Imam Rauf Can’t Remember What the Koran Teaches: “there is a perception that Jews and Muslims and Christians must be each other’s existential enemies”
by sheikyermami on December 7, 2010
Ground Zero mosque imam: “there is a perception that Jews and Muslims and Christians must be each other’s existential enemies”
And only some seething Islamophobe would say things to that effect, right? Well…
“O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust.” — Qur’an 5:51
“Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews…” — Qur’an 5:82
“The Jews call ‘Uzair [Ezra] a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!” — Qur’an 9:30
And don’t forget the three places where Allah refers to unbelievers as apes and/or swine: Qur’an 2:63-66; 5:59-60; and 7:166. But then, what does Allah propose one do?
“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” — Qur’an 9:29
“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know.” — Qur’an 8:60
There’s always room for ahadith:
“Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.” — Sahih Bukhari 4.52.177
But there’s never room for apostasy from Islam: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.” — Sahih Bukhari 9.84.57
One could go on. But there is the other element of this story that makes Rauf’s feigned ignorance of where one gets the idea that Islam is hostile to non-Islamic faiths so absurd. That, of course, is the very project he is involved in: a triumphalist insult perpetrated by a group at once breathtakingly incompetent and driven by an appalling sense of entitlement — both to build and to use public money — that defies imagination. And all in the name of “tolerance,” naturally.
Here, indeed, is an exceptionally Orwellian puff-piece, eager to outdo every kid on the block where that self-congratulatory tolerance is concerned. It gets a running start with the title. “The Gift of Reconciliation,” by James Carroll for New York Times, December 4:
As the ocean liner steamed in from the open sea and approached the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the boy worried that the ship’s superstructure would not clear. ”It was a cold, sunny winter day, Wednesday, the 22nd of December, 1965,” he said. ”There are certain dates etched in your memory.” His journey to America had begun in Egypt, where his father was a leading religious figure. ”The image of the Statue of Liberty came into view slowly . . . such majesty and beauty. It was a life-changing moment in my life. I was 17 years old.” That Feisal Abdul Rauf’s American story began off the southern tip of Manhattan can seem foreordained, in light of the controversy that consumed him 45 years later. At his first glimpse of his new world, he told me, ”I had an intuition that my work would involve introducing Islam to America.” Yet at that point, young Rauf was himself in the throes of typical adolescent questioning. ”In such a free society — it was the ’60s! — religion had become a matter of choice.” Not so in Kuwait, where he was born, and where religion was inherited. In America, ”religion was passé. I was bewildered by all that. I was asking, ‘Does God exist? What is the meaning of life?’ And I found the answers to my religious questions as a matter of choice. I could choose to embrace my Muslim faith — and I did.” That simply, Feisal Abdul Rauf glimpsed the meaning of the nation’s defining freedom. ”America made it possible for me to freely and deliberately choose to be religious and Muslim.” Rauf would become an American citizen in 1979.
The boy enrolled at Columbia University, from which he graduated as a physics major in 1969. He earned a graduate degree at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., still within sight of Lower Manhattan. But he had become an apprentice to his father: Muhammad Abdul Rauf, a University of London Ph.D, who was director of the New York Islamic center from 1965 to 1970, a leading Muslim participant in the nascent ”ecumenical movement.” After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the senior Imam Rauf frequently visited New York synagogues. ”It was a difficult thing to do for an Egyptian Muslim in that tense time between Israel and the Arab world,” Feisal said. ”My father waged the struggle for peace.”
From 1970 to 1980, his father was director of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., an elegant mosque on Embassy Row. In 1977, a fringe Muslim group, headed by a man with a history of mental illness, took over the Islamic Center and two other Washington buildings (including the B’nai B’rith headquarters), taking more than a hundred hostages. ”My father was held at gunpoint for 39 hours at the Islamic Center by the Hanafi Muslims,” Rauf said. ”He experienced the terror of extremist Muslims.” So did Rauf.
Cue the Cordoba Canard:
In 1983, Rauf’s father ”passed the baton to me.” Rauf became the imam of the Al-Farah mosque in SoHo, now in TriBeCa, a dozen blocks north of the World Trade Center. ”I have been 27 years at Al-Farah mosque,” Rauf said. ”That gave me my pulpit.” Imam Rauf followed his father as a leading Islamic participant in interfaith dialogue, co-founding the multifaith Cordoba Initiative, named for — and taking its mission from — the Iberian city that was a medieval center of Jewish-Christian-Muslim reconciliation. ”There is a perception that Jews and Muslims and Christians must be each other’s existential enemies,” he says. ”To defeat that is an act of reconciliation.” But then the great shock occurred. ”After 9/11, I was often challenged to improve U.S.-Muslim or Jewish-Muslim relations.” And that is what he set about to do, including his role in the proposed Cordoba House at Park51, to be a center of reconciliation two blocks from Ground Zero.
Even that controversy, Imam Rauf believes, has advanced reconciliation: ”The support we received has led to increased regard for American and Jewish faith leaders — for Americans generally — all across the Muslim world.” That might seem hard to credit. Yet precisely as the controversy swirled in the United States, Rauf was visiting Arab nations as a State Department-sponsored good-will ambassador. The editor of a Bahrain newspaper, for example, called the mosque dispute America’s ”best propaganda. It shows a nation that is liberal and not afraid.” Imam Rauf concludes: ”A global coalition of moderates across the faith traditions advances moderation and peace worldwide. This story has done that.”
That depends on accepting the idea that “moderate” means the same thing in every “faith tradition.”
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