His project, called Park 51, has created a national debate over religious tolerance and sensitivity to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
In recent weeks, Imam Abdul Rauf has barely been heard from as a national political debate explodes over his dream project, including, somewhere in its planned 15 stories, a mosque. Opponents have called his project an act of insensitivity, even a monument to terrorism.
In his absence, a host of allegations have been floated: that he supports terrorism; that his father, who worked at the behest of the Egyptian government, was a militant; that his publicly expressed views mask stealth extremism. Some charges, the available records suggest, are unsupported. Some are simplifications of his ideas. Others are just mean-spirited, hateful allegations.
The far-right has called the imam “a radical Muslim,” a “militant Islamist” and, simply, the “enemy” by critics. And they even have framed his Cordoba House project as a conduit for Hamas to funnel money to domestic terrorist operations.
For those who actually know or have worked with the imam, the descriptions are frighteningly — and sadly — far from reality.
Ironically, Abdul Rauf spent the past decade fighting against the very same cultural divisiveness and religious-based paranoia that currently surrounds him.
“Imam Feisal has participated at the Aspen Institute in Muslim-Christian-Jewish working groups looking at ways to promote greater religious tolerance,” Walter Isaacson, head of The Aspen Institute told the Huffington Post. “He has consistently denounced radical Islam and terrorism, and promoted a moderate and tolerant Islam. He is the type of leader we should be celebrating in America, not undermining.”
A longtime Muslim presence in New York City, Abdul Rauf has been a participant in the geopolitical debate about Islamic-Western relations well before 9/11.
In 1997, he founded the American Society for Muslim Advancement to promote a more positive integration of Muslims into American society.
His efforts and profile rose dramatically after the attacks when, in need of a calm voice to explain why greater Islam was not a force bent on terrorism, he became a go-to quote for journalists on the beat.
Abdul Rauf, 61, was raised in a conservative religious home in Egypt and arrived in America as a teenager in the 1960s. Thus he comprehends both the Middle East and America.
“To stereotype him as an extremist is just nuts,” said the Very Rev. James P. Morton, the longtime dean of the Church of St. John the Divine, in Manhattan, who has known the family for decades.
“Since 9/11, Abdul Rauf, like almost any Muslim leader with a public profile, has had to navigate the fraught path between those suspicious of Muslims and eager to brand them as violent or disloyal and a Muslim constituency that believes itself more than ever in need of forceful leaders.”
For example, in explaining what makes some people tick, he said: “As a general rule, when people feel they’ve been humiliated, when people feel they’ve been frustrated, when people feel they’ve been ignored, when people feel that justice is not meted, then they feel the need to conflagrate,” he recently told reporters.
Abdul Rauf also feels that the Muslim world has a responsibility to “put its house in order” and “stop delivering slaps on the face,” regardless of how the West behaves.
He credits the West for its separation of church and state, and calls the relationship between religion and the government “one of the big issues the Muslim world needs to address and solve.”
