Cordoba House

In early December 2009, the New York Times ran an article on a new project in lower Manhattan called Cordoba House. The plan was ambitious, including a 500-seat performing arts center, a gym, a restaurant, a library, a culinary school, a swimming pool, and a prayer space. Two things made the development especially noteworthy: it was located a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, and it was being built by American Muslims.

I knew the projects co-founders, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan, a dynamic husband-and-wife team. As so called ‘moderate Muslims’ (sometimes the label was meant as a compliment, sometimes as an insult), we had met several times on the interfaith speaking circuit and developed a friendship. Our primary topic of conversation was the development of an American Muslim identity. While this was something each of us had cared about for many years, the subject was made all the more urgent by the horrors of 9/11. The attacks had created an association in the public imagination between Islam and terrorism, putting enormous pressure on American Muslims to prove their loyalty to the country while remaining true to their faith.

As the war on terror gained steam and a simplistic Islam vs the West dichotomy began to dominate policy circles and public discourse, people like us were doing our best to highlight the shared values between the two civilizations. We believed the principle link between America and Islam was the ethic of pluralism.

While most contemporary Muslim majority nations had a dismal track record regarding pluralism in comparison to their Western counterparts, many medieval Muslim societies were relatively impressive on this score. Of these, the civilization of Al-Andalus was especially inspiring. The Catholic nun Hroswitha described its capital city, Cordoba, as “The brilliant ornament of the world (that) shone in the west, a noble city ... wealthy and famous ... and resplendent in all things, and especially for its seven streams of wisdom and as much for its constant victories.” The library of the caliph had four hundred thousand volumes, a thousand times more than the largest library in the Christian-dominated parts of Europe. The catalogue of the library alone ran to forty-four volumes. Jews, hounded and hated elsewhere in Europe, thrived here. This was the milieu that gave rise to the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, where Hebrew poetry was rediscovered and reinvented, where a Jew rose to be the caliph’s foreign minister. While much of Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages, Muslim scholars were producing commentaries on Aristotle, texts that played a key role in sparking the Renaissance in Europe.

In our minds, the connections between medieval Andalusia and contemporary America were everywhere. There were beautiful symbolic resonances; synagogues on New York City’s Upper West Side contained architectural allusions to the mosques built in 11th century Cordoba. And there were deep substantive similarities. Andalusia had experimented with a partial pluralism, extended limited rights to diverse communities, and allowed some degree of civic and political participation. The American project was about the adoption and advancement of this ethic.

Imam Feisal and Daisy named their project Cordoba House to highlight the bridge of pluralism that connected Islam and America. They liked to speak about how Catholicism and Judaism had become American religions by bursting out of their bubbles, learning from and working with other communities, and building institutions that served the common good of their adopted homeland instead of just the concerns of their own parochial groups. Muslims, they insisted, ought to do the same. We could maintain our distinctive identities while contributing to the civic life of our nation. In fact, becoming a valued part of a diverse nation was a deeply Islamic thing to do.

Perhaps the most high profile opponent of Cordoba House was the former speaker of the House of Representatives and soon-to-be presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich. He characterized the attempts to establish Cordoba House as “purely and simply an anti-American act of triumphalism on the part of a radical Islamist ...” and compared it to placing a ‘Nazi’ sign next to the Holocaust Museum. For Gingrich ‘Cordoba’ did not refer to a Muslim civilization that was on the vanguard of pluralism for its time but, “the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.” He further claimed, “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” Such language was quickly turned into talking points which were repeated in thousands of speeches, blogs and tweets.

Gingrich raised particular concerns about what he called a ‘stealth jihad’: “Stealth jihadists use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadists use violence,” he stated in a widely-publicized speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010. “But in fact they’re both engaged in jihad,” he continued, “and they’re both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Shariah.” (NYT 12/21/11).

Shariah literally means “path to the watering place”, but is more colloquially understood as Islamic law. While this conjures up images of Taliban brutality, much of what is covered in Shariah are straightforward matters regarding prayer and communal life. Furthermore, like the law of any religious tradition or nation, it is by no means fixed but requires interpretation and adaptation for various times and places. Gingrich said little about such nuances, content instead for his statements to provide an aerial attack for what was already an aggressive anti-Shariah ground game. Even before the Cordoba House controversy, a small group of anti-Muslim activists were encouraging state legislatures to pass anti-Shariah legislation, measures that would proactively forbid American judges from consulting Shariah law.

Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan official, was one of the leaders in the anti-Sharia movement. In 2010 Gaffney’s think tank, the Center for Security Policy, produced a report entitled Sharia: The Threat to America which stated: “Sharia is a doctrine that imposes the rule of Allah over all aspects of society. More precisely, contrary to the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and in a way absolutely incompatible with it, Sharia asserts that God did not create freewill but tied it to the will of Allah – the condition of human beings is submission to Allah and not freedom.”

The statement contains or suggests many of the most common tropes of the anti-Muslim movement: Islam is best understood not as a religion but as a political system bent on domination. While in Judeo-Christian America we cherish freedom, Islam requires submission. No wonder their guys committed 9/11. Could your Muslim neighbors be the next jihadist? Better stop them now.