Category Archives: Islam in America

30 Mosques in 30 States

Islam in America, Travel


The imam takes a gander at some notes before getting ready for the next round of prayers

There is an interesting blog called 30 Mosques, 30 States, where Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq are posting each day during Ramadan about their visits to different mosques, a different one each day of the month of Ramadan. They started out at the mosque closest to Ground Zero:

Day 1 – New York, Ground Zero Mosque
by Aman Ali, August 12, 2010

Dude, it’s just a mosque.

Bassam and I walked into Park 51, the site of the so called “Ground Zero Mosque,” expecting to feel transformed, knowing the fact that I was praying inside the place that’s practically been mentioned in the news every 20 minutes.

But all it felt like – was praying inside a mosque.

Bassam and I spent days debating whether or not we should visit Park 51, because we didn’t want to get sucked into the bickering over the building that’s dominated the news cycle for weeks.

But at about 8 p.m. tonight, we said to each other “Whatever, let’s go for it.” Since we broke our fast at the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, we decided to pray Taraweeh, the Ramadan night prayer, at Park 51.

We hopped in our car and drove about 100 blocks to the place and found a security guard standing outside the building. In light of all the protests and animosity towards the mosque, I guess you can never be too careful. Continue reading 30 Mosques in 30 States →

The Obama Blame Game

Bible and Holy Land, Ethics, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue


On top of inheriting two wars and the worst economic recession in the United States since the Great Depression, President Obama has been gifted something else: a chorus of sore losers fueled by rightwing media mouths. The Birthers carry on in the good ole boy tradition of the John Birchers, trying to find any way to get a Black man out of the White House. The Tea Party is hardly a group of patriots holding their fire until they see the whites (their eyes are set on the blacks to be sure), since their own bloodshot eyes are green with envy. And then there is the great Alaskan wasteland, Sarah Palin, the nit-twitter, Grizzly grinning and over bearing it, who for a mere 100 grand will demonstrate how utterly vapid she is:

• 9/11 mosque=act of fitna, “equivalent to bldg Serbian Orthodox church@Srebrenica killing fields where Muslims were slaughtered” – Raza&Fatah 3:34 PM Aug 14th via Twitter for BlackBerry®

• Mr. President, why are they so set on marking an area w/ mosque steps from what you described, in agreement with many, as “hallowed ground”? 3:06 PM Aug 14th via web Continue reading The Obama Blame Game →

Milking the mosque cow

Bible and Holy Land, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media


Residents in Temecula, Calif., protested against a mosque’s proposed worship center; photo by Mike Blake for Reuters

As I child I have vivid memories of attending an avowedly fundamentalist revival meeting on the then hot Cold War theme of “The Impending Holocaust,” the theme being that the Russian communists were poised to invade America, knock down all our electricity networks and raze every church to the ground (imagine what they would do to God-fearing virgins). It was those commie atheists who could not stand seeing any house of worship. Now it is clear that the fearmongers among us have switched Satanic enemies. Islam has replaced Communism as the Devil’s international workshop (of course Islam long held that status before any German freethinker or British social theorist thought up the idea of communism). A church on every corner, a synagogue here and there and even an occasional Masonic temple, but “our” God preserve us from any mosques.

The current torrent of media hype about building a “mosque” near Ground Zero is part of a deeper Islamophobic fervor in direct lineage with the same unfriendly folks who have self-righteously hated Injuns, Negroes and Jews and found verses in the King James Version of the Bible to back up their hatred. Today’s New York Times carries a story by Laurie Goodstein about efforts across the country to stop construction of Islamic places of worship. If this is yet another tempest brewed in Tea Party forums, it looks more like a lynch mob than a ladies aid society brunch. Continue reading Milking the mosque cow →

Mere drops in an ocean of right-wing vitriol

Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media

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. Continue reading Mere drops in an ocean of right-wing vitriol →

Glenn Beck is not amused

Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media


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: Continue reading Glenn Beck is not amused →

Satire is Religion

Danish Cartoon Controversy, Ethics, Islam in America, Lithographs, Muhammad


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. Continue reading Satire is Religion →

Anwar Al-Awlaki: The Jim Jones of Islam

Islam in America, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

by Kamran Pasha, The Huffington Post, May 23, 2010

As a Muslim and an American, let me say this loudly and clearly — Anwar al-Awlaki is a servant of evil and a traitor both to Islam and to America. He is intent on misleading the world by spreading the lie that Islam permits the killing of civilians. It does not.

Prophet Muhammad forbade the killing of non-combatants and reacted with horror when he heard of civilian deaths on the battlefield. In order to expound his own political agenda, Al-Awlaki is defaming the Prophet and the global Muslim community, which rejects terrorism. And in the process, he is revealing himself to be a modern Jim Jones — a narcissist creating a death cult.

In 1978, Jim Jones led 900 of his devoted followers to mass suicide by forcing them to drink cyanide mixed in a fruit beverage. The term “drinking the Kool-Aid” has since become synonymous with people who blindly follow their leaders to their doom. And it is clear that al-Awlaki’s followers are very much drinking his brand of Kool-Aid. Indeed, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was apparently a follower of al-Awlaki before he turned on his fellow soldiers in an orgy of murder. Like Jim Jones, al-Awlaki has remarkable charisma and uses it to lead his followers down a very dark path.

I say all of this with great grief. Al-Awlaki was once a highly regarded Muslim scholar who taught a message of peace and brotherhood. But his story is like that of the archetypal villain of the movie Star Wars — Anakin Skywalker, a defender of justice, who devolves into Darth Vader, a monster who cares only for his own twisted quest for power. Continue reading Anwar Al-Awlaki: The Jim Jones of Islam →