin of all the fuss and misrepresentation, and I soon found the article “How the ‘ground zero mosque’ fear mongering began” by Justin Elliott, writing for Salon. He goes back to December 8, 2009, when the Times published a long front-page article on what was then called the Cordoba project. In the article, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer along with his wife Daisy Khan, the one advised to consider strollers, mentioned the center as a way to combat extremists. Two Jewish leaders and two city officials as well as the mother of a man killed on 9/11 said they supported the idea of having the center. Justin said that “besides a few third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site,” no one paid much attention to the Times story.
On December 21, 2009, Daisy Khan appeared on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox while a conservative media personality Laura Ingraham was co-hosting, and Ingraham told Khan, “I like what you’re trying to do.” But for the first time the Cordoba project was misidentified on the TV screen as the “ground zero mosque.”
Nothing much happened between December and May, when there was a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project. The Associated Press ran a story about it, with differing opinions from relatives of 9/11 victims, and the New York Post also had an article with the inaccurate headline “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.” This is when Geller, the right-wing blogger, posted “Monster Mosque Pushes ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction,” giving the Cordoba project as an example of “Islamic domination and expansionism.” She likened the location of the mosque to Al-Aqsa, which was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The next day, May 7, 2010, Geller’s group, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) began “Campaign Offensive: Stop the 911 Mosque.” Robert Spencer, the associate director of this group, is a writer who maligns Islam in any way he can and has been cited by Karen Armstrong and other commentators on comparative religions for his determinedly distorted way of presenting Islam. The organization SIOA provided names and people to call to complain about the “911 Monster Mosque,” and the board chair reported getting hundreds of calls.
On May, 2010, Geller announced that May 29 would be the SIOA’s first protest against the “911 monster mosque.” She may have chosen May 29 because on that day in 1453, the Ottoman forces were victorious at Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, bringing to an end 1500 years of the Roman Empire, which had made Christianity its official religion.
A few days later on May 13, 2010, the New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser wrote a column calling the proposal “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero,” referring to Geller and Spencer’s Stop Islamization of America group as a human rights group (!), and saying falsely that the proposed Cordoba House would open on September 11, 2011. The media madness had begun.
This was when Giuliani, so strongly associated with Ground Zero, had his say—much of it not based on fact—on the Jeff Katz Radio Show, and his comments sounded like those my friend when she told me about the Terrorists’ Victory Mosque and the evil Imam behind it. Giuliani said the imam behind the “mosque” was sympathetic to terrorism. This was Rauf, the imam chosen by the FBI to give workshops to police officers and the FBI agents. This was the Rauf chosen as a spokesperson by our government.
“Come on! We're gonna allow that at ground zero?” Giuliani asked. "This is a desecration.”
As for Muslims feeling discriminated against by the opposition to the mosque, Giuliani said the opposition “will not and should not insult any decent Muslim because decent Muslims should be as opposed to Islamic extremism as you and I are." An Islamic Cultural Center was “Islamic extremism”?
This same month on August 27, 2010, the article “Show spotlights innovation of ancient Muslims” by Christopher Rorchia of the Associated Press reported on an international exhibit showing innovations of the ancient Muslims and beginning its tour—in Istanbul. These innovations included the Golden Age of Islam’s advances in engineering, medicine and architecture, “laying the foundation for Western progress from the Renaissance until now.” Among the giants of innovation were the Al-Jazari, a Muslim engineer who designed the “elephant” clock 800 years ago, physician Al-Zahrawi, who led the way for European surgery, Fatima Al-Fihri, who set the foundation for the modern university—with no gender restrictions, and Abbas Ibn Firnas, who constructed a winged contraption near Cordoba in Spain and flew briefly centuries before Leonardo da Vinci worked on the flying designs with which the West credits him. A visitor at the show was quoted as saying, “The West has a phobia about Islam.” She credited the exhibit for trying to build better ties between the East and the West.
But that was in Istanbul, and back in the USA we were following the news of a pastor in Florida, Terry Jones, and his “Burn a Koran Day” to commemorate the ninth anniversary of 911. Human Rights First made an online effort to combat this. Its director Tad Stahnke sent out an e-mail message on August 30, 2010, saying, “This misguided and violent rhetoric only harms us by alienating the communities whose cooperation is essential to effectively combat terrorism.” Human Rights First was starting its own campaign to counteract the one by Jones to burn the Koran. In a Leah Garchik column, “Lessons from a destroyed mosque,” September 8, 2010, there was a report on the thirty-minute movie “An American Mosque” by David Washburn about a mosque in Yuba City that was destroyed by arson in 1994. Would Cordoba House/Park 51 be set on fire along with the Koran and the discourse, already quite incendiary?
Just at the point of losing hope, I noticed that my binder of articles pertaining to the protest against—and distortions about—the Park 51/the Cordoba House was growing thinner. After the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and even up to and around the time of the tenth anniversary of it, the furor was dying down. The Cordoba Project, once so named “to invoke 8th-11th century Cordoba, Spain, considered by historians a model of peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews,” (Wikipedia), was to people like Newt Gingrich “a deliberately insulting term” because it symbolized the Muslim conquerors’ victory over Christian Spaniards. Gingrich noted that Muslims had converted a Cordoba church into the third largest mosque in the world. Never mind that this was originally a pagan temple, then a Visigoth Christian church before the Umayyad converted it into a mosque and then build a new mosque on the site—a mosque regarded as the one of the most accomplished monuments of Islamic architecture. Or maybe that is precisely what they do mind. To the Islamophobes Muslim Spain represented only conquest and victory over Western religion. The name Cordoba House was changed to the very neutral Park 51, and instead of billing itself as an Islamic Center, it opened its doors on September 22, 2011 as Park 51 Community Center. Its opening featured Danny Goldfield’s New York Children project, photographs of children from 169 nations—all now living in New York City. Goldfield attended the opening night, as did Rana Sodhi, a Sikh whose brother was killed in a hate crime four days after the attack on September 11, 2001. It was Sodhi’s efforts to fight prejudice that inspired Goldfield’s project. Sodhi said that Park51 was opening in lower Manhattan to replace the hatred of “that day” with a message of tolerance.
“It’s time to start demystifying what we’re trying to do,” Sharif El-Gamal, the developer of Park 51, said, reminding me of how this controversy changed my plans for my study sabbatical. Demystifying the Middle East is one of the courses I’m taking along with Politics and Government of the Middle East, Intro to Islam, Comparative Religions, and Western Culture and Values. It’s worth noting that in Western Culture and Values, we’re now studying 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 Mohammad is the most important prophet, but he 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 (and in Cordoba in the Golden Age) 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? 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. Let’s hope that the distortion of Islam found in the West’s Song of Roland and on Fox News will end at last.
A year after my friend, a victim of hate-mongers like Geller, first warned me of the “victory Mosque to terrorism,” I read “U.S. Muslims most optimistic of faith groups,” by Tara Bahrampour and Michelle Boorstein, reporting on the Gallup Poll for the Washington Post. Let’s hope their optimism will be strengthened, not diminished, by future events.
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