Imam Rauf: Mosque planner has been mostly silent during noisy debate

By Michelle Boorstein
Monday, August 23, 2010; C01

To pundits skeptical of Feisal Abdul Rauf, the New York imam is a wolf in sheep's clothing who claims to be building a monument to tolerance near Ground Zero but is actually an apologist for radical, anti-American Muslims.

To people who have worked with him in the interfaith community, the white-bearded Sufi is a visionary for peace and progressive Islam, an American patriot who has toiled for decades to build bridges between this country and like-minded Muslims around the world.

Unquestionably, the 61-year-old Rauf (pronounced rah-oof) is the product of some strange circumstances.

Rocketed to prominence after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by government and interfaith leaders interested in promoting the voices of moderate Muslims, the former industrial filter salesman won a book contract and gigs representing the State Department in the Muslim world and teaching FBI agents about Islam. He was asked to become a member of the World Economic Forum and invited to speak with the likes of Antonin Scalia and Karen Hughes. In just a few years, he went from an ambitious, well-liked leader of a small TriBeCa prayer group to a world player.

"After September 11, when we were all afraid, Imam Feisal was one of the people who stood up for American Muslims who totally rejected terrorism. He built a significant network of Christian and Jewish supporters," said D. Randall Benn, a D.C. lawyer and interfaith activist who has worked as Rauf's Washington adviser for about two years. "It was where he was, and the power of his ideas, that made him big."

Ironically, the same symbolic power of Ground Zero that elevated Rauf now threatens to take him down.

At the center of a global firestorm of debate, Rauf is absent, sticking to his commitment to lecture for the State Department in Bahrain about, of all things, "how we emphasize religious tolerance in our society," department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters last week. Rauf's wife said he would not be available for an interview until next month -- though he told a gathering at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Bahrain on Sunday that the attention generated was a "sign of success" and could bring about greater understanding.

Though now largely invisible, Rauf seems to have become a proxy for Americans' anxiety about Islam and its legal system, sharia. The intense reaction against Rauf's proposed project and some of his political views have laid bare Americans' fragile acceptance of its Muslim minority.

'Builder of bridges'

So far, debate has been framed around whether a $100 million, 15-story Muslim community center and mosque should be built two blocks from where Islamic radicals brought down the World Trade Center. But interviews with people who know Rauf suggest that the project isn't much more than an idea and that Rauf's most controversial trait may be his ambition.

While he portrays himself as someone who runs two influential interfaith nonprofits (his Web site says he is "regarded as one of the world's most eloquent and erudite Muslim leaders"), neither one has a staff, and the project that has inspired outrage hasn't even begun fundraising, said Rauf's wife and work partner, Daisy Khan.

Appearing Sunday on ABC's "This Week With Christiane Amanpour," Khan made clear that she and her husband intend the project to go forward and -- for the moment -- at the same site. But she also said, "We understand the pain and the anguish that has been displayed throughout the country."

Khan evaded the question of whether they had been in talks with New York Gov. David Paterson about moving the center to another location. Asked twice about it, Khan said her side wants to meet first "with all the stakeholders who matter, who are the New Yorkers. The community board has overwhelmingly supported this. . . .

"And we have to be cognizant that we also have a constitutional right. We have the Muslim community around the nation that we have to be concerned about, and we have to worry about the extremists as well, because they are seizing this moment."

Rabbi Leonard Schoolman, who hired Rauf in the late 1990s to teach about Islam at the Center for Religious Inquiry at St. Bartholomew's Church in Manhattan, and who is a strong supporter of the imam, called the project "amateur hour" and more of a publicity strategy than a reality, meant to promote the couple's interfaith work. Even with 50 media requests coming in per day, a part-time employee of the developer who owns the property has been the sole source of information in recent days, which he was sending out in occasionally snarky messages on Twitter.

"I don't think either of them has the capacity or resources or anything else to pull this off," said Schoolman, who accompanied Rauf to a meeting with civic officials earlier in the 2000s to support the project at another location, farther uptown.

"I don't think he has a constituency in the Muslim community," said Schoolman, who has been to Masjid al Farah, the TriBeCa mosque at which Rauf has led services since 1983. "I think he's pretty much of a loner."

Schoolman still calls him an inspiring speaker and "builder of bridges." Those views are echoed by bigger figures in the interfaith world, like William Vendley, whose group Religions for Peace advises the White House on religion and foreign policy.

Vendley, who has known Rauf for 15 years through interfaith events, and others described the imam's view of Islam as a religion in transition. "He offers the thesis that Islam will reinvent itself in America," he said.

Khan, who has been speaking for her husband in recent weeks, said Rauf sees the United States as "the most sharia-compliant state" because it upholds what Rauf believes is the proper interpretation of the Koran's emphases on protection of life, freedom of religion, one's property, family, dignity.

Like father, like son

Rauf is the grandson and son of imams. His father, Muhammad Abdul Rauf, was born in Egypt and ran the Islamic Cultural Center on East 96th Street in Manhattan and the Islamic Center of Washington on Massachusetts Avenue -- both early important institutions for Muslim immigrants that are run by representatives of Muslim countries. Feisal Rauf was educated in England, Egypt and Malaysia before moving as a teenager to the United States, where he got degrees in physics from Columbia University and the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

As is not uncommon for Muslim American imams, Rauf has no formal religious education, and initially he explored other careers. According to a Web site he runs, he taught remedial reading in Harlem until he was laid off during the city's fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s, then sold industrial filters for a New Jersey company before taking the job overseeing the mosque at 225 W. Broadway in 1983.

The mosque is primarily open for Friday prayers and Thursday night group chanting, called zikrs. In recent years its small prayer space has become so crowded the mosque had to hold four Friday prayer sessions.

"It's hard to find imams in this country who can connect spiritually but are grounded in the experience of American Muslims," said Mariam Cather, who lives in Brooklyn and was married last year by Rauf. "You can hear a pin drop when he speaks because everyone wants to hear what he says. He can enthrall a crowd."

Rauf and his wife keep a busy, important schedule, speaking around the world to promote religious pluralism and gender equality. In 1997 they launched the American Sufi Muslim Association, the name of which was changed to the broader American Society for Muslim Advancement to reflect their larger goals, Schoolman said.

The group's stated mission included "strengthening an authentic expression of Islam based on cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women's empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange."

After Sept. 11 they also founded the Cordoba Initiative, which includes the Muslim center project, called Park51. The initiative also conducts training for young Muslim American leaders, lectures and something called the Sharia Index Project, which gathers Islamic legal scholars to reach consensus on the relationship between Islamic law -- sharia -- and government. Before beginning his State Department work last week, Rauf was in Malaysia meeting with leaders about the program, his wife said.

He and his wife also serve as spiritual guides for a small community of Muslim American go-getters, holding zikrs in their home as well as doing informal matchmaking and performing marriage ceremonies, including ones for interfaith couples.

Skirting key issues?

In an interview with The Washington Post this past June about the project, Khan said the fact that the land near Ground Zero became available showed "a divine hand."

Yet many questions went unanswered about Rauf and his project, a vacuum that seems to have been filled quickly by people put off by Rauf's apparently liberal political views. In recent weeks, conservative leaders and pundits in particular have lobbed far more questions than specific complaints about the imam. Why was he unwilling to explicitly call Hamas a terrorist organization? When he said U.S. foreign policies fueled the Sept. 11 attackers, does that rationalize terrorism? Whom is he meeting with in Malaysia?

Rauf's decision -- against the advice of some interfaith leaders who support him -- to remain silent in the media storm seemed to fuel some people's worries.

"If [interfaith] is your cause, why not make it an interfaith center?" said K.T. McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst who took a course from Rauf after the 2001 attacks. During the course, she said, he declined to condemn particular Islamic organizations. "He would condemn violence, but not be specific."

His silence has also fueled conspiracy theorists who said the sharia project was on a "hidden Web site" that would reveal his real plan to use the large downtown site "to enforce sharia law in America and worldwide." The sharia project is prominently featured on the Cordoba site.

Rauf has been criticized for days, in the conservative media in particular, for comments like the one he made in June when asked if he agreed with the State Department's assessment of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

"I'm not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question," he told New York's WABC radio. "I do not want to be placed, nor do I accept . . . being put in a position where I am the target of one side or another." He went on to say that he sees targeting civilians as a sin in Islam and that he is a supporter of the state of Israel, but the interview is now lore in the anti-Park51 blogosphere.

Interfaith leaders said it's not uncommon to avoid areas of tension in dialogue -- in fact it's a strategy, they said.

Schoolman said that in interfaith discussions, sometimes people say, "Let's talk about what we can do something about. What are the problems in our community? We can't resolve what's going on with Israel and Palestine."

Rauf has apparently not been specific about two controversial imams who worked before and after the 2001 attacks at the Islamic Cultural Center, where Rauf is still a trustee. In the days after the attacks, one suggested that Jews were behind them and the other said that it wasn't clear Muslims were involved, as U.S. officials had concluded.

His wife declined to comment on the controversies, saying she wasn't familiar with the comments or what her husband has said about them, but said "his record on terrorism is very, very clear."

To some Muslim Americans, such intense distrust of a man whose life's work is about interfaith relations shows a double standard, a limit to how far they can go in criticizing U.S. foreign policy, how frankly they can speak about sharia-state relations, a topic of great debate especially among young Muslims around the world.

Meanwhile, more Muslim American voices are surfacing in criticism of Rauf and his handling of the project.

"The fact that the organizers of Park51 did not see Islamophobia as a concern when announcing this proposal is disturbing. It reinforces the idea that they have no vision or leadership," Hofstra University professor and blogger Hussein Rashid wrote Friday. Rauf's supporters fear that a determined peacemaker who could play an important role may wind up destroyed by unrelenting controversy over the very subject he spent his career trying to promote: Islam.

"You have a pair of interfaith leaders who miscalculated the passion this would generate," Benn said of the imam and his wife.