Mosque Ado About Nothing

It is no coincidence that I happened to begin writing this blog at the height of the controversy surrounding what I regard to be one of the most ridiculous "news" stories in years. I speak of course of the controversy surrounding the dreaded "Ground Zero mosque" which is, in fact, not a mosque, and not at Ground Zero (I guess "the Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan" didn't have the same ring to it...). The controversy surrounding the proposed community center is one of the latest stories in a growing trend towards intolerance and misinformation in this country that has caused me great concern and heartache. As I mentioned in my first posting, I have always loved politics. More or less, I have also always had a great trust in the ultimate wisdom of the American people, even if I at times disagreed with their selection of leaders or opinions in polls. Recent developments however, including but not limited to the controversy surrounding the Community Center, a no-name pastor from Florida becoming national news for threatening to burn the Quran, and polls showing a substantial portion of the American population either not knowing President Obama's religious affiliation or thinking that he is a Muslim, have threatened to make me far more jaded about politics and doubtful of the American people's discernment (the last one in particular is astounding- did we not have a long, ridiculously drawn out national dialogue during the election over Obama's radical, fire-and-brimstone CHRISTIAN pastor?).

As detestable as all of these things are to me, I hesitate to categorize all of the above grievances under the label "Islamophobia" as so many of my concerned fellow Americans have. Okay, Pastor Jones in Florida certainly is deserving of the term (perhaps just generally ignorant and xenophobic would be better descriptions though), but as disappointed as I am in the majority of the American people, both for their ambivalence about Obama's religion and their opposition to the Mosque, I refuse to believe that the majority of my countrymen are 'Islamophobic.' Moreover, there are certain elements of Islam as it is practiced today not only by the radicals but by a substantial portion of its adherents that it is entirely rational to be weary of as a member of civilized, secular, Western society. The suffix 'phobic' suggests that a fear of something is irrational (which, in the case of Jones and others like him, it is), but I think it is perfectly rational for someone to be concerned about, among other things, the veiling of women, intolerance of homosexuals (to be fair, Islam shares that one with Christianity, though not in the same degree), and a consistently violent response to anything perceived as blasphemous to their religion or its founder. Many of the same critics of Americans who oppose the proposed 'Cordoba House', today cited the French legislature's decision to ban women from wearing the full Burqa (veil covering a woman's entire face but her eyes) in public as another example in a long line of Western Islamophobia:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100915/ap_on_re_eu/eu_france_forbidding_the_veil

While I do regard opposition to the community center as silly and ridiculously hypersensitive, I believe that the French legislature's decision to ban the burqa for reasons both legal and cultural was a fair one. It is, in fact, consistent with reforms instituted nearly a century ago in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal (lauded by Turks everywhere as 'Atatürk' meaning "Father of the Turks"). In the wake of the dissolution of the old Ottoman Empire (the power center of the Islamic world at that time) at the end of the First World War, "Atatürk" fashioned a modern, Westernized, secular democratic republic out of the rubble of the old Empire. Among his reforms were the enfranchisement of women, the abolition of Islam as the official "state religion", the separation of church and state, complete freedom of religion, and, yes, banning the wearing of the burqa. Not only does Atatürk's example prove wrong the claim of some on the right that Islam is incapable of modernization and an Enlightenment comparable to that experienced by Christendom in the 18th Century and Shinto Japan following World War II, but it also proves wrong the gross exaggerations of the West's intolerance by Islamic apologists.


It seems that between the right-wing's race to condemn Islam (or, as Sarah Palin would say, "refudiate" it), and the left-wing's race to defend it, reason and clear-thinking is all but lost. Yes, Islam in its purest form has some aspects intrinsic to it which are contradictory to modernity and civilization- but so do all religions when they attempt to go beyond the realm of personal decisions by individual adherents into forcing their precepts on the population at large. Therein lies the problem with contemporary Islam- the insistence by many of its adherents, perhaps even the majority, that it be not just a religious ideology but a political one; as well as the tendency for the hardliners to threaten violence whenever they perceive blasphemy, and the majority of Muslims to either consent or stay silent about it. There can be some parallels drawn between Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists, but the simple fact is that if a whack-job Imam publicly planned to burn the Bible, a great many Christians would be terribly upset and offended, but there would likely be very few, if any, threats of violence. This is a sad reflection on mainstream Islam as it exists today, but I have great hope for its future. I go to school here at the University of Texas with a great many Muslims every bit as modern and American as I am. They value their religion in their personal lives, but do not seek to implement its teachings at the political level. When we as a country protest the building of a Community Center by one of their more moderate leaders (Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is no Atatürk, but he is a step in the right direction) because it is the general vicinity of the site of an atrocity perpetrated by someone whose ideology has no resemblance to his or theirs, we draw an unnecessary line in the sand that threatens to lose a great many young, bright, patriotic Muslims. In this sense, perhaps the controversy surrounding the proposed Cordoba Center is in fact not "Mosque Ado About Nothing", but "Mosque Ado About Something", for the symbolic importance it has attained in the ongoing modernization of mainstream Islam.