To be honest, the more I study and reflect on the "Ground Zero Mosque" issue the more difficulty I have accepting or respecting the whole "sensitivity" argument. First of all, the 9/11 families and victims organizations don't all speak with one voice and several of them (like September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Not in Our Name) are opposed to war and Islamophobia. Secondly, if people can tolerate strip clubs and pizza places on "sacred ground" they should be able to tolerate Muslims practicing their religion there. But thirdly, the never stated, and therefore unquestioned, assumption behind the opposition to the Park 51 project is that all Muslims in the US should be equated with the terrorists behind 9/11.
One of the more persuasive counter-arguments (I think) lies in also pointing out the extent to which Muslims are and have been an integral part of American life. Not only does the nearby African Burial Ground hold Muslim bodies. Not only was that part of lower Manhattan historically "Little Syria". Not only is there already a mosque there for Muslims who work nearby. Not only were there Muslims who were victims and heroic responders to the World Trade Center attack. On top of all that, the World Trade Center originally had a Muslim prayer space for the Muslims who were an integral part of the life of the community.see also
Planet Grenada:
"refudiating" islamophobia: park 51 / cordoba house / the (not-really-at)-ground zero mosque Muslims and Islam Were Part of Twin Towers’ Life
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
New York Times
September 10, 2010
Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair
Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.
In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr.
Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and
Vesey.
Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr.
Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17
th floor of the south tower.
He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as
wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the
salat prayer.
On any given day, Mr.
Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and
ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.
Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49
th floor, Mr.
Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He
didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?
He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and
Vesey. From that corner, he watched the south tower collapse, to be followed soon by the north one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.
Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.
Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical,
Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition
“We
weren’t aliens,” Mr.
Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam
aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘
Aleikum salaam.’ ”
One of those men in suits could have been
Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the
Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.
“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr.
Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from
Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”
How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.
Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr.
Abdus-Salaam and Mr.
Sareshwala. Prof. John L.
Esposito of Georgetown University, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”
Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106
th and 107
th floors for their daily prayers.
Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque —
Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.
During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their
iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.
“
Iftar was my best memory,” said
Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”
Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr.
Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named
Abdoul-Karim
Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named
Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.
Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.
There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted
salat al-
Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.
“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr.
Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”
