I won’t attempt to decipher the swirling debate surrounding the manufactured controversy of Park 51, the “mosque” (actually, cultural center modeled on the Jewish YMCA at 92nd Street) “at Ground Zero” (actually, several blocks away, like the other mosques already in the area.). All heat and very little light, it’s clear the only thing this debate has energized is our own xenophobia, mob rule, and perhaps a political base or two. The defenders of common sense have been spirited, particularly Michael Bloomberg, Jeffrey Goldberg, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Gerson and President Obama. The political opportunists have been shameful, particularly Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Charles Krauthammer, and Rick Lazio.
But for most of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the circus in America is a side show of self-important, ignorant Americans. Many are fighting a bloody battle to redefine their faith in their own communities around the world. Zoning rights in lower Manhattan seems trivial in comparison. Despite all the hype and fanfare about the tectonic rift between the West and the Islamic world, the clash of rival faiths and cultures, the most virulent religious war is being fought between and among Muslims themselves.
America is involved in this fight only peripherally, and then not because we are defending ourselves from an Islamic monolith that seeks to infiltrate and conquer free societies. On the contrary, for the past 60 years, it is America that has been the aggressor, exploiting and protecting its strategic interests in Muslim lands- namely, our addiction to Middle Eastern oil and our support of client-states like Israel and Pakistan that can project our superpower influence. More often than not, our meddling has been to the detriment of the cause of freedom in the Muslim world as our policy makers continually opt for the stability of dictators and strong men.
How reality becomes twisted, inverted in fact, in home town America, in the name of fear and victimhood. Does any sane person believe the Twin Towers would have come down if the Western financed oil boom, and intense American patronage, had not enabled the rise of Saudi Arabia, allowing it to export its homicidal brand of Islam across the Muslim world, spawning the Bin Ladens of the global age? If men like Ayman Zawahiri are not tortured and radicalized in Egyptian prisons under a staunchly American-backed Mubarak regime, who builds Al Qaeda into an organization capable of striking across oceans? If America does not pump billions of dollars into an Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 80s, who has the capability and air of righteous invincibility to declare war on the sole remaining superpower in the 90s? If American evangelical and Jewish groups do not fund illegal settlements built a stone’s throw from ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, is there any sympathy or support among ordinary Muslims for the mass murder of innocents on this scale?
This is what Feisel Abdul Rauf, the Imam of the Park 51 center, meant when he said America was an accessory to 9/11. Is he a traitor and an Islamic extremist for pointing out the obvious and speaking truth to power? Is he being insensitive to the memory of those who died at Ground Zero? Are we being insensitive to the Palestinian mother whose child has just blown himself up as a suicide bomber when we tell her that her own leaders contributed to this, that they brainwashing her son into giving his life only to perpetuate an endless cycle of violence? I don’t think so in either case. This kind of tough love, this introspection and challenge of our own leadership is, in fact, the only way to break that endless cycle.
All this does not absolve ordinary Muslims from a sacred responsibility of reclaiming their faith from those who would use it to justify violence. We cannot do this for them. Although they cannot compete in the news cycle with suicide bombings and beheadings, moderate Muslims are slowly awakening and finding their lost traditions- the narrative of that inclusive, tolerant faith that lived during the medieval Islam of religious communities living side by side, governed by their own laws, in cities from Cairo to Baghdad to Cordoba. Hence the other name the New York project is known by- the Cordoba House, after the city where in the 8th century the conquering Syrian Abdul Rahman asked- yes, asked- the defeated Christians if the Muslims could share, yes share, their church for prayer until a proper mosque was built.
In Iran, a coalition of civil society groups has directly challenged the clerical establishment and their ideology of religious rule for the first time in 30 years. Many of the protesters are part of the religious classes themselves. In Iraq, an Awakening Movement of Sunnis completely rejected the austere Islam of Al Qaeda and was in large part responsible for the success of the Surge. In Somalia, Sufi groups- long the lighter, more inclusive side of Islam- are directly challenging the stone age ideology of Al Shabaab. These forces are entirely organic and are directly calling into question the most violent strains of Islam. We must give them a chance to find their voices. Judaism and Christianity took centuries- many of them bloody- to reform themselves into the modern faiths they are today. We can encourage Islam to do the same. We can play a positive, constructive role. Or, we can play politics and invite more hatred and insecurity.
