How to Pray at Ground Zero 11 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

I met Daisy Kahn and her husband Imam Feisal Rauf a few summers ago at The Chautauqua Institute, the western New York interfaith arts community. They have long been featured speakers there. That summer, my husband and I had a chance to sit and chat with them for about an hour about their creative initiatives for bridge-building between American Muslims and non-Muslims.

In 1997, they had founded the New York-based American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). The home page of ASMA’s website (www.asma.org) sets its tone: the word “welcome” in over a dozen languages. ASMA’s mission statement includes: “We are dedicated to 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.”

In response to 9/11, Daisy left her career as an interior designer to be ASMA’s Executive Director. Then Imam Feisal took other steps aimed at improving relations between Muslims and the West. He wrote the book What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right with America (HarperCollins, 2004), which points up the many congruencies between Islamic practice and the U.S. Constitution.

He also founded the Cordoba Initiative. As its website (www.cordobainitiative.org) explains, “The name Cordoba was chosen carefully to reflect a period of time during which Islam played a monumental role in the enrichment of human civilization and knowledge. A thousand years ago Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted and created a prosperous center of intellectual, spiritual, cultural and commercial life in Cordoba, Spain.”

At Chautuaqua, we chatted about all these projects. We found Daisy and Imam Feisal to be warm and engaging, deeply committed to helping other Americans understand Islam better and to helping Muslim-Americans assimilate into American culture. And to drawing on the arts to help achieve these aims.

Yes, the arts. This dimension of their work will be of special interest to Good Letters readers. I doubt that many readers are aware of the Muslim artists’ memorial program that ASMA conceived in response to 9/11. The event was held on January 19, 2004, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, not far from the site of the World Trade Center. There, six hundred people gathered for an afternoon of multi-media artistic exhibitions and performances entitled “Reflections at a Time of Transformation: American Muslim Artists Reach Out To New Yorkers.”

In his opening address, Imam Feisal said that what artists can do in the wake of overwhelming tragedy is to “touch the life of their fellow-citizens”—because the arts have enormous power. And he added, alluding to the concept of “transformation” in the program’s title:

There is no real art if there is no personal and positive transformation; anything else is ostentatious display. Muslim artists, who as Muslims are after all dedicated to perfecting their faith, must constantly make their art a bridge on which the average person is prompted to embark upon the goal of human perfection as embodied by the Prophet Muhammad’s example.

Knowing Daisy and Imam Feisal as I do, I’ve naturally been pained by the uproar against their proposed community center and prayer space (modeled on the YMCA and the JCC). This project was conceived in exactly the same spirit as their previous initiatives: a spirit of reconciliation, of seeking ways to engage American non-Muslims and Muslims together in life-affirming enterprises. Hence the proposed community center’s inclusion of a theater, performing arts center, fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, culinary school—all open to the general public.

As for opponents’ objections that a Muslim prayer space shouldn’t be built in the neighborhood of Ground Zero, I’m coming to see this from a different angle.

Ground Zero is often referred to as “sacred ground.” The phrase has got me to wondering: how about building on Ground Zero’s sacredness literally—by building prayer spaces there for all of America’s religions? Already two churches are right next to Ground Zero. Add a synagogue, a mosque, a Buddhist and Hindu temple—and we’d have the structural institutions and religious communities that could begin together our country’s much-needed healing over the tragedy of 9/11.

Think of these faith communities joining to offer an interfaith prayer service every September 11th. To my mind, that would be calling on the very best of our shared American values.

In fact, the idea has just jogged from my brain cells an image from decades ago: I remember as a child seeing on busses an ad for church-going with the text “The Family that Prays Together Stays Together.”