If September 11th brought out the best of Americans, the last several weeks have brought out the worst. As an American Muslim, I feel like I have been on the receiving end of a bipartisan smackdown of sorts amidst the uproar over the proposed construction of the Cordoba House Islamic community center in Downtown Manhattan.
But what bothers me most isn’t the Sarah Palins of the world calling on me to “refudiate” my first amendment rights or Newt Gingrich comparing me to a Nazi. I expect nothing less from the crazies and I will not pretend I hold them to any higher standard.
It isn’t even when people like Barack Obama implicitly question the “wisdom” of building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero. I lost faith in him the forty-seventh or forty-eighth time he took a page out of Newt’s book and acted as though being called a Muslim was on par with being a called a Nazi. It’s also not really when Howard Dean calls it a “real affront to people who lost their lives” for American Muslims to exercise our freedom of religion. Although I’ll admit it, that last one did sting a little.
No, what bothers me the most is when even those on the left who ardently support the Cordoba House project defend it only by pointing out that the “Ground Zero mosque” is neither a mosque nor actually at Ground Zero. Or when they tell the crazies to cool it because there are already several other mosques near Ground Zero.
That’s what really breaks my heart. Because it tells me that even so many well-meaning people who are on my side just don’t get it. This isn’t about whether we’re building a mosque or a community center, and it’s not about whether the mosque is built on Ground Zero or two blocks away. It’s about the fact that there are people out there who think it is offensive for anything Muslim to go anywhere near Ground Zero because they have deemed Muslims collectively guilty of perpetrating the attacks on 9/11. They think that the Cordoba House would “defile Ground Zero” or be a “real affront” to those who died there because they think it would signal submission to the very people who brought down the World Trade Center. Or, as Newt put it, they think it would be like putting up a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.
And the way I see it, anyone who tries to parse the facts by saying, “Well, it’s not like they’re building the mosque right at Ground Zero,” or “Well, it’s not really a mosque,” is tacitly accepting that line of reasoning. The reason why the Cordoba House should be built is not because it’s a safe two blocks away from Ground Zero or because it’s not really a mosque. It’s because Islam did not hijack four planes and fly two of them into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It’s because all Muslims in the world were not co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks. It’s because we did not check the First Amendment at the security gate when 19 men made their way through Logan, Newark, and Dulles Airports one Tuesday morning in September 2001 and proceeded to unleash pure devastation on the world.
If you weren’t an American Muslim on 9/11, then you don’t know what it felt like to be an American Muslim on 9/11. I will not claim to speak for other Muslims, but that day, as I sat in my college dorm room, I grieved for humanity, I grieved for my country, and I grieved for my religion. I wrestled with intense feelings of shock, sorrow, shame, and—yes—guilt.
But I categorically reject the notion that anyone out there has the right to tell me that I should feel guilty for September 11th because I am Muslim. Or that I should be ashamed of the actions of other Muslims. Or that I have a heightened obligation to condemn all terrorist acts simply because I am Muslim. As far as I am concerned, anyone who tells American Muslims how we should feel, what we should say, what we should do, or how we should (or shouldn’t) exercise our first amendment rights because of what happened on September 11th is a bigot, because s/he cannot separate actions taken by nineteen individuals nine years ago from a faith of 1.5 billion people.
And just like I reject the notion that anyone can tell me how I should feel about September 11th, I also do not claim that I have the right to tell others how they should feel about Muslims. Bigots have feelings too. I get that. But don’t tell me that you question the “wisdom” of my decision to not be sensitive to the bigoted feelings of bigots. In my book, it’s okay to offend the bigotry of bigots.