Saturday, September 4, 2010
On Special Protections for the Zoning of Religious Institutions
This NYT article explains the recent law protecting the right of placement for religious institutions, as well as some recent controversies about mosque location.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Update: Intimidation at NY Mosque
See the story about teenagers firing a gun, sideswiping a car, and engaging in verbal abuse in western NY state.
Update: Attempted Arson and Gunfire at Tennessee Mosque
The New York Times reports that mosques in the vicinity of Nashville and Murfreesboro are hiring security teams following the burning of construction equipment and the sound of gunfire near the embattled site of the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
On the Individual: Park51 and Religious Identity
As the controversy over the planned Park51 community center and mosque in lower Manhattan approaches its fifth month, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the 'mosque' debate has dominated the mainstream United States media. As last week's top story, it accounted for 15% of total news coverage and roughly one-quarter of coverage on cable and radio. A number of related events--from opposed protests in lower Manhattan to the increase in the number of polled US Americans identifying Barack Obama as a Muslim, to the hate-crimes arrest of Michael Enright following the stabbing of a Bangladeshi-American NYC taxi driver--have become fodder for the wide range of views appearing online, on cable, and in print relating to questions of religious identity, the politics of mourning, and the status of US democracy.
In a key article critiquing the status of the public debate thus far, Amitava Kumar argues, "What has really been happening in this debate is the annihilation of the individual. There is no longer a conversation about a particular person; we can talk only about a faith. But is that faith one that is practiced by real people? No, because instead of people, we are always talking only of politics and symbols." Although I am less invested than Kumar in the individual, he is right to point out the importance of grounding the debate in the context of how religion is spatialized through the embodied practices of Muslims in the public culture of lower Manhattan. Artist Mira Schor, who lives just over a mile from the WTC site, writes, "my whole street is a mosque," referring to the common sight of Muslims (primarily Muslim men, she reports) unfurling prayer mats on public streets in Manhattan. Two mosques in the vicinity of 51 Park Avenue, Masjid Manhattan and Masjid al-Farah, predate the 911 attacks, and Masjid Manhattan began service in 1970, the same year that Tower #1 of the World Trade Center opened. The inability of these mosques to provide adequate prayer space for the thousands of Muslims who worship in lower Manhattan (especially following the 2008 eviction of Masjid Manhattan from a larger space) helped spur demand for Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf's prayer services that have been held at the Park51 site.
Little press coverage has focused on the Muslims who live, travel through, and/or work in the vicinity of the WTC site, but the effect of the controversy is palpable in the revised front page of the website of Masjid Manhattan, which has deemed it necessary to publicly "condemn any type of terrorist acts" and to dissociate itself from the unaffiliated Park51 project. While understandable given the real dangers of Islamophobic violence and ongoing public vilification of mosques and Islamic cultural and political organizations across the country, this response concedes the good Muslim/bad Muslim typology common to the generally tepid liberal responses to the controversy.
The good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy--amplified by the constant proclamations of the goodness of Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf--stands in tension with another grounding assumption underlying many liberal responses to the controversy: the unqualified individual right to religious freedom. Should the question of the right to build a mosque be evaluated differently in the event that the organizers hold unpopular views, say regarding Hamas or Palestine or the causes of 9/11? The conflation of Islam with violence thus also has consequences concerning the constraint on public political speech.
It has been necessary for commentators sympathetic to Park51 to place strong emphasis on constitutional rights for the individual, specifically the right to religious 'choice' and 'freedom.' However, these commentators should not uncritically assume that classical liberal conceptualizations of freedom describe the ways in which either US American Muslims or conservative critics view the relationship between religion and identity. The debate is demonstrating the limits of understanding religion primarily through the model of 'personal belief' that is subject to 'choice.' Since 911, a new racial category encompassing what Leti Volpp identifies as the 'Muslim-looking' individual has solidified a relationship between marked bodies and the religious category 'Muslim' such that Islam itself is increasingly tied to notions of inheritance. In turn, individuals such as Obama who profess no public allegiance to Islam may be viewed as inherently Islamic based on other racialized cues, such as family history, nationality, or ideology. Indeed, the recent polling on Obama suggests that those who view him as 'Muslim' are more likely to identify him with what they see as problematic ideology and questionable citizenship. Yet the largely nativist, racialized take on religious identity is not the only sphere in which the religion-as-belief model of identity has approached its limit. A growing body of religious studies scholarship demonstrates that this model fails to grasp the complex ways in which embodied religious practices (for example, the communal experience of the call to prayer) are as significant or more significant than conscious belief in mediating religious identity. As the emphasis on religion as belief can be traced to the eightneenth century, when it resolved certain European state requirements for disciplining labor and national identity within the context of global imperialism, the concept remains relatively provincial in the world history of spiritual practice. It perhaps never attained the dominance that secular liberals might like to attribute to it.
Thus while the appeal to the law of individual religious freedom remains the legal underpinning of the Park51 organizers' claim to do as they please with their space, its abstract vision of equality is not commensurate with the type of contextualized cross-community dialogue that the Cordoba Initiative seeks to initiate. Especially given that Islam is portrayed by many US American post-911 critics as the religious expression of totalitarianism as a political form, Islam is excluded from the domain of freedom entirely. This incommensurability is starkly suggested by the fact that the accused taxi cab attacker, Michael Enright, a filmmaker whose work mourned and celebrated US soldiers in Afghanistan, is a volunteer for Intersections International, a nonprofit devoted to cross-community dialogue that supports Park51.
A number of students in our class suggested that on a pragmatic level, the controversy will make the mission of promoting 'tolerance' across religious divides at the center virtually impossible, making a move further from the WTC site a useful concession. This is an understandable argument, and moving Park51 might yield tangible benefits to the people who actually wish to make use of it. However, given the current heat of Islamophobic rhetoric, it is unlikely that a new location will be able to overcome the sense of alienation that the controversy has stoked among US Muslims, echoing decades of marginalization faced by European Muslims. Preserving the current location will at least signal a setback for a politics that figures Islam as violent and alien.
In a key article critiquing the status of the public debate thus far, Amitava Kumar argues, "What has really been happening in this debate is the annihilation of the individual. There is no longer a conversation about a particular person; we can talk only about a faith. But is that faith one that is practiced by real people? No, because instead of people, we are always talking only of politics and symbols." Although I am less invested than Kumar in the individual, he is right to point out the importance of grounding the debate in the context of how religion is spatialized through the embodied practices of Muslims in the public culture of lower Manhattan. Artist Mira Schor, who lives just over a mile from the WTC site, writes, "my whole street is a mosque," referring to the common sight of Muslims (primarily Muslim men, she reports) unfurling prayer mats on public streets in Manhattan. Two mosques in the vicinity of 51 Park Avenue, Masjid Manhattan and Masjid al-Farah, predate the 911 attacks, and Masjid Manhattan began service in 1970, the same year that Tower #1 of the World Trade Center opened. The inability of these mosques to provide adequate prayer space for the thousands of Muslims who worship in lower Manhattan (especially following the 2008 eviction of Masjid Manhattan from a larger space) helped spur demand for Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf's prayer services that have been held at the Park51 site.
Little press coverage has focused on the Muslims who live, travel through, and/or work in the vicinity of the WTC site, but the effect of the controversy is palpable in the revised front page of the website of Masjid Manhattan, which has deemed it necessary to publicly "condemn any type of terrorist acts" and to dissociate itself from the unaffiliated Park51 project. While understandable given the real dangers of Islamophobic violence and ongoing public vilification of mosques and Islamic cultural and political organizations across the country, this response concedes the good Muslim/bad Muslim typology common to the generally tepid liberal responses to the controversy.
The good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy--amplified by the constant proclamations of the goodness of Imam Feisal Abdul al-Rauf--stands in tension with another grounding assumption underlying many liberal responses to the controversy: the unqualified individual right to religious freedom. Should the question of the right to build a mosque be evaluated differently in the event that the organizers hold unpopular views, say regarding Hamas or Palestine or the causes of 9/11? The conflation of Islam with violence thus also has consequences concerning the constraint on public political speech.
It has been necessary for commentators sympathetic to Park51 to place strong emphasis on constitutional rights for the individual, specifically the right to religious 'choice' and 'freedom.' However, these commentators should not uncritically assume that classical liberal conceptualizations of freedom describe the ways in which either US American Muslims or conservative critics view the relationship between religion and identity. The debate is demonstrating the limits of understanding religion primarily through the model of 'personal belief' that is subject to 'choice.' Since 911, a new racial category encompassing what Leti Volpp identifies as the 'Muslim-looking' individual has solidified a relationship between marked bodies and the religious category 'Muslim' such that Islam itself is increasingly tied to notions of inheritance. In turn, individuals such as Obama who profess no public allegiance to Islam may be viewed as inherently Islamic based on other racialized cues, such as family history, nationality, or ideology. Indeed, the recent polling on Obama suggests that those who view him as 'Muslim' are more likely to identify him with what they see as problematic ideology and questionable citizenship. Yet the largely nativist, racialized take on religious identity is not the only sphere in which the religion-as-belief model of identity has approached its limit. A growing body of religious studies scholarship demonstrates that this model fails to grasp the complex ways in which embodied religious practices (for example, the communal experience of the call to prayer) are as significant or more significant than conscious belief in mediating religious identity. As the emphasis on religion as belief can be traced to the eightneenth century, when it resolved certain European state requirements for disciplining labor and national identity within the context of global imperialism, the concept remains relatively provincial in the world history of spiritual practice. It perhaps never attained the dominance that secular liberals might like to attribute to it.
Thus while the appeal to the law of individual religious freedom remains the legal underpinning of the Park51 organizers' claim to do as they please with their space, its abstract vision of equality is not commensurate with the type of contextualized cross-community dialogue that the Cordoba Initiative seeks to initiate. Especially given that Islam is portrayed by many US American post-911 critics as the religious expression of totalitarianism as a political form, Islam is excluded from the domain of freedom entirely. This incommensurability is starkly suggested by the fact that the accused taxi cab attacker, Michael Enright, a filmmaker whose work mourned and celebrated US soldiers in Afghanistan, is a volunteer for Intersections International, a nonprofit devoted to cross-community dialogue that supports Park51.
A number of students in our class suggested that on a pragmatic level, the controversy will make the mission of promoting 'tolerance' across religious divides at the center virtually impossible, making a move further from the WTC site a useful concession. This is an understandable argument, and moving Park51 might yield tangible benefits to the people who actually wish to make use of it. However, given the current heat of Islamophobic rhetoric, it is unlikely that a new location will be able to overcome the sense of alienation that the controversy has stoked among US Muslims, echoing decades of marginalization faced by European Muslims. Preserving the current location will at least signal a setback for a politics that figures Islam as violent and alien.
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