Who Cares What They Think?

From Rauf’s Larry King Live interview, some critics are taking issue with the following statement:

The imam of the mosque conceded Wednesday he would have changed sites if he knew how controversial it would become – but he now believes a switch would anger the radical Muslim world.

“If we don’t do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world,” said Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

Before the Koran-burning controversy inflamed the Muslim world and during Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf journey through the Middle East on a State Department-funded trip to relay, of all things, what it’s like being Muslim in the United States (apparently he praised America…of course, this will be dismissed as Islamic deception by the ‘phobes…or the link itself dismissed as liberal propaganda), here are some news reports of “world opinion” to the U.S. national controversy over the building of Cordoba House (this was originally an unpublished draft, from before the Terry Jones controversy).

There are some interesting reactions reported in this NYTimes piece:

For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.

But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.

The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.

“America hates Islam,” said Mohaimen Jabar, the owner of a clothes shop in Baghdad, Iraq.

“If America loved us, it would help the Palestinians and stop the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “It would stop Iran and Israel from distorting the image of Islam.”

Interestingly, leaders in Iran, Afghanistan and even occasionally prickly rivals like China and Russia — both of which have their own tensions in some of their heavily Muslim regions — have refrained from making much of the Park51 debate.

China’s state-run news media has used the story to elaborate on the need for a secular state strong enough to police extremism, a matter near and dear to its own ideology.

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Far more common, however, was a sort of shrug of the shoulders from clerics and observers accustomed to far more unpleasant debates. While extremists have presented the controversy as proof of American hostility toward Islam, some religious leaders have taken quite a different stance, arguing against placing the center close to ground zero.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Grande Mosquée of Paris and one of the most senior Islamic clerics in France, told France-Soir: “There are symbolic places that awaken memories whether you mean to or not. And it isn’t good to awaken memories.”

A senior cleric at Egypt’s Al Azhar, the closest equivalent in the Sunni Islamic world to the Vatican, said that building at the proposed location sounded like bad judgment on the part of American Muslims.

“It will create a permanent link between Islam and 9/11,” said Abdel Moety Bayoumi, a member of the Islamic Research Institute at Al Azhar. “Why should we put ourselves and Islam in a position of blame?”

That is not to say that the language in the United States has not agitated some observers, like Aziz Tarek, who wrote on the Saudi Web site Watan that America was in the grip of “intolerance and racism.”

He referred to Newt Gingrich’s widely reported statement that there should not be a new mosque in Lower Manhattan until Saudi Arabia allows construction of churches or synagogues.

“How can they compare building a mosque in N.Y. with building whatever in Mecca?” Mr. Tarek wrote. “I thought they viewed themselves better than that country of Saudi Arabia with its many human rights violations, as they love to put it.”

One Cambridge University researcher, writing in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam, said Muslims could win their case for a center near ground zero in a court of law, only to end up losing in the court of public opinion.

“Provoking the other side will eventually create public opinion that will undermine the very laws that the Muslims evoke today,” wrote the researcher, Khaled al-Haroub, adding that many Muslim states do not tolerate Christian or Jewish houses of worship: “We keep increasing our religious demands vis-à-vis the West, while refusing to meet even a few of the demands made by religious minorities living among us.”

Paradoxically, the public reaction has not been heated in Lebanon, a country with 18 recognized religious sects where Muslims and Christians have a long history of occasionally violent coexistence.

If the mosque were built, many Lebanese commentators said, it would increase the influence of the ideal of the secular state. Many Lebanese, however, seemed more interested that Miss U.S.A., Rima Fakih, a Lebanese-American, had suggested that Park51 seek another location, than in the debate itself.

“Let’s be honest, it is kind of weird to build it there,” said Samer Ghandour, 33. “But the U.S. is also incredibly polarized and does not tolerate Islam.”

Mahmoud Haddad, a history professor at the University of Balamand in Lebanon, said that “the Muslim community should take the high moral and political ground” and agree to move the center, even though it has every right to build near ground zero.

“They should show they are more concerned about the general good of all Americans,” said Mr. Haddad, who studied and taught in the United States for two decades. “American society refuses to accept Muslims, even of the Westernized type, and consider them as a potential risk at best.”

What strikes me in this article is the diversity of opinion and thoughts by Muslims quoted. Like the practice of Islam itself, there is no “one opinion fits all” amongst Islamic practitioners.

Marc Lynch’s piece is more dismal in pointing out how the Muslim world may be negatively affected.

He rightly points out that for anti-American extremists and jihadis, their reaction probably amounts to little more than a shrug of the shoulders. But for those in the moderate mainstream, how does it affect them?

The impact is likely to be felt not so much on extremists, whose views about America are rather fixed, but on the vast middle ground, the Arab and Muslim mainstream which both the Bush and Obama administrations have recognized as crucial both for defeating al-Qaeda and for achieving broad American national interests. And that mainstream, not the extremists themselves, is where our attention needs to be focused.

Lynch goes on to provide a selection of what he considers representative of Arab columnists:

* Jamil al-Nimri, a Jordanian liberal writing for al-Ghad, who writes that the backlash against the mosque has unleashed a wave of bigotry and hate, at the expense of the intended message of an enlightened and tolerant Islam.
* Mohammed al-Hammadi, an Emirati writer for al-Ittihad, who describes the mosque as a moment for America to choose whether it truly believes in freedom.
* Abd al-Haq Azouzi, a Moroccan writing for al-Ittihad, who reverses the familiar question to ask “why do they hate us?,” and warns that those cynically manufacturing the issue for political benefit are unleashing an uncontrollable wave of hatred.
* Abdullah al-Shayji, a Kuwaiti writing for al-Ittihad, who sees the mosque battle as a fundamental test of the place of Muslims in America and fears rising Islamophobia.
* Ragheda Dergham, writing in al-Hayat, warns that the campaign against the mosque threatens Islamic moderation.
* Manar al-Shourbji, in Egypt’s al-Masry al-Youm, reflects that the campaign against the mosque demonstrates that the good intentions of the mosque’s founders were not enough in the face of rising anti-Islam extremism in America.

And this is just from the last few days. The most positive spin on the mosque crisis is actually that it’s all politics.

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the courageous remarks of figures such as Michael Bloomberg have also received prominent coverage — something which gives moderate figures something to grasp onto when arguing against the extremists. And that’s what they need, both for their own sake and for ours.

Meanwhile, the mosque has barely registered on the major jihadist forums which I frequent — yesterday, on the leading al-Shamoukh forum, it was not mentioned in the headline of a single one of the first ten pages of posts (more than 500 in all). There have been a few threads, as Evan Kohlmann has claimed, but it’s a fairly minor theme within the forum debates (“Burn a Quran Day” has actually had more traction than the NY mosque thus far, actually). Certainly no triumphalism about how they’ll soon have a monument to victory, as you hear so often out there on the American lunatic fringe. I have no doubt that al-Qaeda and like-minded extremists will eventually use the anti-mosque movement in their propaganda, since it so perfectly fits their narrative of a West at war with Islam — the very narrative which both the Bush administration and the Obama administration worked so hard to combat over the last few years. I suspect that the participants in the forums aren’t talking about it much is that it simply confirms what they already believe about America. They’ll use it, but don’t see much to argue about.

That’s the opposite of the Arab mainstream, which is vigorously arguing about what it means for the future of America’s relationship with Muslims — both in America and in the world. Where the anti-mosque movement and escalating anti-Islam rhetoric is really resonating is with the Arab mainstream

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The mosque issue has been covered heavily on Arab satellite TV stations such as al-Jazeera, and the images of angry Americans chanting slogans and waving signs against Islam have resonated much like the images of angry Arabs burning American flags and denouncing U.S. policy did with American viewers after 9/11. The recent public opinion surveys showing widespread hostility towards Islam among Americans have also gotten a lot of attention.

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by fueling the narrative of a clash of civilizations and an inevitable war between Islam and the West, this unfortunate trend is empowering extremists on all sides and weakening moderates. That’s exactly the dynamic which I warned about here and in my recent Foreign Affairs article, and it’s one which counter-terrorism professionals and public diplomacy specialists alike understand needs to be broken before it’s too late.

And now we have protests going on throughout the world by those thin-skinned and in perpetual rage predictably shouting “Death to America!”, “Death to President Obama!”, who can’t wrap their minds around the fact that the president can’t simply violate the Pastor’s Constitutional rights, nor that the Pastor and his vast congregation of 30 does not represent the consensus voice of America:

Terry has a very very small following and in the grand scheme of things is completely irrelevant, but now it seems that the Muslim world is lumping and stereotyping all Americans together under the actions of one man, leaving us all “at risk,” and characterizing all Americans as Muslim hating bigots.

And of course, Islamic Rage Boys in turn become the poster face/voice for Islam, even though the protesters themselves do not speak for the whole of Islam.

From Rauf’s interview with Soledad O’Brien:

the battle front is not between Muslims and non-Muslims. The real battle front is between moderates on all sides of all the faith traditions and the radicals on all sides. The radicals actually feed off each other. And in some kind of existential way, need each other. And the more that the radicals are able to control the discourse on one side, it strengthens the radicals on the other side and vice versa. We have to turn this around.