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Islam has long history downtown: Why the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ belongs in lower Manhattan

By Edward E. Curtis, The New York Daily News, Friday, July 23, 2010

Rick Lazio, the gubernatorial candidate from Suffolk County, doesn’t like it. Sarah Palin, though not exactly a New Yorker, has resoundingly “refudiated” it. More importantly, plenty of ordinary citizens vocally oppose the establishment of a Muslim community center and mosque near the World Trade Center site.

But no matter how offensive their presence may be to some people, Muslims have always been a part of lower Manhattan’s past. In fact, Islam in New York began near Ground Zero. From an historical perspective, there could hardly be a better place for a mosque.

One of the first Arab-American enclaves in New York City was located on Washington St. in lower Manhattan - the very area in which the World Trade Center was later built. Founded by Arabic-speaking Christians and Muslims from Ottoman Syria in the 1880s, it was called Little Syria.

The heart of Little Syria was full of outdoor cafes where non-Arab visitors sometimes gawked at men smoking hookahs and trading gossip about the Ottoman Empire. In a 1903 article, the New York Times called the neighborhood “quaint,” noting the “uniform politeness” of its inhabitants.

Lower Manhattan is also the final resting place of Muslims and other Africans, often slaves, who were forcibly resettled in New York when it was still New Amsterdam. The African Burial Ground, discovered in 1991, is six blocks away from the proposed Muslim community center. Scholars continue to debate the religious identity of the hundreds buried there, but the fact that some of the dead wore shrouds and were interred with strings of blue beads, frequently used as Islamic talismans, suggests Muslim were among the enslaved people who helped build Manhattan into a bustling city. (more…)

Attacking Muslims Is In Vogue Again Among Conservatives

by Jason Linkins, Huffington Post, July 21, 2010

Recently in the land of the demented, it’s become ultra-voguish to hate Americans who are practitioners of Islam. Loud, angry, scare-bears have made their position very clear. Muslims aren’t allowed to have mosques in lower Manhattan or Staten Island or Tennessee or Southern California. In Jacksonville, Florida, anti-Muslim extremists can mount acts of terrorism without being concerned that the national media will get too heavily involved in covering the story. And among Alaskan celebrities of certain renown, the hatred of Muslims is threatening to rip the very fabric of the English language.

And now, Glenn Beck has decided that he cannot tolerate the thought of American Muslims riding around on rollercoasters for fun! This is what Beck bleated out to the world, via email: (more…)

I opened my email this morning and back-to-back there was instant conflict: a posting about a new Indian Deoband fatwa ruling that veiled Muslim women should not ride bicycles and another about a female French lawyer who ripped the face covering off a young Muslim girl in a shopping mall near Nantes, the latter a pre-emptive strike for the pending anti-niqab law in the French parliament. Both rulings strike me as silly, both as overtly political. So now instead of the standard “Death to America” vs. “Muhammad is a child molester” chant wars we have entered the era of dueling over social mores through Fatwa Wars. Although not as erotic as the recent tit-illating fatwa controversy, also involving women’s bodies, the battle lines are still drawn over the same resource: what males do to control women’s bodies and minds.

Let’s start with the Deoband bicycle banning. The commentary by Nigar Ataulla, an Indian Muslim who happens to be female as well as a journalist who enjoys bike riding, called “Cycle Fatwa  Rides into My Re-Cycle Bin” reads:
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by Gabriel Marranci, Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist, June 21

Recently two events made me question how the UK, and Europe in general, understand the concept of ‘freedom of speech’ – the invitation to attend the annual Buckingham Palace garden party extended to white supremacist BNP’s Nick Griffin and the Home Secretary’s decision to ban the popular Muslim tele-preacher Dr Zakir Naik from entering the UK.

There is no one single definition of ‘freedom of speech’ and an attempt to formulate one can only result in empty theorizing and utopian visions. Freedom of speech is linked to local, regional and international contexts, social realities, cultural differences and an understanding of what freedom means. What for one person is ‘freedom of speech’, for another is just ‘freedom of insult’ or ‘unacceptable behavior’.

States, as well as communities, limit individual rights of expression not because of the pleasure of doing so, but for fear of seeing their status quo, and hence power, challenged or questioned. However, the limitation of individuals’ right to express their thoughts and ideas is often justified by the argument that those ideas are ‘repulsive’ or ‘objectionable’ to the system of values held by a supposed majority (i.e. power holders). Said that, many of the ideas, values and concepts that are both well accepted and well liked today have been considered ‘objectionable’ or ‘repulsive’ at one time or another. (more…)

by Khalil El-Anani, Al-Ahram, 17-23 June, 2010, Issue 1003

The current Western obsession with the niqab, or full- face veil, often seems part of a subconscious plot to restrict anything Arab and Islamic, symbolic as that may be. The niqab is not really Islamic garb, this I am sure something that Western politicians know. And yet it is becoming a target of hate because it is seen as a cultural symbol that is extraneous, and indeed dangerous, to European societies.

Sometimes I wonder, what if it were Indian women, or Sikhs and Buddhists for that matter, who wore the niqab ? Would European parliaments still spend entire sessions discussing the niqab ?

Theological debate on niqab aside, Western outrage against the niqab seems to be a by-product of Islamophobia, a phenomenon that is raging like wildfire across Europe, asserting itself sometimes as mosque- phobia and at other times as minaret-phobia. Should this trend continue, the day may come when European parliaments ban men from wearing their beards long and shaving their moustaches. I wonder what kind of phobia we’ll name that one! (more…)

Raheel Raza at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Bethlehem

by Huma Dar, Dept. of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley

On Thursday, June 10, 2010, Jerome Taylor, the Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Independent posted an article headlined, “First Woman to Lead Friday Prayers in UK.” Two-thirds of the way down this article, we find that:

“Ms Raza’s appearance in Oxford is a repeat of a similar prayer session in 2008 which was led by Amina Wadud, an American-born convert and Muslim feminist. But this is the first time a Muslim-born woman will lead a mixed prayer service in Britain.”

Taylor’s differentiation between “American-born convert” and “Muslim-born woman” and labeling of the latter as the “first woman” in the headline create a false hierarchy and subtly delegitimize Dr. Wadud, a leading Muslim scholar and author of Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, a path-breaking text in the study of gender and Islam. Taylor’s late admission of “repeat” after the (mis)leading announcement of “First” in the headline does not quite cover up for the critical sins of omission and commission, especially as Raheel Raza, the Pakistani-Canadian woman leading the prayer at Oxford, is neither an ‘Alima or a scholar of Islam nor is she known for her advocacy of Muslims at large.

In fact Raza is a rather polarizing figure amongst Muslims in North America and her record does not indicate much learning in the letter or spirit of Islam, as in speaking truth to power and standing with the oppressed. (more…)

Birth and Origin of the Pope by Lucas Cranach, illustration for Martin Luther’s “Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil,” 1545

Satire is Religion

By Austin Dacey, Religion Dispatches, May 12

Scatological humor. Crude drawings mocking revered religious figures. I am speaking, of course, of Lucas Cranach’s Birth and Origin of the Pope [image above], one in a series of woodcuts commissioned by Martin Luther in the 1540s under the title “The True Depiction of the Papacy.” In it, an enormous grinning she-devil squats in the foreground, excreting the Pope along with a heap of bishops while in the background another infant pontiff suckles at the teat of a serpent-haired wet nurse.

Forget the South Park dust up; forget Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. If you want to see truly shocking anti-religious cartoons, you have to go back to the sixteenth century. Near the end of Luther’s life, his propaganda campaign against Rome grew increasingly vitriolic and his language grotesquely pungent. He took to calling his ecclesiastical enemies ‘asses,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘blockheads,’ ‘basilisks,’ and ‘pupils of Satan,’ and the Pope himself ‘Her Sodomitical Hellishness’ and ‘fart-ass’ (no, it doesn’t sound much more dignified in German—fartz-Esel). Eric Cartman would be in awe. (more…)

Prophet Muhammad with the Angel Gabriel. Miniature from the Ottoman Empire, c. 1595 CE (Topkapi Museum, Istanbul)

Why Islam does (not) ban images of the Prophet

By Omid Safi, Newsweek, May 2, 2010

When a pair of adolescent and anonymous Muslim bloggers (”Muslim Revolution”) threatened the producers of South Park for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit in an April 2010 episode, pundits responded by saying that the “Muslim Revolution” folks were extremist idiots (true) and that they were offended because Islam bans the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad (not true).

When the Danish cartoon controversies broke out in 2005, many pundits–and some Muslims–stated that Muslims were offended because Muslims have never physically depicted the Prophet.

That is actually not the case, and marks yet another example of what is at worst an acute sense of religious amnesia, and at best a distortion of the actual history of Islamic practices: Over the last thousand years, Muslims in India, Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia and Turkey did have a rich courtly tradition of depicting the various prophets, including Prophet Muhammad, in miniatures. (more…)

Who’s Afraid of the Free Speech Fundamentalists?: Reflections on the South Park Cartoon Controversy

by Jeremy F. Walton, The Revealer, April 28, 2010

Recent days have, alas, been marked by a sense of déjà vu all over again for scholars of contemporary Islam. On April 14th, the American cable network Comedy Central aired the first half of a double episode of the immensely-popular cartoon sitcom “South Park.” The episode specifically parodied Islamic prohibitions on the pictorial representation of the Prophet Muhammad by portraying him in concealment, first within a U-Haul truck and then inside an ursine mascot costume. On the day prior to the episode’s airing, the American website revolutionmuslim.com posted the following comments by one Abu Talhah al-Amrikee:

We have to warn Matt and Trey [Matt Stone and Trey Parker, co-creators of South Park] that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.

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One of the major problems with the blogosphere in which I dip is the ease with which the most ludicrous and obnoxious statements can spread. Witness Mark Williams, the blogging head of the so-called Tea Party, who ranted against a proposed new mosque in lower Manhattan by calling Allah as worshipped by Muslims a “monkey god.” There are many who have denigrated Islam, most often claiming that Allah started out as a moon god in Mecca. But Mr. Williams probably confused Islam with Hinduism, only to compound his ignorance by issuing an apology to Hindus for accidentally offending Hanuman, who is indeed a monkey god. Here is the “apology”: (more…)