Kuwait-born Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam leading the
project to establish the center, has been in Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE in the
past two weeks but met with a more subdued reaction than the US media.
"Muslims this time are not part of this, they didn't
call for it, they didn't defend it and didn't bother with the whole
issue," Saudi columnist, Abdulrahman Al-Rashid, wrote in Asharq Alawsat.
The US row is perceived as much less of an affront to
Islam than Switzerland's vote to ban minarets and France's moves to forbid the
full-face veil, observers say.
Asked whether the American people were becoming more
intolerant, the Imam Abdul Rauf played down American prejudice.
"If they are informed properly about what the actual
facts of the situation are, they will always make the right decision," he
said.
Abdul Rauf's project, now named Park51, has been dubbed
by its critics the "Ground Zero mosque" because of its proximity to
the World Trade Center site where nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept.
11 attacks.
An American Muslim cleric who delivers a weekly sermon at
an Abu Dhabi mosque said the row was more about US domestic politics with the
Nov. 2 congressional vote looming.
"It's really a local issue," the cleric, Jihad
Hashim Brown, said. "It has to do with the current congressional election.
As soon as the elections are finished it will blow over."
Recent French moves to ban Muslim women from wearing the
niqab or burqa in public triggered more of a media outcry in the Middle East.
"The niqab ban was a state-endorsed one and so
seemed to Muslims like an act of oppression," said public relations
consultant Riham El Houshi, 22, an Egyptian living in Qatar, adding that she
thought building the planned center was insensitive.
Qatari Ghanim Al-Naimi said the right to build mosques
anywhere in the world should be guaranteed: "Religion had nothing to do
with (Sept. 11)."
