EXCERPT
The transformation of a proposed Lower Manhattan cultural center into an anti-American edifice—framing pushed by the right and reinforced by the mainstream media—was a crucial victory for the nativist coalition that would later rally behind the 45th president.
BY SPENCER ACKERMAN
AUGUST 9, 2021
BY CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY IMAGES.
In the old Spanish city of Córdoba, Islam had built a European pluralism that anticipated cherished American values. Faisal Abdul Rauf considered it a place America would embrace. The lessons of an ancient city, the New York imam thought, could help resolve the post-9/ 11 crisis afflicting both America and Islam.
Founded in the eighth century, Córdoba was the intellectual center of Europe, a haven of tolerance, education, and achievement. The wealthy city, centerpiece of a breakaway Umayyad emirate, attracted and nurtured Christian, Jewish, and Islamic scholars and cosmopolitans. Founding ruler Abdel Rahman I, who had fled the dominant Abbasid caliphate, wrote wistful poetry about being a refugee. A citywide midsummer festival celebrated John the Baptist.
But over centuries, under the stresses of internal political fracture and external war, Córdoba’s multiculturalism broke down. In his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America, Rauf hailed native son Moses Maimonides, the titan of Jewish philosophy and theology. Maimonides, however, fled Córdoba when the conquering Almohad dynasty revoked protections for dhimmi—Jewish and Christian minorities—and persecuted Spanish Jewry, even separating children from their parents.
Rauf considered American history a narrative of progressive triumph over such prejudices. After Pakistani jihadis murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being Jewish, Rauf delivered a moving address to the Upper West Side’s B’nai Jeshurun congregation. He told Pearl’s grieving father, Judea, “Today I am a Jew. I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.”
“We strive for a ‘new Córdoba,’” Rauf wrote, “a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like.”
Rauf had been preaching twelve blocks from the World Trade Center since 1985. He located his new Córdoba there. At 45 Park Place was a mid-nineteenth-century building left vacant after undercarriage debris from the doomed planes cratered several floors of what was then a Burlington Coat Factory. Aided by Sharif El- Gamal, a real estate developer and self-described “shark,” Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, purchased the property for $4.85 million in July 2009. They planned to restore it as the thirteen-story Cordoba House, which would feature a community center, pool, restaurant, performance space, mosque and culinary school. Rauf conceptualized it as a Muslim version of the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish space on the Upper East Side that plays a cherished role in the intellectual life of New York City. The site of the new Córdoba struck Rauf as poetic, even sublime. It was a chance, he said, to send “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”
But to Rauf’s horror, several in New York’s 9/11 survivor community did not believe the project was sending a different statement at all. When Khan unveiled Cordoba House to a Manhattan community board’s finance committee early in May 2010, Rosemary Cain, mother of fallen 9/11 firefighter George Cain, said it was “atrocious that anyone would even consider allowing them to build a mosque near the World Trade Center.” Khan, shaken, explained to the committee that she and her husband felt “an obligation as Muslims and Americans to be part of the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan.”
Fanning the flames was Pamela Geller, who blogged that a “monster mosque” was coming to Ground Zero, an “insulting and humiliating…victory lap” celebrating terrorism. A veteran of the business side of the ruling-class broadsheet New York Observer, Geller was radicalized by 9/11. She told New York Jewish Week that she was embarrassed not to have known who it was that attacked America, so she turned to authors and journalists who revealed that the culprit was Islam. Geller was also a birther, though not one tied to any particular theory of Barack Obama’s origin; she once published a reader’s theory positing that his real father was Malcolm X. Her ally against Cordoba was Robert Spencer, whose books lined the FBI library at Quantico. Spencer claimed Rauf was erecting a “victory mosque.” Together, they created a pressure group called Stop Islamization of America. Asked by The Washington Post if he was being deliberately provocative, Spencer replied, “Why not? It’s fun.”
Soon the New York Post ran columns about “mosque madness” generating anger from “fed-up New Yorkers.” Fox News crusaded against it. By the end of May protesters holding signs reading SHOW RESPECT FOR 9/11. NO MOSQUE! packed a four-hour-long public hearing on Cordoba House. “This is humiliating that you would build a shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks of 9/11!” Geller lectured. Rauf, who had the support of New York’s power structure, was left pleading that they had “condemned terrorism in the most unequivocal terms.” El-Gamal described the anger at the meeting as “the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
By now the right-wing media, setting the tone for their mainstream counterparts, didn’t call Rauf’s project Cordoba House at all. They called it the Ground Zero Mosque. The demonization of Rauf followed. Rudy Giuliani told a radio host that Rauf had “a record of support for causes that were sympathetic with terrorism,” which was a complete fabrication. A Republican candidate for governor in New York, Rick Lazio, called Rauf a “terrorist sympathizer.” Donald Trump, the New York developer and reality-show host, portrayed himself as saving the city from the Islamist menace while operating as a shakedown artist. Trump wrote one of Rauf’s investors, “As a resident of New York and a citizen of the United States,” with an offer to buy out his share at a 25 percent markup. Rauf would have to move to an admittedly worse location, Trump said, “because it will end a very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse.”
The protests began that summer. Demonstrators carried signs reading SHARIA in a dripping blood-red font and spoke of a “hijacked Constitution.” A puppet dressed like a jihadi hung over a mock missile, advertising, OBAMA, YOUR MIDDLE NAME IS HUSSAIN, WE UNDERSTAND, BLOOMBERG, WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE? The twenty-five-year-old nephew of a fireman who died at the World Trade Center seethed at the “level of defiance” he considered Muslims to be showing. “They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not,’” he told the Times. At the end of August a cabbie named Ahmed Sharif, a Bangladeshi immigrant and a father of four children, picked up a blond film student named Michael Enright. Enright, seeming drunk and wielding a Leatherman knife, asked if Sharif was Muslim. “This is the checkpoint, I have to bring you down,” Sharif recalled Enright saying as he slashed and stabbed, “talking like he was a soldier.”
Order Reign of Terror on Amazon or Bookshop.
As thousands filled the streets on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 to denounce the Ground Zero Mosque, local Muslims rode out a terrifying moment. Geller led a protest at the site featuring signs objecting to “Obama’s Mosque.” One of the speakers was Geert Wilders, a Dutch legislator and Islam’s premiere persecutor in Europe, whom Geller introduced as a “modern-day Churchill.” He urged the protesters to “draw the line” against Rauf, “so that New York, rooted in Dutch values, will never become New Mecca.” Another speaker, by teleconference, was Bush’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, who Geller enthused spoke “bluntly and unequivocally” about the “affront to American values” the “mosque” represented. One protester told Time it was “the first stage of Saudi Wahhabist takeover of the United States.” He might have been more extreme than most, but by then, a CBS poll recorded 71 percent of Americans objecting to the “mosque.”
Rauf had few allies. President Barack Obama gave a statement of support for religious freedom, but several national Democrats preferred to appease Islamophobia, as the party had done so often since 9/11. The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the “mosque” ought to be “built someplace else.” Several Democratic congressmen from New York declared their opposition. New York’s Jewish community, which Rauf had supported, either kept silent or joined in the denunciation. As the High Holidays approached, B’nai Jeshurun’s Rabbi Rolando Matalon chose a sermon dwelling on “the tremendous polarization in our society” rather than the persecution unfolding downtown. Judea Pearl said Rauf’s project reflected “anti-American ideologies of victimhood, anger and entitlement” within American Islam and should relocate.
Rauf tried accommodation. He apologized for calling American policy “an accessory” to 9/11, conceding it was “insensitive” of him to suggest as much. Had Rauf known the outrage Cordoba House, now rebranded as “Park51,” would generate, he wouldn’t have chosen the same location. But if he moved, he explained, “the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse.”
It turned out capital was his biggest enemy. “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a capitalist,” said Rauf’s partner, El-Gamal, who had not expected to become a pariah. He eclipsed Rauf from what would now never be Cordoba. By January, Rauf was marginalized. He remained a member of Park51’s board but no longer served as a spokesperson for the project. El-Gamal deemphasized and ultimately abandoned the community center aspect of the property in favor of, eventually, luxury condos. The protests dissipated.
Rauf continued expressing hope for reviving the sentiments animating Cordoba, but hope was all he had left. Rauf had discovered an invisible border marking the hard limit of American acceptance. America would not permit a new Córdoba, not even in the city Rauf already thought of as one. The transformation of Cordoba House into the Ground Zero Mosque marked the moment a presidency like Trump’s became inevitable.
“There are individuals who are working very hard to promote fear and antagonism towards Islam and Muslims in this country. It’s fueled, in part, by the first African-American president that we have,” Rauf said in 2012. “Obama’s father was a Muslim and people have used this to arouse hostility against him. A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment.”
From Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman, to be published on August 10, 2021 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Spencer Ackerman.
In the old Spanish city of Córdoba, Islam had built a European pluralism that anticipated cherished American values. Faisal Abdul Rauf considered it a place America would embrace. The lessons of an ancient city, the New York imam thought, could help resolve the post-9/ 11 crisis afflicting both America and Islam.
Founded in the eighth century, Córdoba was the intellectual center of Europe, a haven of tolerance, education, and achievement. The wealthy city, centerpiece of a breakaway Umayyad emirate, attracted and nurtured Christian, Jewish, and Islamic scholars and cosmopolitans. Founding ruler Abdel Rahman I, who had fled the dominant Abbasid caliphate, wrote wistful poetry about being a refugee. A citywide midsummer festival celebrated John the Baptist.
But over centuries, under the stresses of internal political fracture and external war, Córdoba’s multiculturalism broke down. In his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America, Rauf hailed native son Moses Maimonides, the titan of Jewish philosophy and theology. Maimonides, however, fled Córdoba when the conquering Almohad dynasty revoked protections for dhimmi—Jewish and Christian minorities—and persecuted Spanish Jewry, even separating children from their parents.
Rauf considered American history a narrative of progressive triumph over such prejudices. After Pakistani jihadis murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being Jewish, Rauf delivered a moving address to the Upper West Side’s B’nai Jeshurun congregation. He told Pearl’s grieving father, Judea, “Today I am a Jew. I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.”
“We strive for a ‘new Córdoba,’” Rauf wrote, “a time when Jews, Christians, Muslims and all other faith traditions will live together in peace, enjoying a renewed vision of what the good society can look like.”
Rauf had been preaching twelve blocks from the World Trade Center since 1985. He located his new Córdoba there. At 45 Park Place was a mid-nineteenth-century building left vacant after undercarriage debris from the doomed planes cratered several floors of what was then a Burlington Coat Factory. Aided by Sharif El- Gamal, a real estate developer and self-described “shark,” Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, purchased the property for $4.85 million in July 2009. They planned to restore it as the thirteen-story Cordoba House, which would feature a community center, pool, restaurant, performance space, mosque and culinary school. Rauf conceptualized it as a Muslim version of the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish space on the Upper East Side that plays a cherished role in the intellectual life of New York City. The site of the new Córdoba struck Rauf as poetic, even sublime. It was a chance, he said, to send “the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”
But to Rauf’s horror, several in New York’s 9/11 survivor community did not believe the project was sending a different statement at all. When Khan unveiled Cordoba House to a Manhattan community board’s finance committee early in May 2010, Rosemary Cain, mother of fallen 9/11 firefighter George Cain, said it was “atrocious that anyone would even consider allowing them to build a mosque near the World Trade Center.” Khan, shaken, explained to the committee that she and her husband felt “an obligation as Muslims and Americans to be part of the rebuilding of downtown Manhattan.”
Fanning the flames was Pamela Geller, who blogged that a “monster mosque” was coming to Ground Zero, an “insulting and humiliating…victory lap” celebrating terrorism. A veteran of the business side of the ruling-class broadsheet New York Observer, Geller was radicalized by 9/11. She told New York Jewish Week that she was embarrassed not to have known who it was that attacked America, so she turned to authors and journalists who revealed that the culprit was Islam. Geller was also a birther, though not one tied to any particular theory of Barack Obama’s origin; she once published a reader’s theory positing that his real father was Malcolm X. Her ally against Cordoba was Robert Spencer, whose books lined the FBI library at Quantico. Spencer claimed Rauf was erecting a “victory mosque.” Together, they created a pressure group called Stop Islamization of America. Asked by The Washington Post if he was being deliberately provocative, Spencer replied, “Why not? It’s fun.”
Soon the New York Post ran columns about “mosque madness” generating anger from “fed-up New Yorkers.” Fox News crusaded against it. By the end of May protesters holding signs reading SHOW RESPECT FOR 9/11. NO MOSQUE! packed a four-hour-long public hearing on Cordoba House. “This is humiliating that you would build a shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks of 9/11!” Geller lectured. Rauf, who had the support of New York’s power structure, was left pleading that they had “condemned terrorism in the most unequivocal terms.” El-Gamal described the anger at the meeting as “the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
By now the right-wing media, setting the tone for their mainstream counterparts, didn’t call Rauf’s project Cordoba House at all. They called it the Ground Zero Mosque. The demonization of Rauf followed. Rudy Giuliani told a radio host that Rauf had “a record of support for causes that were sympathetic with terrorism,” which was a complete fabrication. A Republican candidate for governor in New York, Rick Lazio, called Rauf a “terrorist sympathizer.” Donald Trump, the New York developer and reality-show host, portrayed himself as saving the city from the Islamist menace while operating as a shakedown artist. Trump wrote one of Rauf’s investors, “As a resident of New York and a citizen of the United States,” with an offer to buy out his share at a 25 percent markup. Rauf would have to move to an admittedly worse location, Trump said, “because it will end a very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse.”
The protests began that summer. Demonstrators carried signs reading SHARIA in a dripping blood-red font and spoke of a “hijacked Constitution.” A puppet dressed like a jihadi hung over a mock missile, advertising, OBAMA, YOUR MIDDLE NAME IS HUSSAIN, WE UNDERSTAND, BLOOMBERG, WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE? The twenty-five-year-old nephew of a fireman who died at the World Trade Center seethed at the “level of defiance” he considered Muslims to be showing. “They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not,’” he told the Times. At the end of August a cabbie named Ahmed Sharif, a Bangladeshi immigrant and a father of four children, picked up a blond film student named Michael Enright. Enright, seeming drunk and wielding a Leatherman knife, asked if Sharif was Muslim. “This is the checkpoint, I have to bring you down,” Sharif recalled Enright saying as he slashed and stabbed, “talking like he was a soldier.”
Order Reign of Terror on Amazon or Bookshop.
As thousands filled the streets on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 to denounce the Ground Zero Mosque, local Muslims rode out a terrifying moment. Geller led a protest at the site featuring signs objecting to “Obama’s Mosque.” One of the speakers was Geert Wilders, a Dutch legislator and Islam’s premiere persecutor in Europe, whom Geller introduced as a “modern-day Churchill.” He urged the protesters to “draw the line” against Rauf, “so that New York, rooted in Dutch values, will never become New Mecca.” Another speaker, by teleconference, was Bush’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, who Geller enthused spoke “bluntly and unequivocally” about the “affront to American values” the “mosque” represented. One protester told Time it was “the first stage of Saudi Wahhabist takeover of the United States.” He might have been more extreme than most, but by then, a CBS poll recorded 71 percent of Americans objecting to the “mosque.”
Rauf had few allies. President Barack Obama gave a statement of support for religious freedom, but several national Democrats preferred to appease Islamophobia, as the party had done so often since 9/11. The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the “mosque” ought to be “built someplace else.” Several Democratic congressmen from New York declared their opposition. New York’s Jewish community, which Rauf had supported, either kept silent or joined in the denunciation. As the High Holidays approached, B’nai Jeshurun’s Rabbi Rolando Matalon chose a sermon dwelling on “the tremendous polarization in our society” rather than the persecution unfolding downtown. Judea Pearl said Rauf’s project reflected “anti-American ideologies of victimhood, anger and entitlement” within American Islam and should relocate.
Rauf tried accommodation. He apologized for calling American policy “an accessory” to 9/11, conceding it was “insensitive” of him to suggest as much. Had Rauf known the outrage Cordoba House, now rebranded as “Park51,” would generate, he wouldn’t have chosen the same location. But if he moved, he explained, “the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse.”
It turned out capital was his biggest enemy. “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a capitalist,” said Rauf’s partner, El-Gamal, who had not expected to become a pariah. He eclipsed Rauf from what would now never be Cordoba. By January, Rauf was marginalized. He remained a member of Park51’s board but no longer served as a spokesperson for the project. El-Gamal deemphasized and ultimately abandoned the community center aspect of the property in favor of, eventually, luxury condos. The protests dissipated.
Rauf continued expressing hope for reviving the sentiments animating Cordoba, but hope was all he had left. Rauf had discovered an invisible border marking the hard limit of American acceptance. America would not permit a new Córdoba, not even in the city Rauf already thought of as one. The transformation of Cordoba House into the Ground Zero Mosque marked the moment a presidency like Trump’s became inevitable.
“There are individuals who are working very hard to promote fear and antagonism towards Islam and Muslims in this country. It’s fueled, in part, by the first African-American president that we have,” Rauf said in 2012. “Obama’s father was a Muslim and people have used this to arouse hostility against him. A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment.”
From Reign of Terror by Spencer Ackerman, to be published on August 10, 2021 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Spencer Ackerman.
