Mosque near Ground Zero?
Cordoba House could ‘encourage more attacks’
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PrintIf 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.
The Cordoba Initiative’s choice of location for the Cordoba House Islamic center may be constitutionally protected, he said, but it is insensitive and has caused a rift between the Muslim community and America.
 | Dr. Tawfik Hamid suggests the Cordoba Initiative should change the location of its Islamic center and build a memorial to Sept. 11 victims inside. Courtesy Tawfik Hamid |
“My worry is this can be the spark that can create a clash of civilizations if our leaders are not wise enough to have a strategy that can respect everyone and end it in a peaceful way to bring moderate people to the table to stop radicalism that can come from both sides,” he said.
Also, Hamid said, should the center be built at the Park Place site, the radicals responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks will believe their actions paved the way for a new Islamic institution in America.
“The aim of building the mosque was to build bridges,” he said. “The outcome was the opposite of this. By the radicals it will be seen as a sign of victory and encourage more attacks on America.”
Recently, Hamid wrote a Declaration of Beliefs of Muslim Moderates, which calls for “contemporary understandings of Islam to replace currently predominant harsh and radical (Salafi/Wahabbi) interpretations of our religion.”
The declaration calls for Muslims to ban the Redda Law, which Hamid said allows for the killing of Muslims who convert out of the faith; an end to violence against women; a rejection of the idea of Islamic domination of the world; a declaration of anti-Semitism and slavery as un-Islamic; and an end to laws that permit the killing of homosexuals.
The declaration — which is circulating on the Internet — is part of what Hamid called a new theological interpretation, providing a way that Islam can remain viable without radical interpretations of core values.
“That is the problem with many Muslims — they are so scared that if they start to touch these values their religion will collapse. The only way to help these people is to give them other interpretations.”
Hamid has received mostly positive feedback from non-Muslims to his declaration, while the Muslim community has thus far remained silent, he said. The requests in the document are simple and can be phrased as yes or no questions that get at the core of Muslim beliefs. He expects Muslim leaders who sign it to take action to change Islamic education, rather than just pay lip service to the document, he said.
“Many people, especially intellectuals, consider it one of the best ways to evaluate and define if a leader of Muslims is a real moderate or a radical,” he said.
In the end, Hamid believes the Cordoba Initiative will change the location of the Islamic center. If the group shows that it did not intend to cause pain or act insensitively, that will help close the rift it has caused. He also suggested that wherever Cordoba House ends up, organizers should build a memorial to Sept. 11 victims inside.
Hamid challenged Cordoba Initiative founder Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to sign the Declaration of Beliefs. If Rauf does this, he said, the radicals will look at the mosque as a sign of defeat.
“If this imam can stand clearly and unambiguously and sign this declaration, I will be the first to support him,” Hamid said.
Read the Declaration of Beliefs here.
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.
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.
Jewish-Muslim dialogue team speaks out on Cordoba House controversy
On 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.”
‘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.”
