In his New York Times column today ("Broadway and the Mosque"), Tom Friedman set out to explain why he "didn't object to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site." He argued that the issue was all tied up with his "affection for Broadway show tunes"—shows and tunes that are, for him, what makes America America and New York, New York. I get that. I also love the diversity of this country, especially its largest cities.
But at stake, in case you've missed it, is the project to build a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of where the twin towers once stood. Friedman reminds his readers that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim leader advocating the project, has "condemned the actions of 9/11." The Imam wants the center near Ground Zero to help "bridge and heal a divide" among Muslims and other religious groups.
Bridging differences among faiths—and among Muslims—is obviously to be applauded. Long may we have more of that. But Friedman's article mostly ducks the burning issue of location, location, location that is, for many Americans, at the heart of the matter.
He writes, "When we tell the world, ‘Yes, we are a country that will even tolerate a mosque near the site of 9/11,' we send such a powerful message of inclusion and openness. It is shocking to other nations." I understand that too. But as his article also has to concede that the 9/11 attacks were "perpetrated in the name of Islam," he asks his reader to displace recent acts of indescribable atrocity—the 9/11 attacks against New York and Washington—by saying that we'd at least be able to convey our openness to the rest of the world.
That's an important idea and principle, but it also requires a kind of disconnect that focuses only on Islam's projected message of peace, not the unfortunate political reality of Shia at repeated odds and war with Sunni. Despite its problems, Sam Harris' The End of Faith, a book focusing on religiously inspired terrorism, includes half-a-dozen unforgettable pages of quotations from the Quran, each declaring as imperative the speedy elimination of all doubters, heretics, and "infidels." That's an uncomfortable but inescapable publication fact, as awkward as those passages in the Bible that advocate, say, the stoning of women who stray. Both books were written centuries ago, but many of their followers assume that their message is unchanging, eternal, and to be taken literally.
Advocates of moderate Islam understandably point to the religion's many maxims of peace and its impressive cultural legacy—one that I've personally witnessed and admired across Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia, and parts of Indonesia. But such advocates also must downplay how fragile is the balance in those and many other Muslim countries between religious moderates and religious extremists only too willing to do whatever they believe the Quran permits them to do.
In a post on Double X called "Yes, I DO Feel Conflicted about the Ground Zero Mosque," Rachael Larimore writes, "However noble the goals of the center are, the people behind it had to realize this was going to stir up trouble. However unintentionally, they are picking a fight." On the same page, Emily Yoffe also disputes Mayor Bloomberg's assertion that it shouldn't matter who is backing the funding of the mosque, even if the donors for the $100 million project support Wahhabism, an extremist form of Islam. It shouldn't matter, of course, but it does.
London, where I'm from, also prides itself on its religious tolerance and welcoming spirit. Unfortunately, that welcome also reads as naïve to radical clerics who've preached at mosques in several parts of the city, following so many warnings against what they were inciting that they had to be deported from the UK altogether. Such was the clerics' fervent aim in radicalizing worshippers into attacking their host city, even after the attacks that took place on July 7, 2005 (Britain's "7/7"), in events that are also etched on my mind. The perpetrators of those attacks—four Muslim men—also were acting in the name of Islam and had an unshakable conviction that what they were doing was just, necessary, and sanctioned by their religion. In Hamburg, Germany, authorities recently had to take similar action, closing the Masjid Taiba mosque because, long after some of the 9/11 hijackers met there, it continued to be used to incite violence.
Many cities across America are homes to churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples, with worshippers practicing their faith peacefully, without conflict. That's a great thing. But the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York is alas a different matter. That's why we've come to call it "Ground Zero." It's a site with such overdetermined meaning to so many Americans that one wonders how some commentators could underestimate the inevitable strength of feeling over the issue and act as if it almost shouldn't be there. They're asking that we accept one image of Islam, but that we ignore and forget the other that daily fills our news.
It isn't bigoted to point that out. I think it's akin to staring historical memory straight in the face and wondering how its importance could be so quickly and strangely discounted.
