An
Open Letter to Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, Promoter of the New York’s Ground Zero
Mosque
August
2010
Dear Imam Abdul Rauf,
Congratulations on attaining your aim to build an Islamic
community center and mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero.
Allowing the construction of this complex close to where the former World Trade Center stood on the morning
of September 11, 2001 is a tribute to America’s tolerance.
Your big challenge has just begun. To fulfill
your declared interest in reconciling religions and countering the backlash against
Muslims you must deal with the following six issues.
First, until you are able to pacify the intolerant and violent
Quranic verses against non-Muslims in general, Christians and Jews in particular,
please refrain from proclaiming Islam a religion of peace. Although the Quran
contains tolerant peaceful verses like 2:62,
2:136, 2:256, 29:46 it also contains intolerant violent verses like 2:65, 2:120, 2:191, 2:193, 2:216, 2:217, 5:14,
5:51, 5:59, 5:60, 5:78, 8:60, 9:05, 9:29.
Will you teach that today’s Christians and Jews are to be
condemned the way the Quran condemns their seventh century ancestors? Will you
take issue with the likes of Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudais, the leading cleric of Islam’s
holiest mosque in Mecca, who told his congregation in 2004: “Read history and
you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil forefathers of the
even more evil Jews of today . . . the scum of the human race, accursed by
Allah, who turned them into apes and pigs”?
Secondly, will you advocate compliance with America's personal status laws instead of Shari’a laws on the treatment of women—four wives simultaneously to one man (4:3),
divorce at man's will without giving cause, a woman’s inheritance (4:11) and testimony
in a court of law (2:282) being equal to one half of those of a man? Will you teach that the disobedient wife should be hit or beaten up to accord with (4:34)?
Will you be promoting the Prophet's saying, according to Sahih Al-Bukhari, that most
of those who are in hell are women, that women's "lack of
intelligence" is the reason why a woman's testimony in an Islamic court of
law is equal to half that of the testimony of the Muslim male, and that the
reason why women are prohibited from praying and fasting during menstruation is
due to them being "deficient in religious belief"? What about Sunan Al-Nasai, which
attributed to the Prophet saying: "People who entrust the management of
their affairs to a woman will fail."
We are told that
Khadija, the Prophet's first wife was the best born in Quraish, a successful businesswoman and the
richest. We are also told that Khadija employed young Muhammad in her business,
that she proposed marriage to Him when He was about 25 years old, and that she
was about 15 years His senior and twice a widow. We are told that for the 25
years of the Prophet's marriage to Khadija, until her death in 620, He remained
monogamous to her, that she was the one person to whom He turned for advice and
comfort, and that Khadija was the first convert to Islam. Such an image makes Khadija
an emancipated, commanding woman of high standing in Meccan society and in the
eyes of her husband par excellence, and that the Prophet treated her with
faithfulness and devotion. Will
you be explaining the contradiction between the Prophet's treatment of Khadija
and the treatment of women that emerged under Shari’a Law?
Do you support the suckling of the adult fatwa, which has recently
become the subject of considerable debate in Arab media? If the answer is no,
will you explain Sahih Muslim’s dedication of a special section titled:
“Suckling the grown-up man” as well as Sunan Abi Dawood’s dedication of a
similar section to the same subject? Will
you be explaining why it is that Muslim non-Arab Bangladesh, Indonesia,
Pakistan, and Turkey interpret Sharia Law in such a way as to allow women to
become presidents and prime ministers?
Third, will you be teaching that the punishment for
apostasy from Islam (and blasphemy) is death, that for false accusation and
drinking alcohol the punishment is flogging (though in 47:15 the Quran promises rivers
of wine in paradise)? Will you be preaching
that the penalty for theft is amputation of a hand (5:38) and a foot (if theft is repeated) and for theft with
homicide is execution by the sword followed by crucifixion, and that the
punishment for adultery (when the offenders are mature, married Muslims) is
stoning to death? On the penalty for adultery, the Quran imposes 100
lashes to each adulterer (24:2), but attributions to the Prophet by five
Hadith collectors changed the punishment for adultery from 100 lashes to
stoning the adulteress and the adulterer until death. Which penalty will you be
advocating?
Fourth, will your new center sponsor scientific research into the
historicity of the Quran and the Hadith?
Fifth, will you maintain Muslim clerics' teaching that Shi’ites, Islamilis, Druzes, Alawites,
let alone non-Muslims, are heretics?
Sixth,
how will you interpret and teach verse 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last
Day, nor hold that forbidden which has been forbidden by God and his messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, even if they are of the People of the Book, until they pay the protective
tax (jizya) with willing submission,
and feel themselves subdued”?
Hopefully, the new center will guide those Islamic countries that
discriminate today against their own non-Muslim citizens and residents to emulate America’s religious tolerance. Hopefully, the new center will not be hijacked by Wahhabi money and
reduced to a Pakistan/Taliban madrassah.
Background
information
On September 11, 2001, the day Islamist
terrorists flew two passenger airplanes into the World Trade Center, a plane's
landing gear crashed through
the roof of the 152 year old Burlington Coat Factory’s five-story
building at 45-47 Park Place, two blocks north of Ground Zero. The
building,
vacant since that fateful day, was purchased
in July 2009 for nearly $5 million by a real estate company associated with the
promoters of the new center.
Imam Faisal
Abdul Rauf, founder of the American Society for Muslim
Advancement and an investor in the project, has announced plans to
transform the site intoa $100 million 15-story Islamic center, called
Park51, with a
swimming pool, basketball court, a library, art studios, auditorium, a
September 11 memorial
besides the mosque and room for seminars to reconcile
religions and to counteract the backlash against Muslims in general.
The project created a storm of passionate debate. Its promoters and
supporters argue that the project will bring better understanding among
religions. To its opponents, the project is an insensitive aggressive act.
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