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U.S. Sends Muslim Center Imam to Arab World to Promote Religious Tolerance
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As P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, explained at a briefing last week:
Imam Feisal will be traveling to Qatar, Bahrain and the U.A.E. on a U.S. government-sponsored trip to the Middle East. He will discuss Muslim life in America and religious tolerance….
His work on tolerance and religious diversity is well-known and he brings a moderate perspective to foreign audiences on what it’s like to be a practicing Muslim in the United States. And our discussions with him about taking this trip preceded the current debate in New York over the center.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Crowley said that the two-week speaking tour will begin on Thursday in Bahrain. He added that Imam Feisal had visited the same countries on behalf of the State Department in 2007, during two trips he made in support of the Bush administration’s outreach to the Muslim world.
As P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, explained at a briefing last week:
Imam Feisal will be traveling to Qatar, Bahrain and the U.A.E. on a U.S. government-sponsored trip to the Middle East. He will discuss Muslim life in America and religious tolerance….
His work on tolerance and religious diversity is well-known and he brings a moderate perspective to foreign audiences on what it’s like to be a practicing Muslim in the United States. And our discussions with him about taking this trip preceded the current debate in New York over the center.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Crowley said that the two-week speaking tour will begin on Thursday in Bahrain. He added that Imam Feisal had visited the same countries on behalf of the State Department in 2007, during two trips he made in support of the Bush administration’s outreach to the Muslim world.
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In a Times Op-Ed on Tuesday, William Dalrymple reminded readers that the Imam belongs to a sect of Islam whose members have been the subject of repeated and bloody attacks by militants:
Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.
In a post on a Washington Post blog last month, which called the center “an attempt to prevent the next 9/11,” Imam Feisel wrote:
We are not the extremists. We are that vast majority of Muslims who stand up against extremism and provide a voice in response to the radical rhetoric. Our mission is to interweave America’s Muslim population into mainstream society. We are a Muslim-American force for promoting the universal values of justice and peaceful coexistence in which all good people believe.
What has grieved me most over the past few months is the blatantly false reporting that has led some victims’ families to think that this project is somehow designed by Muslims to gloat over the attacks on 9/11. That could not be farther from the truth.
My heart goes out to all the victims of 9/11. But I urge you to include in your sympathies the family of Mohammad Salman Hamdani. Born in Pakistan, his parents brought him to New York as a small child. He wanted nothing more than to be an American, and he was. A high school football player in Queens, he graduated from Queens College. When he could not get into an American medical school, he became a part-time ambulance driver. He disappeared on 9/11 and his body was found months later in the wreckage of the North Tower. This 23-year Muslim died saving his fellow New Yorkers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/nyregion/20imam.html?_r=1&hpw
CAIRO — Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the organizer of the planned Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, arrived in Bahrain on Thursday to begin a three-country tour of the Persian Gulf sponsored by the United States State Department.
