Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  PART I

  GROUND ZERO

  The Muslims on the steps of New York City Hall had come to give Michael Bloomberg a piece of their mind. They were chanting slogans and waving signs. They wanted equal rights, what Jews and Christians had, what several cities in New Jersey already recognized, what having a 12 percent representation among the population justified, what a City Council resolution that passed by an overwhelming margin (impressive but nonbinding) warranted, what political organizing in a democratic system should rightfully win them. They wanted two Muslim holy days, Eid al Fitr and Eid al Adha, recognized as public school holidays.

  The mayor was clear about his position, and he was not for turning. “If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” Bloomberg curtly told the New York Times.1

  The Muslims were not happy. Eid wasn’t just any holiday, and they weren’t just any community. They had rounded up their neighbors, they had formed a coalition with other community and religious groups, they had found their voice, and they were directing it at the mayor. “We really have confidence in the mayor’s intelligence,” said one of the coalition’s leaders, Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid. “It’s an election year,” he added.2

  Fatima Shama, then the mayor’s senior adviser on education policy, remembers Bloomberg walking into the bullpen in City Hall that morning visibly frustrated. She overheard him venting about it to other staffers, and she remembers thinking, “Actually, this is his fault.’ A few weeks later, Fatima brought the issue up with him: “Mr. Mayor, you should know—they’re out there because of you.” Bloomberg, like any mayor, was accustomed to getting blamed for all sorts of problems, but he seemed positively baffled by having guilt assigned to him on this one. Fatima continued, “Remember those speeches you gave about every New Yorker having a voice? Remember how you assured Arab and Muslim New Yorkers not to be fearful because of the effects of 9/11? Well, they took you at your word.”

  Fatima was something of an anomaly at the senior levels of the mayor’s office. Many of Bloomberg’s staff were identified through national searches and had the same kind of Ivy League/private-sector success résumé he did. The vast majority were white. Fatima was from the Bronx and had degrees from Binghamton University (part of the State University of New York system) and Baruch College (part of the City College of New York system). After graduate school, she’d landed a job running a health-and-literacy project for the city. Her work was efficient and effective, and she got promoted multiple times in relatively short order, including into a position where she worked directly with the mayor. Then, when Fatima was barely in her thirties, Bloomberg appointed her New York City’s commissioner for immigrant affairs, a result of both the connections she had with various ethnic and religious communities in the city and the trust the mayor had in her judgment.

  Attractive, with olive skin, dark eyes, and long, curly hair, Fatima looks like the type of ethnically ambiguous woman New York City specializes in. One day, Bloomberg overheard her speaking Arabic to a Muslim delegation visiting City Hall. “But I thought you spoke Spanish,” he said, a little surprised.

  “I speak Spanish and Arabic,” she said. “And Portuguese.” Bloomberg looked even more confused, so Fatima added, by way of explanation, “My Brazilian mother raised me to be a good Arab housewife.”

  Fatima’s father had fled the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and gone to Brazil. He met and married a woman there, and the two immigrated to the United States in 1962. In his first years in America, Fatima’s father worked as a peddler, finally scraping together enough money to start a store he named A & S Grocery. The A stood for Ali and the S for Sons. But Ali’s sons—Fatima’s brothers—didn’t work in the store. They were busy with school, sports, and other seductions of American life. Fatima and her sisters were the ones who loaded soda bottles on grocery shelves and ran the cash register. “Why don’t you call your store A & D Grocery?” she asked her father one day. “D for daughter,” she said when he looked confused. Now he was even more confused. Palestinian Muslim men start stores with their sons, not their daughters. Everyone knows that. Why was this daughter always asking such questions?

  Fatima was raised a Catholic in Palestinian culture with a sprinkling of Islam. She went to the same Catholic school as US Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor and attended Mass on Sunday. Her father didn’t pray and didn’t fast for Ramadan. The Islamic content of her house consisted of two oft-repeated ideas: Allah maak and Haram—“God be with you,” and “Know what is forbidden.”

  In that tight knit, largely Palestinian neighborhood, it felt like lots of things were forbidden, especially for girls. A group of families had chipped in twenty bucks each to purchase enough chairs for a few dozen Arab Muslim kids to sit in a basement and receive Islamic lessons from a severe-looking middle-aged woman every Saturday morning. On the handful of occasions Fatima attended, she remembers the lessons as long on lists of forbidden things. Pickles were on the list: they were shameful because of their shape. “I didn’t understand why until years later,” Fatima told me.

  A lot of girls Fatima knew got married as teenagers. About the time she turned sixteen, she started getting visitors. It was not uncommon for her to come home from school and find, in the living room, a family with a grown son looking for a suitable match. Fatima would bring tea and stare ahead in stony silence. “I thought about faking a twitch to scare them off,” she told me.

  College offered the hope of freedom. Fatima had the grades; it was other hurdles she had to overcome. One afternoon, one of Fatima’s aunts came to her home, sat on the same sofa the suitors and their families did, and loudly declared that girls going away to college is haram. Fatima’s father listened politely and said he’d handle this. When his sister left, he turned to his daughter, who was bursting with opinions and intelligence, and said, “You go to college, but if you do anything to dishonor this family, you’re in serious trouble.”

  On the first day of class, Fatima’s sociology of religion professor read down the list of names. “Fatima Shama,” he said, and Fatima raised her hand. He looked at her, smiled, and said, “Salam alaykum.” Fatima wanted to bury her head. She’d taken the class because she thought it would be an easy A. She had no interest in answering for a religion she felt no connection to. Actually, at that time in her life, she felt no connection to any religion. As a teenager, she’d gone to the Middle East and had been overwhelmed by the depth of suffering she saw in Palestinian refugee camps. She asked the priest at her church when she returned home why he never talked about the Middle East in his homilies. “No politics in church,” the man said.

  “I’m not asking you to talk about politics,” Fatima said. “I just want you to talk about human suffering. Isn’t that a central theme in Christianity?”

  “No politics in church,” the priest said, louder.

  “I’m not coming back here,” Fatima told her mother.

  The head of the Newman Center, the Catholic students’ organization, was in Fatima’s sociology of religion class. So was the leader of Hillel, the Jewish student group. Both of them talked about their faiths with knowledge and pride. Faith guided their lives, faith illuminated their paths, faith inspired their actions. Fatima had always viewed faith as motions and mumbles you faked when other people were around. She put her nose to the ground at Islamic school when everyone else did; she knelt at Mass when everyone else got on their knees. But Fatima was fascinated by these other students in her class, these students who talked of the fullness and freedom that faith gave them. What was that about?

  Because she was the only one with a Muslim-sounding name in class, people turned to her on questions about Islam. “I guess I could have said that I wasn’t going to talk about it, that I wasn’t really Muslim,” she told me. “I could have even dropped the class. But the way these other two talked about their faiths, and because people looked at me when Islam came up, I decided I wanted to know something about this religion that other people wante
d me to represent. So I started checking Islamic books out of the library and reading them late into the night.”

  One of the authors her professor recommended was Moroccan scholar Fatema Mernissi. Her work turned everything Fatima thought she knew about Islam upside down, especially when it came to gender relations. Mernissi wrote about Khadija, the Prophet’s wife, presenting her as a successful, independent businesswoman so impressed by the work ethic and honesty of a younger man named Muhammad that she proposes marriage to him. As Muhammad goes through the experience of receiving revelation, preaching Islam, and being hated and threatened by the Quraysh tribe in Mecca, Khadija stands staunchly by his side, both supporting and guiding him. “I wanted to be like that—intelligent, independent, successful, but also a strong partner,” Fatima told me.

  Fatima met a Pakistani student on campus who taught her how to pray. She started fasting for Ramadan. She began to speak up in class, talking about the connection she felt to the Islam that she was reading about in the work of feminist scholars. As she deepened into her faith, she found her life growing fuller. As she accepted some of the restrictions within Islam, she felt freer. And as she moved toward making a career choice, her Muslim faith inspired her in the direction of public service.

  Serving as the mayor’s senior adviser on education and being a Muslim during the time that Muslims were lobbying City Hall for Eid to be a public holiday put Fatima in an interesting position. Muslim leaders would contact her and ask for meetings with City Hall brass. Fatima facilitated access appropriately. These people were New Yorkers, and they had every right to make their case to public officials. Fatima also gave the mayor primers on Islam. She talked about the Qur’an and the Prophet, the Five Pillars of Islam, the ritual prayers, the centrality of mercy. She spoke about the significance of Eid and the practice of iftar, the meal that ends the daily fast during the month of Ramadan. She even convinced Bloomberg to host an iftar dinner at Gracie Mansion, pointing out that the White House had been hosting such an event since the 1990s. “He thought it was beautiful,” Fatima told me. “The form of the prayer, the sound of the azaan—he was just blown away.” He was particularly moved by the imam who led the prayer at the iftar, a Muslim New Yorker from Egypt whom Fatima recommended, a man named Feisal Abdul Rauf.

  There seemed to be two modes for politicians when it came to the Ground Zero Mosque debate in late summer of 2010: attack or avoid. Those who opposed Cordoba House being at 51 Park Place puffed up their chests, let out their roars, and threw their spears every chance they got, which was pretty frequently, because for several weeks straight, it was the first question every journalist asked any politician. Carl Paladino made it the centerpiece of his campaign for governor, running ads saying, “A mosque makes a mockery of those who died there” and promising to use the power of eminent domain to stop “the monument to those who attacked us.”3 On the other hand, every time the issue came up, political figures who thought New York City Muslims ought to be able to pray where they wished and launch a center where they wanted looked like they were seeking a rock to crawl under. The standard bleat was, “They have the right to do it, even though it may not be the right thing to do.” This was effectively what President Obama said when he proclaimed he would not comment on the “wisdom” of the location.4 Some cited the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of worship, or the fact that the courts would almost certainly allow Cordoba House to be built, but they did it so meekly, it sounded more like they were hiding behind the Constitution than defending it.

  Bloomberg was virtually in a category by himself. Cordoba House became his signature cause that summer, a position that may well be the defining legacy of his third term as mayor of New York. Every political wind was against him: A Religion News Poll showed that, based on its proximity to Ground Zero, over 60 percent of Americans opposed Cordoba House. Eighty-five percent of Republicans, members of Bloomberg’s political party, were against it. Even a majority of New Yorkers were opposed.5

  Bloomberg didn’t run away, he didn’t hide, and he didn’t compromise. Every chance he got he spoke up, with conviction and emotion. When his speechwriters presented him with language that he considered too weak, he wrote his own lines. When civic and religious leaders told him in private they thought he probably was right but didn’t want to risk their reputations and appear with him in public on this issue, it just strengthened his resolve. Longtime friends went public with their disagreement with the mayor. The hate mail piled up at City Hall, some of it from former admirers saying that his stand on the issue had changed their opinion of him; if he ran for president, they would not support him. When the Anti-Defamation League stated that they were opposed to Cordoba House, the mayor didn’t take a pass and say, “Well, they have a right to their opinion” or “I’m not going to comment on that.”6 He said the position was “totally out of character with [the ADL’s] stated mission. I have no idea what possessed them to reach that conclusion.” When New York governor David Patterson offered to give Cordoba House free state-owned land far away from Ground Zero, Bloomberg—standing right next to Patterson at a press conference—openly disagreed with him. “Something about this issue just really hooked into him,” Howard Rubenstein, a powerful business leader in New York and a friend of Bloomberg’s, commented. “It deeply upset him.”7 Bloomberg told Daisy Khan (the face of the project in the media and Imam Feisal’s wife) in private that Cordoba House should not move, no matter how hot the political fires burned or how good the offer to go elsewhere. He’d stand with them. The beating heart of New York City was on the line; the idea of America was at stake.

  Bloomberg set out his case for American pluralism in two speeches he gave that August, right at the height of the media furor around Cordoba House. The first speech was delivered at the Statue of Liberty at the beginning of the month and the second at an iftar dinner the mayor hosted at Gracie Mansion toward the end of the month.8 Part of the mayor’s job in these speeches was being clear about who the enemy was, and who the enemy was not. “Islam did not attack the World Trade Center—al-Qaeda did,” Bloomberg said at the iftar. Muslim New Yorkers were friends, neighbors, coworkers, just like everyone else. And just like everyone else in New York City on 9/11, Muslims were among those who suffered. “Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans,” Bloomberg said. “We would betray our values—and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans—if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan.”

  Part of the mayor’s job was to articulate a definition of America. He emphasized what our nation is not: “To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American.” He stated in no uncertain terms the core values of this country and presented New York City as the epitome of American pluralism: “Our doors are open to everyone—everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants and it is sustained by immigrants. . . . That’s what makes New York special and different and strong.”

  For Bloomberg, it was precisely that pluralism that the 9/11 terrorists had attacked, and precisely that value that New York City and America had to now proudly embrace. “We would be untrue to the best part of ourselves—and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans—if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in Lower Manhattan,” he said. “We would betray our values—and play into our enemies’ hands—if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists.”

  He supported Cordoba House not just because religious freedom was a cornerstone of American law but also because he expected the institution to make an important contribution to American life. “It is my hope that the mosque will help bring our city even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as peop
le of any other faith, and they are as welcome to worship in Lower Manhattan as any other group. . . . I expect the community center and mosque will add to the vitality of the neighborhood and the entire city.”

  Bloomberg offered special recognition to the parents of Mohammad Salman Hamdani, who had disappeared on the morning of 9/11. The family, like many families in New York City, frantically searched the city’s morgues and hospitals for any sign of their son. In October 2001, they heard a knock on the door. It was two police officers, who asked a set of terse questions about Salman. They demanded the graduation picture they saw on the fridge, the one that showed Salman next to an Afghani classmate. Slowly, it dawned on the family: these police officers were basically accusing Salman of being involved in the 9/11 attacks. His Muslim faith and Pakistani background made him a prime suspect. There was a photo of Salman circulating through New York City Police Department offices with the caption “Hold and detain. Notify: major case squad.”

  It turns out that Salman was not one of the villains of 9/11, but one of the heroes. A certified emergency medical technician and a police cadet, Salman had seen the burning towers while he was traveling to work and gone to help. He died saving others. “Salman stood up when most people would have gone in the other direction,” Bloomberg said of him.9

  The mayor even defended the individual most other public figures, even those who supported Cordoba House, didn’t want to talk about: Imam Feisal. During the furor around Cordoba House, all those world leaders Imam Feisal met through US State Department events and trips to Davos acted as if they’d never heard of him. Not Bloomberg. He quoted the speech Imam Feisal had made during a memorial service for slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl: “If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind, and soul ‘Shma’ Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad’—‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one.’ ”10 “In that spirit,” Bloomberg continued, “let me declare that we in New York are Jews and Christians and Muslims, and we always have been. And above all that, we are Americans. . . . There is nowhere in the five boroughs of New York City that is off limits to any religion. By affirming that basic idea, we will honor America’s values and we will keep New York the most open, diverse, tolerant and free city in the world.”11