This is America! – An Interview with Aziz Poonawalla on the Cordoba House Project

If you’ve never read anything written by Aziz Poonawalla, you should take a moment to correct that mistake. Poonawalla has been around for a long time in blogging years, starting his writing career in March of 2002 at Unmedia, later renamed City of Brass. In August 2002, APoonawalla also started Dean Nation, later renamed Nation-Building, with such well-known liberal names as Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias as, “the very first weblog devoted to a presidential candidate”.

Nowadays, Poonawalla is one of the foremost writers on Islam and the experience of Muslim Americans at City of Brass, now hosted at beliefnet, and group blog Talk Islam.

Poonawalla was kind enough to take out of his very busy schedule to trade a few emails with me about the ongoing Cordoba House Project controversy. If I may say, I think the interview is well worth your while and I encourage you to read it in full below the fold.

Scott: So the plans to build a Muslim facility (which many are merely calling a mosque) near the site of Ground Zero have become a very hot topic of late. It seems really to have brought out some sharp divisions in American worldviews.

As a Muslim American what has been your general take on the debate to date?

Aziz: I think that this really does boil down to an issue not just of religious freedom but also a means of putting into practice the very American values which Al Qaeda seeks to deny. A mosque in NYC, near to the site of 9-11, is not a “monument to the attackers” (a pernicious claim, which puts collective responsibility for the terrorist attacks on all Muslim Americans) but actually a repudiation of the Al Qaeda ideology. What they want is to make Muslim Americans reject American identity and follow their call to jihad – explicitly, as Anwar al Awlaki has repeatedly stated, and even succeeded (ref the cases of Fort Hood and Times Square). An American mosque, built for American Muslims, is literally the antithesis of what the enemy most desires.

The bigotry unleashed by this whole affair plays perfectly into our enemies’ hands.

I’ve written more about this in detail in my post, Why all Americans have a stake in Cordoba House.

Scott: Is it particularly disheartening for you to see recent polling that shows a majority of New Yorkers and Americans opposed to the idea of the Cordoba House? How do you think proponents of the project and the idea of not sinking into a sort of nativism are best advised to counter that sentiment and engage its proponents given how much of this issues is wrapped up in appeals to emotion?

Aziz: I am certainly dismayed to an extent, because I do tend towards an idealistic notion of the public mind – as intellectuals we sometimes make the mistake of assuming that everyone is as plugged into the debate as we are and that people will come to the same conclusions as we do, given the same data. In practice, of course, the public often doesn’t have the same data, and even when they do, reason is hardly an objective process [1].

The best strategy is the one that they are following: appeal to American values, engage in consistent and public outreach (such as the exclusive interview that Sharif el Gamal did with me at City of Brass, answering some rather pointed questions of mine), and build interfaith support among community and religious leaders. The endorsement of the project by President Obama – at considerable political risk to himself – is the kind of validation that will I think in the long run help cool these passions. Of course, the fact that the project still hasn’t even raised any money, let alone broken any ground, also helps – by the time anything even begins to take shape at the site the national debate will have cooled. There isn’t going to be anything at the site other than a makeshift prayer space for a long time.

[1] in other words, the “super-rational” fallacy.

Scott: The first two paragraphs of the initial post to which you referred were pretty heart breaking to read. I wonder if you could try to convey just how different the lived experiences of many Anerican Muslims are in a post 9-11 America/world and how the Cordoba House controversy fits into or speaks to the larger context of those changes.

Aziz: Generally, American Muslims did not really see themselves as a separate entity within the political context. There wasn’t for example any real “Muslim political lobby” or coordinated Muslim identity beyond the various acronym organizations like CAIR and ISNA, etc. We really didn’t have any clue that we would be forcibly differentiated from everyone else, by the actions of wackos abroad. I’ve often argued that the concept of “Ummah” has very little tangible meaning, but on 9-11 for one day it was a real concept, and in the most negative sense. That conflation of our community with these extreme elements persists and is one of the animating forces in the Park51 debate.

The GOP animus towards Muslims predates Park51, note. I’ve been chronicling the “War on Muslims” at my blogs for years now. However in some ways the Park51 project has brought us to an inflection point, as a catalyst for a much-overdue debate about Muslim integration. Frankly, we Muslim Americans dont get any credit for our level of integration, our cooperation with the authorities, and our self-vigilance against extremism. The isolated cases (Fort Hood and Times Square in particular) where Muslim Americans have succumbed to radical ideology are all cases where the perpetrator was isolated from his local Muslim community, and preyed upon (by Anwar al Awlaki). The solution to preventing future cases like these is to increase Muslim American civic integration, and the danger of the Park51 controversy is that ordinary Muslim Americans will see this backlash and conclude that the efforts of the past decade were largely wasted. The worst thing that could happen would be the alienation of Muslim communities from the civic sphere. But if we cant build mosques in normal places like Sheboygan or Murfreesboro, then how will that integration be sustained?

My friend Josh Trevino – who is no friend to the Park51 project nor any kind of apologist for Islam – made a great point on Twitter recently (http://twitter.com/jstrevino/status/21254370276, http://twitter.com/jstrevino/status/21254408477, http://twitter.com/jstrevino/status/21254486705):

Two major sensitivities missing in the @Park51 debate: one on each side. First, proponents of @Park51, including @Park51 itself, need to acknowledge that there are legitimate and moral grounds for opposing it. Second, opponents of @Park51 need to keep firmly in mind the effect this fracas has on American Muslims not affiliated with @Park51.

(emphasis mine). The danger here is that the controversy could set Muslim Americans on a trajectory very different from the one they were on prior to 9-11 and have tried valiantly to maintain post-9-11. But the flip side is that if we as a nation respond the right way, we can as a nation derive a great victory here, one which will frustrate the extremists’ attempts at recruitment based on alienation.

The whole issue is an emotional one. But that’s why I am optimistic that the better angels of our nature will prevail. This is America!

Scott: We’ve mentioned how this is a very emotional issue. But to what degree do you think it is also a racial issue? And do you think many American Muslims will perceive it as a racial issue?

Aziz: I think that emotion doesn’t arise in a vacuum – there has to be some stimulus, and in this case the stimulus does have a racial element. We have to be careful when using the word “racial” of course because a. Islam is a religion, not a race, and b. Muslims in the US are racially diverse. However, the vast majority of Muslims in the US are of non-Caucasian stock, primarily African American or South Asian origin, and the stereotype of Arabs in the public mind tends towards a darker-skinned image than the actual lighter shade. If you look at race as “Not X” instead of “X” then I think it’s a valid application to the question of Islam.

Now, I don’t think that 30% of my fellow Americans are racists, nor do I think that they are bigots (not even the 30% who still think Obama was born in Kenya/is a cryptomuslim). You can be a decent person and still hold some racist or bigoted views. In fact that percentage of people who carry such baggage probably approaches 100%, myself included.

So its not a blanket condemnation of “Racist! Bigot!” we are making here. However, when you combine the emotional impact of 9-11, the undercurrent of prejudice against Islam borne of fear of the unknown/centuries of Orientalism marking it as the quintessential Other, and then layer onto that the background signal of racial intolerance that is America’s original sin and persists to this day, then you are basically confronted with a pretty skewed playing field, against which the idealized rhetoric of universal rights and freedoms has a disadvantage. It’s to the credit of our national character however that we are actually having a debate. That suggests to me that these concepts can survive exposure to these obstacles. Were this another country, such as one Newt Gingrich feels should be the benchmark for our behavior, there would be no debate at all.

To actually answer your question, however, American Muslims are mostly an optimistic bunch. We can concede there are racial issues at work against us here, but that’s part of the mix I described above. We have to be pragmatic and remember that every group before us, the Jews, the Catholics, etc had to face pretty much the same gauntlet prior to acceptance. I think the problem is less that American Muslims will perceive racism as they will perceive unequal treatment and withdraw from civic engagement. The question isn’t why we are facing this hostility but rather whether that hostility makes our attempts at assimilation moot. That’s a debate we don’t want to be having, but is being forced upon us. I hope that as a community of communities, Muslim Americans don’t become disheartened and lose that essential optimism that really makes us American. Unfortunately, with precisely half of the American political landscape opposed to us, it’s going to be a tough fight ahead to stay optimistic. I think my role has to be in fighting that fight.

Scott: And finally, there has recently been some speculation that organizers of the Cordoba House may back off. The organizers have denied those claims, but the possibility raises an interesting question. Namely, what do you think is at stake with regards to this issue? Why is it important, if indeed you think it is important, that the community center be built? And what would be the implications of opponents successfully shutting the project down?

Aziz: I think that the Muslim American community didn’t ask to be included in Park51′s project, but we have been dragged into it forcibly. In some ways it would be a relief if the issue went away. However, if they do decide to move, then I think that the message that will be sent is that bigotry and fear of Muslims is not just permitted, it is effective. This may result in short term relief for Muslim Americans, but surely longer term pain. To be honest I don’t know what I prefer in that regard.

It should be noted that if they did decide to move, then Republicans would claim victory, but would also be denied the issue’s urgency and impact in November. I suspect that a great many strategists are secretly ecstatic that Park51 is sticking to its guns. That’s another reason I personally am now ambivalent about the outcome. The main reason, however, is that I am not exactly pleased with Park51′s mishandling of the entire affair. Their PR has been incompetent (especially on Twitter) and the entire controversy might well have been avoided if they had shown a little restraint instead of trumpeting the proximity to Ground Zero at the outset. Also, the total absence of Feisal Rauf has a “Where’s Waldo” quality that is maddening in itself. I’m quite capable of defending Rauf against some of the accusations against him, but am not inclined to carry his water for him while he gallivants about the globe.

If the project is going to fail, maybe it is better it fail now than later. Certainly the Muslim American community will take a hit either way. If I sound cynical it’s only because I think that there’s a failure of leadership here and that has done as much damage to Muslim American aspirations as the most committed Islamophobes profiting from exploiting 9-11 passions.

Still, I subscribe to the view that the center’s existence would be a powerful symbol and repudiation of the ideology of Al Qaeda. So despite my misgivings about the cost to the Muslim American community, on a broader scale, I think it is good for America that the project succeed. This is why I still count myself a supporter of Park51.

Tagged as: American Muslims, Aziz Poonawalla, Cordoba House Project