Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  A year after the Summer of Islamophobia, Fatima and I were on a panel together talking about the Muslim American experience. Fatima made it a point to emphasize that she had worked just as hard on the antigay bigotry of the fall of 2010 as she had on the anti- Muslim bigotry of that summer. Making sure gays felt safe in New York City’s boroughs was just as Muslim a thing to do as making sure Muslims feel safe.

  Listening to Fatima speak of the work she did as an American Muslim on behalf of the LGBT community, I thought of a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad: “No one of you truly believes until he wants for his brother what he wants for himself.”

  It is an ethic central to Islam. It is an ethic, in a hundred languages and in every conceivable form of prayer, that has built America.

  THE MUSLIM MENACE

  In October 1995, just months after graduating from law school, Suhail Khan moved home to San Jose. One day, taking the local paper out of its wrapper from the driveway of his parents’ home, he found himself stunned by the story splashed across the front page. Longtime US congressman Norman Mineta had announced that he was resigning his seat in thirty days. Mineta, a Democrat, had lost his powerful position as chair of the Transportation Committee in the Republican revolution of 1994, and had decided that taking a job as a corporate lobbyist for Lockheed Martin would be more fruitful than being in the minority.1 The article listed a number of prominent Bay Area Democrats who would likely compete for the seat. Toward the end, somewhat offhandedly, it suggested that there might be a Republican candidate as well—Tom Campbell.

  That name rang a bell for Suhail. Campbell was a professor at Stanford Law School and a state senator. Suhail knew the name from California state Republican circles. Campbell had a reputation as a man guided by principles, not partisan ideology or personal ambition. Among other things, Suhail had always respected that he didn’t take political action committee money.

  Suhail, who had attended law school at the University of Iowa, was hoping to turn his familiarity with that all-important early caucus state into a position with a Republican presidential candidate. He’d been having promising conversations with staff in the Bob Dole campaign, but the possibility of being involved in a race in his home district intrigued him. He called Stanford Law School to see if he could get through to Campbell. After being transferred around for a while, he finally heard Campbell’s voice on the other end of the line. Suhail explained that he’d read the Mercury News article and that he’d like to find out more about Campbell’s campaign. Campbell said that he’d read the same article and was intrigued by the possibility himself.

  “You mean you haven’t announced that you’re running yet?” Suhail asked, a little surprised.

  “Mineta’s announcement shocked everyone. I haven’t even had time to decide whether I want to run, let alone announce it to a newspaper,” Campbell explained. He had spent much of the morning trying to get through to his wife, who was in Russia at the time. He took down Suhail’s number and said he’d get back to him if he chose to get into the race. Suhail had been around politics long enough to know not to wait by the phone.

  Born in Colorado and raised in Northern California by Indian Muslim immigrant parents, Suhail traced his interest in politics back to both his parents’ influence and to a chance moment in American television. As a kid, he happened to be watching Schoolhouse Rock on the day the animated educational show for children had a civics lesson. “I’m just a bill,” sang a rolled-up piece of paper on the steps of Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC. Suhail remembers the cartoon well—the American flag waving over the portico of the Capitol, the description of American government and democracy, the whole song the rolled-up piece of paper sang. And he remembers thinking to himself, “I’m going to be a part of that someday.”

  Suhail traces his inspiration for joining the Republican Party to an even more unlikely source: the University of California at Berkeley. Suhail enrolled there in 1987, when he was seventeen. “There were a bunch of policies—local and campus ones, mostly—that I found well-intentioned but ineffective,” he said. “Rent control was one; affirmative action was another. On one level, they made sense to me, but in the final analysis, I thought they did more harm than good. And in some cases, they were just downright contradictory. For example, at the same time there were these huge pro–affirmative action protests at Berkeley, there was a cap on the number of Chinese students there. No doubt blacks have experienced terrible discrimination in America, but so have Chinese Americans. It seemed illogical to aggressively recruit one group based on the idea of redressing past wrongs while limiting another that had also experienced discrimination.”

  Suhail laughed when he talked about having joined the Berkeley College Republicans, aware of how oxymoronic the phrase sounds. And indeed, it was the smallest college Republican group at any university in California. Not long after joining, he was given a leadership position. By the time he left Berkeley, Suhail had grown the Berkeley College Republicans into the largest such campus group in the state. His success on campus led to Suhail being offered a staff position in the California Republican Party, where he worked on the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988. When I asked him his core reason for being a Republican, Suhail answered simply that America should rely on the entrepreneurship and goodness of its citizens, not on the well-intentioned but ineffective policies of government agencies, to be a great society. It wasn’t just a political idea, he pointed out, but a religious one as well. Islam emphasizes humankind’s agency and virtue. We ought to have a society that frees up those qualities.

  It was one of the connections he felt with Tom Campbell. “He’s a very devout Catholic, although he never wore it on his sleeve,” Suhail told me. “He went to Mass several times a week and took part in all kinds of Bible studies. But more importantly, he was the kind of guy who wanted to live a life that lived up to the ideals of his faith. He wanted to look himself in the mirror every morning and feel like he was doing that.” Suhail had gone to Catholic school in the Bay Area, attended both Catholic Mass and jumma prayers at the mosque each week, and knew well the resonances between the traditions. Neither Campbell’s Catholic faith nor Suhail’s Muslim faith played much of a role in the campaign. Suhail couldn’t remember anyone in the California Republican Party ever asking him about Islam, much less his faith being a problem.

  Campbell won the special election big and decided to take one person from his campaign with him to DC: Suhail. When he arrived, Suhail was the only Muslim congressional staffer on the Hill. He would pray in the corners of empty rooms and offices, sometimes even in stairwells or hallways. Campbell discovered him doing so one day and told him, “You can always pray in my office.” When a second Muslim arrived on Capitol Hill—a staffer for Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., a Democrat from the South Side of Chicago—the two of them would pray together in Campbell’s office.

  Many congressional offices look like shrines to the current occupant. Signed pictures of the official with baseball players, rock stars, celebrities of all sorts are stuffed together on the walls as a way to exude an aura of importance, as if the office itself isn’t enough. Campbell had none of those. “The guy was just focused on his job,” Suhail said. “It made him very hard to buy gifts for.”

  When Mother Teresa came to DC, Suhail felt like he had his chance: “She embodied Campbell’s vision of selfless service, rooted in the Catholic faith.” Suhail bought a picture of her, waited in line to get it signed, and offered it to Campbell. It was Suhail’s way of thanking the man who had given him his shot in national politics, and for expressing respect for what Campbell held most dear. Campbell put it up in his office. One day, Suhail came into the office and saw something taped to the picture. It was a verse from Surah Miriam, a passage from the Qur’an on the holiness of the Virgin Mary. It was Campbell’s way of thanking Suhail.

  Suhail was overjoyed at having a place besides stairwells and hallways in which to make his daily prayers, but jumma on Fridays was another m
atter altogether. It wasn’t a problem to get the time off from work—Campbell had stated that he would not hold staff meetings on Fridays at midday. But Campbell’s office was too small to host a Muslim khutba, or sermon, or anything close to a congregation. Suhail and his Muslim friend on the Hill started carpooling to a mosque in downtown DC. Soon, other Muslim federal employees heard about the Muslim caravan and asked to join in. Two people became eight, then ten, then twelve. Suhail was happy for the growing community of Muslims, but as soon as the numbers hit about twenty, they decided the caravan was becoming too cumbersome.

  Suhail suggested finding a regular place in the Capitol building itself. “I lived a block away from it at the time,” he told me. “It’s this towering, beautiful, imposing structure, made of cast iron. It’s a symbol of American democracy. It was important to me that building stood for the principles it was built on—equality and freedom. I thought, ‘What better way for the Capitol to feel alive than to have federal employees of a religious minority praying here, openly and proudly.’ ” They approached the House chaplain, who immediately suggested the House chapel for their Friday prayers. The only problem was the chapel had wooden pews bolted to the ground, meaning there wasn’t enough space for Muslims to perform their prayers. They were going to have to find someplace else.

  One of the quaint relics of American politics is that the Speaker of the House controls the rooms on the House side of the Capitol. Suhail knew it was going to be a long, hard road to convince the Speaker to assign a room for weekly Muslim prayers. Space is short in the Capitol, the request list for it is long, and there are a lot of powerful people on that list. Suhail strategized about the coalition he would build, thinking through the various heavies he would bring in to lean on the Speaker and the number of meetings it might take. He told his Muslim friends that he doubted they’d get the space weekly. The likelihood was a monthly jumma on Capitol Hill, and Suhail estimated it could take up to a year to finalize.

  Somewhat randomly, Suhail found himself standing next to the Speaker at a reception and decided, “Why not introduce the idea now?” “Mr. Speaker,” he began and, in a crowded room, to the soundtrack of clinking cocktail glasses, he described the growing number of Muslim federal employees and the ins and outs of Muslim prayer practice. The Speaker nodded and listened. “How many people are we talking, total?” he asked.

  “About thirty,” Suhail replied.

  “What kind of room setup do you need?” the Speaker asked.

  Suhail explained how Muslims pray on carpets, facing toward Mecca, and assured the Speaker that his group would take full responsibility for moving the tables and chairs around as needed, and put them back when they left. “I’d like to schedule a time to speak with you about this more fully,” he said. And then he quickly added, “I’d like to bring in some others as well.”

  The Speaker waved him off, replying that such a step wouldn’t be necessary. Suhail and his fellow Muslims would have their weekly prayer space. Moreover, the Speaker would arrange for the building staff to set up the room properly. “As long as I’m Speaker, you’ll have space for fifty every Friday afternoon,” he assured Suhail.

  Suhail remembers a journalist from Turkey visiting Washington, DC, on assignment, and coming across his group of American Muslim federal employees holding jumma prayers on Capitol Hill. “The guy couldn’t pick his jaw up off the floor,” Suhail said. “I mean, he was just stunned. At that time in Turkey, which is a majority Muslim country, you couldn’t show any sort of religiosity in public buildings, not even wear a headscarf if you were a Muslim woman who covered. They were scared of the majority religion, let alone minority communities. The fact that the United States—a country with a Christian majority—was giving a group of Muslims official space to pray in one of the symbols of its democracy was simply too much for him.” Suhail paused and then continued, “That’s America, that’s what this country is about, that’s what the world should see when they see us.”

  The journalist asked him who had made the decision to give the Muslims the space to pray. Suhail told him: the Speaker of the House, a man just after the vice president in the succession to the presidency, a Republican from Georgia who had engineered his party’s takeover of the House of Representatives after forty years of rule by Democrats, a former history professor named Newt Gingrich.

  I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois during the years Suhail Khan was looking for space to pray in the Capitol, running with a politically active and progressive crowd. The name Newt Gingrich was generally preceded by a series of expletives and followed by the time and place of the next protest. We called Gingrich’s Contract with America the “Contract on America” and made all kinds of off-color jokes when Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House because of a sexual relationship with an aide in his office. In his television appearances back in the mid-1990s, Gingrich had struck me as mean not just in policies but also in personality—always wearing a scowl, generally pointing a finger (literally and figuratively), frequently looking like he wanted to take a swing at whoever was interviewing him, and maybe some of the audience members as well. But Gingrich never struck me as religious mean. Guys like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were religious mean. They didn’t want to just punch you, they wanted to smite you. Gingrich had never been particularly connected with that crowd. His issues were fiscal—balanced budgets, lower taxes, welfare reform—and he spoke about them primarily in terms of national strength, not Christian values.

  Frankly, I’m not proud of my stridency back then. My college roommate actively avoided me, leaving our dorm room early and coming back late, because he knew I could barely take two breaths without emitting a volley of invective on the fundamental brokenness of American politics. Gingrich, more often than not, was the centerpiece of those tirades. A few years later, my views having moderated and my networks expanded, I was having dinner with a friend who worked at the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank in Washington, DC) who casually mentioned that Gingrich was based there. I’d forgotten about him by then, figuring that he’d gathered whatever scraps of dignity he could salvage after his much-publicized affair and resignation and retreated back to Georgia to teach history at some college way out yonder. “Oh, no, he’s still around,” my friend said, a wry smile playing on his face. Apparently, Gingrich had gone through something of a transformation, one centered on religion. He’d recently married Callista Bistek and was showing serious interest in her Catholic faith. He was also playing a hugely influential role in conservative circles, advising Republican politicians, raising money for conservative causes, and continuing to be an indefatigable idea factory. But Gingrich, as my friend pointed out, had always seen himself as a front man, and it was unlikely that he was going to stay behind the scenes forever. “You’ll be hearing from him again” was my friend’s guess.

  For a conservative politician seeking to reintroduce himself to the broader American public, the Cordoba House controversy was like a fastball down the middle of the plate. An anti-Muslim movement had been growing across America in the years after 9/11. Anti-Muslim websites like Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs were receiving hundreds of thousands of hits a month.2 Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT! for America, whose purpose is to root out Muslim influence, boasts five hundred chapters around the country.3 Anti-Muslim authors like Robert Spencer had several books on Amazon’s Top 25 list on Islam and were regularly invited to be guests on respected talk shows. The core message of the industry of Islamophobia was simple and clear: Muslims are preparing a takeover of America because their religion requires them to. There is no such thing as a good Muslim. There is no such thing as moderate Islam. They are not like us. They are against us. We have to stop them now.

  Their talking points co-opted key Muslim concepts in an attempt to masquerade as educated. To them, dawa did not mean education about Islam; it meant domination. Sharia was not simply Muslim law, a system with strong analogues in Judaism and Catholicism; it mea
nt the public stoning of women in summer clothing—better stop it before it comes to your Oklahoma town! Taqiyya was not a minor Islamic practice allowing Muslims to dissimulate when someone seeks them harm; it was a core feature of the faith that requires Muslims to lie about their true objectives. The only Muslim groups with similar interpretations of such Islamic concepts were extremists. And so a peculiar partnership emerged: on matters of Islamic doctrine, Pamela Geller agreed with Osama bin Laden.

  The industry of Islamophobia had slogans and campaigns, speakers and authors, policy papers and websites, organizations and networks. It was a civil-society movement waiting for its moment and its champion. They had been building the wave for years, their efforts crested with the Cordoba House controversy, and Newt Gingrich was only too happy to ride it.

  Gingrich was everywhere during those weeks, providing red-meat sound bites on television, writing about the controversy for newspapers, making it part of his policy speeches at think tanks. The political webzine Talking Points Memo called Gingrich “the nation’s spokesperson for Islamophobia.”4 The issue was perfect for the former Speaker of the House—it allowed him to play populist and professor, to show off his PhD in European history and his heartland patriotism. There he was on Sean Hannity’s show saying in an August 2010 interview, “This is purely and simply an anti-American act of triumphalism on the part of a radical Islamist who is going to go around the world and say, ‘See, the Americans are so dumb that after we destroy two of their greatest buildings, they allow us to build a mosque near there, and that tells how weak and how ignorant Americans [are].” On Fox & Friends that same month, he compared Cordoba House’s proximity to Ground Zero to Nazis putting up a sign next to a Holocaust memorial. In the Washington Post, Gingrich offered a history lesson: “Cordoba House is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain—the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.” Each of these lines was quoted hundreds if not thousands of times on websites, in speeches, at rallies. Gingrich was both supplying ammunition for the movement against Muslims in America and leading the charge. After a decade in the political wilderness, Newt Gingrich was out front again.