Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  SACRED GROUND

  PLURALISM, PREJUDICE, AND THE PROMISE OF AMERICA

  Eboo Patel

  BEACON PRESS

  BOSTON

  To the leaders,

  to the bridge builders

  May the Father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.

  —George Washington

  The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

  —Jane Addams

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART I

  Ground Zero

  The Muslim Menace

  The Evangelical Shift

  PART II

  The Science of Interfaith Cooperation

  The Art of Interfaith Leadership

  PART III

  Colleges

  Seminaries

  American Muslim Child

  Conclusion

  Afterword by Martin E. Marty

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  If only they knew about Cordoba.

  It was 2009. I was in my office at Interfaith Youth Core, clicking through a recently released Pew Research Center study on religion, racking my brain for new strategies. Eight years after 9/11, the survey said, a majority of Americans—65 percent—viewed Islam as very or somewhat different from their own religion.1 Fewer than one in five of my fellow citizens thought that my faith had anything in common with theirs. It raised a question that had been nagging me deep down for some time: For all the growth in the numbers of people committed to making faith a bridge of cooperation, was our movement any match for those who saw faith as a barrier of division or a bomb of destruction? The evening news was still full of stories of suicide bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, books like Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything were runaway best sellers, and chain e-mails with headings like “Why Muslims Can’t Be Good Americans” were landing in my in-box on a regular basis. All of this was proof that interfaith work was not taking place on neutral territory. There were plenty of people out there with a very different idea about religious diversity, and they were not shy.

  The work of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), the nonprofit organization I founded and have led for the last ten years, focuses on training young people from different faiths to organize interfaith service projects. The idea is that serving others is a common value to all traditions—including secular ones—and when religiously diverse young people engage in volunteer projects together, they become both committed to the cause of interfaith cooperation and ambassadors for its importance. I was coming to the realization that these activities were necessary but not sufficient. We needed new strategies, new approaches that could give rise to a new narrative, a tale that spanned the ages and included people of all religions and cultures, a story about the magnificence of putting the high ideals of pluralism into concrete practice.

  That’s where Cordoba came in. It was the capital city of Al-Andalus, an Islamic civilization in southern Spain in the medieval era, a time of Muslim rule characterized by cooperation with Jews and Christians often referred to as La Convivencia. “The brilliant ornament of the world [that] shone in the west,” the cultivated Catholic nun Hroswitha called it, “a noble city . . . wealthy and famous . . . and resplendent in all things, and especially for its seven streams of wisdom and as much for its constant victories.”2 The library of the caliph had four hundred thousand volumes, a thousand times more than the largest library in the Christian-dominated parts of Europe. The catalogue of the library alone ran to forty-four volumes. Jews, hounded and hated elsewhere in Europe, thrived here. This was the milieu that gave rise to the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, where Hebrew poetry was rediscovered and reinvented, where a Jew rose to be the Caliph’s foreign minister. While much of Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages, Muslim scholars were producing commentaries on Aristotle, texts that played a key role in sparking the Renaissance in Europe. The influence of Al-Andalus is with us still: there are synagogues on New York City’s Upper West Side with architectural allusions to the mosques built in that time and place.3

  Here was a Muslim society that promoted art and science, medicine and mathematics, literature and philosophy, values and disciplines admired across nations and religions. If more of my fellow citizens knew about Cordoba, certainly they would see similarities between Islam and America. Moreover, they might start to glimpse the arc of that narrative of pluralism, and see themselves as authors of future chapters.

  The Cordoba story has been frequently mentioned in academic circles. Yale professor Maria Rosa Menocal wrote The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, and Harvard professor Diana Eck had referenced La Convivencia in her presidential address to the American Academy of Religion, the largest association of religion scholars in North America. My own introduction to Cordoba was in my graduate studies in the sociology of religion. It was my inspiration for starting an interfaith organization. I wanted to be deep in the mix when it came to cultivating pluralism. My wife and I took a trip to southern Spain to see the mosques and monuments for ourselves, to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors who had built a civilization we took pride in. And while I was there, it occurred to me that the most powerful similarity between medieval Andalusia and contemporary America wasn’t in the architecture of the buildings; it was in the shape of the society—namely, the idea that different religious communities can live in the same place and not simply coexist in a lukewarm tolerance, but rather actively cooperate and mutually thrive.

  In What It Means to Be an American, Michael Walzer observes that political theorists since the Greeks believed that participatory politics could exist only in ethnically or religiously homogenous nations: “One religious communion, it was argued, made one political community . . . One people made one state.” Pluralism—one state with many peoples—existed only under empires. The next section begins with this line: “Except in the United States.”4

  Cordoba predicted America. It was a civilization that experimented with a partial pluralism, extended limited rights to diverse communities, and allowed some degree of civic and political participation. The American story is about the adoption and advancement of all three principles.

  Human history is littered with examples of different identity groups at war with each other. More frequently than the faithful would like to admit, religious belief has fueled the fighting. Against this backdrop, the American achievement, while far from perfect, is still remarkable. As Barack Obama said in his inaugural address, “Our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.”5 What is even more astonishing is our refusal to stand still, to be content with past progress or favorable comparisons to other nations. We constantly seek to improve this pluralist, participatory, patchwork democracy.

  America’s promise is to guarantee equal rights for all identities. This framework of rights facilitates the contributions of these many communities to this single country. That is America’s genius. The idea is simple: people whose nation gives them dignity will build up that society. When we say we are an immigrant nation, we mean more than just that various religious and ethnic groups settled here in America, bringing with them their Hebrew prayers and Hindu chants. We are recognizing the fact that the institutions they built benefited not just their own communities but also the common good of this country. The hyphen between
Jewish, Christian, and American is not a barrier; it’s a bridge. Those things that make you a better Catholic or Buddhist or Sikh—generosity, compassion, service—also make you a better American. America gains when its immigrants bring the inspiration of their particular heritage across the ocean to these shores and plant it in this soil. Those seeds have grown into Catholic hospitals, Lutheran colleges, Quaker high schools, Southern Baptist disaster-relief organizations, Jewish philanthropy, and much more. The institutional expressions of religious identity are the engines of American civil society. These were lessons I learned not from a political science seminar in college but from a Muslim imam from Egypt.

  Perhaps it is fitting that I first saw Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf speak at New York City’s Riverside Church, where forty years earlier Martin Luther King Jr. had preached about how his Christian faith called him to be an interfaith peace builder.6 Dressed in a dignified silver Arab robe, looking perfectly comfortable in front of a multicultural Christian congregation, Imam Feisal opened with the line, “My dear brothers and sisters, I bring you greetings of peace from the tradition of Islam.” In a calm, gentle voice—a voice that my IFYC colleague Claire said made her want to do yoga—he spoke of his devotion to both Islam and America. He had lived in the Middle East, in Europe, in Malaysia, and had never felt so free and welcome as he did here, in a nation whose principles are totally congruous with the values of his faith, a country that inspired him to do his best work.

  For Imam Feisal, the great fault line in the world is not between Americans and Arabs or Muslims and Christians. It is between the moderates of all traditions and the extremists who belong only to one—the tradition of extremism. It was a fault line Imam Feisal knew well. His father had once been kidnapped by Muslim extremists, and his own mosque was in Lower Manhattan, only a few blocks from where fanatics from his faith rammed planes into the World Trade Center. The gun of religious violence had been pointed at his chest many times, more often than not by people who prayed in Arabic.

  Imam Feisal loved to highlight the dimensions of pluralism in every tradition. In Islam, he cited the verses of the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. He spoke of those seeds flowering into the glorious civilization of Al-Andalus. He called New York City a contemporary Cordoba, sacred ground where God’s multitudes mingled and mixed, a city to be cherished and protected. I remember feeling a flush of pride when Imam Feisal spoke those words. As an American Muslim, I was part of both stories.

  Many Muslim leaders of the immigrant generation, while grateful for America’s freedoms and opportunities, openly registered their disapproval of American popular culture and foreign policy. They spoke often of life back home, offering heavily mythologized versions of mid-twentieth century Karachi or Cairo, and set out to repeat those patterns here. They built a set of institutions—mosques, schools, advocacy organizations—whose purpose was to seal Muslims off from much of American cultural life, institutions that served as bubbles rather than bridges. Imam Feisal was saying something different. He spoke of how Catholicism and Judaism had become American religions by bursting out of their bubbles, learning from and working with others, and building institutions that served the common good of their new country instead of just the concerns of their own parochial communities. Muslims ought to do the same, he insisted. We could maintain our distinctive identities while contributing to the civic life of our nation. America welcomed that. Look at the popularity of Rumi’s poetry and the iconic status of Muhammad Ali. Gaze up at the heights of the Sears Tower, a building designed by an American Muslim. Integrating the distinct contributions of its diverse religious communities is the American way. This is the true meaning of E pluribus unum. This is how this nation was built.

  Imam Feisal’s great dream was to create an institution that embodied this ideal. It would be something analogous to a YMCA (the initials of which stand for “Young Men’s Christian Association”) or a Jewish Community Center, a project that made reference to the Islamic tradition and harnessed the resources of the Muslim community with the purpose of serving the common good of this country. It would be the institutional expression of Muslim pluralism and service in America. He planned to name it after the city that had embodied this ethos in a Muslim civilization many centuries before: Cordoba House.

  It was a vision that inspired me to go see Imam Feisal speak a dozen times, at events in cities ranging from DC to London. And I wasn’t the only one. Imam Feisal was among the most sought-after figures at interfaith conferences across the world in the years after 9/11. He was everywhere—at churches and synagogues, at Aspen Institute events and State Department conferences, at Muslim youth gatherings and at the World Economic Forum, in Davos. I remember receiving a call from a man who was planning a major interfaith conference in Washington, DC, a man who had served as a senior official in the Bush administration. The man simply said, “You’ve got to help us get Imam Feisal for this conference. People are saying they won’t come unless he speaks.”

  When I saw the article in the New York Times in early December 2009, I smiled widely and thought to myself, “He’s making it happen.” Imam Feisal had found a building for Cordoba House, and it was only a few blocks from the mosque where he had led prayers and given sermons for twenty-five years. The finished project would include a 500-seat performing arts center, a gym, a restaurant, a library, a culinary school, a swimming pool, and a prayer space. Muslims would take their place alongside other American communities as a group that built an institution out of the inspiration of their particular heritage in a manner that served their nation.

  The project’s real estate developer, a Muslim who prayed at Imam Feisal’s mosque, stated the intention of the project: “It’s really to provide a place of peace, a place of services and solutions for the community.”7 The Times quoted a half-dozen people who supported the effort, from government officials to religious leaders to people who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks. A spokeswoman for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum said, “The idea of a cultural center that strengthens ties between Muslims and people of all faiths and backgrounds is positive.” An FBI staffer told the Times, “We’ve had positive interactions with him in the past.” A woman whose son was killed on 9/11 called it “a noble effort.”

  The closest parallel to Cordoba House was Manhattan’s Jewish Community Center, and Imam Feisal and his wife, Daisy Khan, reached out to them for advice. Joy Levitt, the center’s executive director, was quoted in the Times article as saying, “For the J.C.C. to have partners in the Muslim community who share our vision of pluralism and tolerance would be great.” She did give Imam Feisal and Daisy some stern advice: Leave enough space for baby strollers.8

  There were some brief references to the “delicate nature” of the project in the Times piece, given that it was going to be near Ground Zero, where a group of extremist Muslims had murdered nearly three thousand Americans. If anybody could pull this off, the article suggested, it would be Imam Feisal. Not only was he a figure with significant national clout, he led a mosque right in the neighborhood. His own Muslim community had been deeply impacted by the tragedy. The Times wasn’t the only media that leaned positive on the project. In late 2009, the conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, hosted Daisy on Fox News and declared her support. It looked like clear sailing.9

  There was one thing that made me nervous—the swimming pool. “That’s going to be trouble,” I thought to myself. Imam Feisal had always been viewed as a little too liberal by certain contingents within American Islam. Even the Times story mentioned that Imam Feisal had a tendency to be “focused more on cultivating relations with those outside the faith than within it.” Imam Feisal’s unabashed affection for America, his work with the US government on the issue of domestic Muslim extremism, his willingness to be identified as a moderate Muslim, all these things had caused grumbling within some segments of his own community. Many wanted more criticism of US foreign policy and popular culture, and just about everyone w
anted Imam Feisal to tell all his powerful friends to stop using the term “moderate Muslim.” They thought it signified that the US government could tell Muslims how to practice their religion.

  Personally, I could live with the term. The Qur’an says that Muslims were meant to be a community in the middle, and if that translated into American English as “moderate Muslim”—fine.10 Plus, given the high-profile nature of Muslim terrorists, I thought the biggest challenge for American Muslims was to redirect the spotlight toward people like Imam Feisal and historical moments like Cordoba and away from the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda.

  Oh, for the days when we argued about the term “moderate Muslim.” By the end of that summer, it had effectively ceased to exist.

  The first punch to land was from Pamela Geller, a right-wing blogger and well-known flamethrower. In May 2010, she posted a piece referring to Cordoba House as a “Victory Mosque at Ground Zero.” The language was picked up by the New York Post and started getting traction on Fox News and other conservative outlets. Sarah Palin tweeted that Muslims should “refudiate” Cordoba House. The lieutenant governor of Tennessee said that Muslims could well be part of a cult and therefore undeserving of First Amendment rights. Political candidates from Nevada to North Carolina started making their opposition to “the Ground Zero mosque” a core part of their campaign strategy. Mosque projects from the suburbs of San Diego to Staten Island—literally, from sea to shining sea—faced vociferous opposition. A group of young men in a car fired several shots at Muslim worshippers leaving a mosque in upstate New York. A mosque construction site in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was hit by an arson attack. A cab driver in Manhattan was asked if he was Muslim, said yes, and got stabbed four times. An obscure pastor in Florida with a Hollywood mustache started making news with his announcement that on September 11 he was going to burn Qur’ans. On Fox News, Imam Feisal was known simply as the radical Imam building a victory mosque on the site where his terrorist brethren had committed the worst attack in American history.