Mosque near Ground Zero?
Jewish-Muslim dialogue team speaks out on Cordoba House controversy
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PrintOn behalf of this newspaper, Rabbi Steven Sirbu asked members of the Temple Emeth-Dar-Ul-Islah Mosque dialogue team how they felt about the Cordoba House controversy and what effect, if any, the controversy might have on relations within the two communities. Below are some of the replies.
Stephen Friedman, a board member of Temple Emeth, said that while initially [before joining the dialogue team], “I had to overcome some trepidation and irrational fear, due to the frequent media association of Islam with terrorism that had filtered into my consciousness … after a year of dialogue I count my Muslim colleagues as my friends.” This does not mean, he said, that there are not differences needing to be addressed, “but the fact that as a group we were able engage in meaningful dialogue on challenging issues like the Middle East conflict was very encouraging.” Adding that he strongly supports the building of Cordoba House, Friedman wrote, “The vast majority of Muslims, like Jews or Christians, are good people living lives of faith, dedicated to their families and communities. The Cordoba Center represents moderate voices in the Muslim world, the kind of voices that we should all support.”
Elijah Muhammad, a member of the mosque, suggested that “the controversy in itself shows that as a country and as a community, we are not accepting to groups who are outside the norm of our thinking. Instead of protesting the building of a cultural center that will happen to have a mosque inside, we as a community should be celebrating our diversity, not rejecting it…. It was not Islam that did those (9/11) attacks, but a group of people who were on a mission that did not reflect the teachings of Islam.” Muhammad said his biggest concern was the ADL statement, which “really caught me by surprise. Being a group that was involved in the civil rights, I would assume they would have been more sensitive.”
Arthur Lerman, an Emeth member, pointed out that in 1964 he had been a volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was in a Mississippi church when it was attacked. He drew a comparison between his experiences then and now, noting that his support for both the southern church and the Islamic center “is based on the furtherance of Jewish values: the right of our fellow human beings to live in freedom, and our obligation to live well with one another — without suspicion, in an atmosphere of open-hearted good will.”
Shaheen Khateeb, from the mosque, said that since she could not express her feelings as eloquently as those who have already spoken on the subject, she would quote several of them instead. She cited New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reminder that “Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans.” She also quoted CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria, who said, “The debate over whether an Islamic center should be built a few blocks from the World Trade Center has ignored a fundamental point. If there is going to be a reformist movement in Islam, it is going to emerge from places like the proposed institute. We should be encouraging groups like the one behind this project, not demonizing them.”
Applauding plans to build Cordoba House, team member Dr. June Moss Handler of Emeth called it “a practical and symbolic opportunity for the Muslim community to remind us that most Muslims seek interfaith respect and understanding and are willing to work to gain that consideration. They should not have to,” she added. “As Jews we understand this only too well.”
Marcia Shapiro of Emeth said she has been “quite upset” over the controversy “and especially at the reasons given for opposition to the project. For those who say that it is hallowed ground, I remind them that the site is a former Burlington Coat Factory,” she said, noting that while she would have had the same opinion even if she had not participated in the dialogue, “there is no way I could have felt such an emotional reaction before this experience.” Said Shapiro: “As recent events have unfolded, I have seen them through the eyes of my Muslims friends and I imagine how it must feel to hear that the mosque will be an ‘insult’ to 9/11 victims…. The Muslims I grew to know are good-hearted people of faith who are committed to their families and their communities. The true insult is to them.”
More on: Mosque near Ground Zero?
Declaration of Beliefs of Muslim Moderates
I (We) are Muslims who want contemporary understandings of Islam to replace currently predominant harsh and radical (Salafi/Wahabbi) interpretations of our religion. We therefore declare that:
1- Redda Law, the Sharia Law that allows the killing of Muslims who convert to other faiths, must be banned in Islamic teachings and in Sharia legal doctrine. Islamic countries that practice Sharia must stop the practice of this law and must admit that Freedom of belief and the right to convert to other faith or believe is a basic right that must be given to all Muslims.
‘Good people can disagree’
Rabbi Jordan Millstein of Temple Sinai in Tenafly sent his congregants a pre-Shabbat e-mail message in which he discussed the mosque. Excerpts follow.
1. This is an issue on which good people can disagree…. The key to maintaining a civil society and healthy, dynamic Jewish community is not that we should all hug each other and sing “Kumbaya” (though if that’s your thing I am totally fine with it). Rather, it is the recognition that there is a human being inside that opinion he/she is wearing and that this human being was created in the image of God just as we were.
Cordoba House could ‘encourage more attacks’
Former Islamic terrorist urges moderation
If the Cordoba House is built in the shadow of the Sept. 11 site, radical Muslims will increase their efforts to attack America because of a perceived victory in their war to transform the United States into a Muslim nation.
So says Dr. Tawfik Hamid, senior fellow and chair for the Study of Islamic Radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. Hamid is a former member of the terrorist Islamic organization Jamaa Islamiya with Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who later became the second in command of Al-Qaeda. For more than 25 years Hamid has spoken out in favor of reformation in the Muslim world based on peaceful interpretations of Islamic texts.
ADL plans taskforce to address Muslim concerns
Organization had opposed Cordoba House
The Anti-Defamation League, which has come under fire for its opposition to the planned mosque near the site of the World Trade Center, is launching an interfaith taskforce to help Muslim communities denied permission to build mosques in their neighborhoods.
The taskforce would “receive complaints, requests, [and] pleas from Muslim communities that run into … prejudice,” Abraham Foxman, the organization’s national director, said.
The initiative, Foxman said in a telephone discussion with The Jewish Standard last Friday, “needs a national specific focus and response. It will take a while because we need to find the partners.”
Questioning character of Cordoba imam ‘just inappropriate’
Tenafly man recalls long relationship with Rauf
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the head of the Cordoba Initiative, should be praised for creating bridges between moderate Muslims and people of good will, according to Tenafly resident Alan Silberstein.
The pair’s relationship goes back decades to their days as engineering students at Columbia University in 1967. Rauf’s father was an Egyptian diplomat and the family had recently relocated from Kuwait. When the Six Day War broke out, the two students were working side by side at summer jobs in the religion department. They often ate lunch together and, rather than drive them apart, the war sparked discussion and mutual respect.
Teaneck officials call Cordoba House case a reminder to protect freedom of religion
The New York Islamic center is a distraction from the real issues facing America, said Teaneck’s Mayor Mohammed Hameeduddin.
“Regardless of whether this goes up, it’s not going to create jobs, it’s not going to get us out of the recession, it’s not going to make America safer,” the mayor told The Jewish Standard earlier this week.
Hameeduddin is the only Muslim mayor in New Jersey. The Teaneck Township Council appointed him and Deputy Mayor Adam Gussen, an Orthodox Jew, in July, but the two have known each other since their days at Teaneck High School. They have not seen the mosque issue drive a wedge between them or Teaneck’s fragile unity.
“We don’t agree on everything,” Gussen said. “The goodwill we’ve put in the bank over a decades-long friendship carries us through any differences we may have.”
Locals call Cordoba House ‘the wrong place’
All of Islam bears some responsibilty for 9-11 and the epidemic of terror carried out in its name and by its adherents,” wrote Rabbi Benjamin Shull of Temple Emanuel of the Pascack Valley in Woodcliff Lake in an e-mail to The Jewish Standard.
Asked to elaborate, he added, “I realize that there are many Muslims who practice a moderate form of their religion and who do not condone terror or violent jihad, but it is obvious to anyone who has studied the history of Islam that the violence we see today is not a mere aberration. There is endemic to Islam an aggressive and imperialistic strain that, many times in the past, has reared its head and brought much religiously fueled violence to the world.
‘This could have been us’
Cordoba House supporters cite religious freedom as crux of debate
Some local groups strongly support the mosque.
While their reasons range from First Amendment freedoms to trust that rank-and-file Muslims are well-intentioned, they speak with passion about the right of their fellow citizens to build houses of worship.
Rabbi Steven Sirbu, whose Teaneck synagogue has partnered with the town’s mosque, Dar-Ul-Islah, to create an ongoing Jewish-Muslim dialogue group, wrote to his congregants, “I have long believed that Muslims occupy a similar place in American society today that Jews occupied about a century ago.”
