Cordoba House: A Strategic, Legal, and Political Analysis

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

        The current flap leading up to the anniversary of 9/11 about burning the Qur’an is profoundly different from the issue of respecting the purpose of Cordoba House. 

        Today’s article, from http://www.radicalviews.org, entitled “Burning the Qur’an and the Satanic Verses: Is here a Difference?, makes some good points on the issue of collective guilt but they are not challenging because they are so obvious.  All the cases studied in constitutional law at Harvard Law School or any other law school could quite rationally be argued either way or in many different ways.  This “burn the Qur’an” issue is a fly-by-night affair, so we should not pay it too much attention except as a security issue. 

        In contrast, the Cordoba House issue may be and should be front and center for the next hundred years, because it touches in a very sophisticated way on all the major threats and opportunities of the 21st century.  The Muslim reaction to attacks on Cordoba House will subtly and profoundly determine the future both of Muslims around the world and of America in the world.  This is why Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy should not compromise on carrying out the original purpose of Cordoba House, as long as some legal guarantees can be obtained for its independence in perpetuity.  Cordoba House could and should provide a classic case for the study of both Islamic law, comparative law, international law, and American constitutional law.

      Two points need to be emphasized in assessing the purpose and value of Cordoba House, otherwise known as the Ground-Zero Mosque.  The first is its purpose and the legal rationale generally preferred for defending it.  The second, which arose a month after this article was originally written but never published, is the reliability of Cordoba House fulfilling this purpose.

      The second point perhaps should be discussed first, namely, how reliable is it that the creator of the Cordoba House concept will maintain control of Cordoba House within the Park 51 building.  What goes on in Park 51, if anything, will be determined not by Imam Abdul Rauf and the board of Cordoba House but by a 23-person Board of Directors that controls the building itself.

      One of the developers and major funders of Park51, which is a 501c3 organization separate from Cordoba House and independent of its plans to house prayer rooms for several world religions within Cordoba House, is Hisham Elzanaty, who has said that he is willing to sell Park51 for the right price.  AP quotes him as saying, “I’m a businessman.  This was a mere business transaction for me.  Develop, raze it, sell it.  If someone wants to give me 18 or 20 million dollars today, it’s all theirs”.  Donald Trump reportedly has already made an offer. 

Actually Elzanaty does not have the authority to sell the property or determine what goes on inside it, because SoHo Properties owns it, and he and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf are only two of SoHo’s eight directors.

      Perhaps there is a simple legal solution to this issue of ultimate control of Cordoba House, but this should be part of the overall transparency of the operation.  Since both Cordoba House and Park51 are non-profit organizations, all arrangements must be public and transparent.  Furthermore, they can be bound by simple contract, whereby the non-profit owners of both entities agree that the original purposes of Cordoba House may not be infringed upon by either side.  Sale of the property can be legally encumbered so that any future property owners would be bound by this provision. 

Another profound issue is whether Islamic law can govern the future of Cordoba House.  According to the Islamic law of foundations, known as awqaf (sing. waqf), once a foundation establishes a mosque or other non-profit project on a property, this property may never be sold for any purpose other than the one for which it was created.  This, of course, would be subject to the American law of eminent domain, because Islamic law is always subject to the public law of the local government and to any constitutional provisions of higher levels of government. 

In order to guarantee the future integrity and reliability of Cordoba House, such provisions and arrangements must be both adopted and made public.

      The most important point, however, is the first one.  What is the purpose of Cordoba House and why should it be defended as part of group rights.

This first point involves both its purpose as envisaged by its creator, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, and the subsidiary issue of the legal rationale used by most of its supporters and the media in defending it.  Most of the pundits who support Cordoba House rely on the importance of protecting religious tolerance and cultural diversity as basic American values. 

Few commentators even mention Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s insistence as long as a year ago that the main purpose of the Center is three-fold: 1) to represent an American community condemnation and warning against the essence of modern evil represented by 9/11; 2) to commemorate the deaths of hundreds of Muslims who either worked in the Twin Towers or helped as First Responders in efforts to save lives; and 3) to preclude any repetition of 9/11 by serving as a center to promote interfaith understanding and cooperation based on the best of all faiths.

          One of the first articles to address the above strategies and counter-strategies during the current highpoint in the spread of Islamophobia was Anthony DiMaggio’s, “The Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero: A Manufactured Controversy”.  This article, published on August 12, 2010, by CounterPunch, supports the conclusion of William R. Hutchison in his monumental book, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal, that, “America leads the world in naivete about its own superiority as a pluralistic society”.

          The moral crisis of Cordoba House and the politicalization of discourse in America over Cordoba House does not result from Imam Abdul Rauf’s three-fold symbolic purpose in locating Cordoba House near Ground Zero.  Rather, such politicalization, which has a decades-old professional background in an Islamophobic industry, has produced the moral crisis of Cordoba House.

          This perspective on the moral and political crisis of Cordoba House has been addressed in many of my writings over the past twenty years, especially in deconstructing the phenomenon of Islamophobia.  One of the main leaders in opposing Cordoba House, who has a long history in this field, is the dean and prince of political pander, Newt Gingrich, who started out with his Progressive Institute (now excluded from all media coverage of his background) and then switched in 1994 in order to engineer the so-called Gingrich Revolution by taking over both houses of Congress for the “Conservatives”, defined as those who a poll suggested supported the ten most popular vote getting themes, which became his Contract with America. 

          Gingrich waited out the 2008 presidential election, because he saw it as a lost cause, but now he is seriously preparing for 2012 and is trying to resurrect what he thinks is a winning theme triggered by the opportunity to ride the wave of disinformation about Cordoba House. 

          When Gingrich ran into trouble in Congress as Speaker of the House because of his totalitarian management style, he needed a scapegoat to consolidate his power.  He did so by laying the groundwork for a new war against evil by calling for a war against Islamic totalitarianism.  On February 8, 1995, at a much-ballyhood conference of military and intelligence officers on developing a global strategy, Gingrich announced, “I have yet to see a coherent strategy for fighting Islamic totalitarianism”. 

          This was strategically a brilliant move.  In the American lexicon developed in the war against Communist global conquest, the world is full of harmless tyrants who seek only their own power at home and therefore can be co-opted to serve American purposes.  Such tyranny is different from totalitarianism, which by definition seeks control of the human mind not only as a means to consolidate its own power but primarily as the ultimate end of its own destiny.

          The use of the emotive word, “totalitarianism”, became an instrument of mimetic thought control and escalated the battle against terrorism to the ideological level of grand strategy, because totalitarianism was the major global threat to Western civilization for most of the 20th century.

          By the mere turn of a phrase, this seminal thinker of the half-century-old NeoCon movement transformed Islam from a religion that occasionally has been distorted to justify both private and state-sponsored terrorism into a generic monster that must be fought wherever it raises its ugly head, because “Islamic totalitarianism” by definition threatens the survival of the Free World. 

          This simple change in terminology served to short-circuit thought so that both long-range global forecasting and operational doctrine and specific military plans no longer had to based on knowledge.  The thinking has already been done and encapsulated in the new language, where a false symbolism becomes an unchallengeable reality.  And by a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, the potential danger becomes real and thereby triggers a spiraling confrontation of action and reaction with the zero-sum result of universal chaos.

          Global chaos is indeed a threat to civilization, whether through a biological attack on major American cities, or an Israeli attack on Iran, or a rogue Russian nuclear attack of revenge on Israel, or merely through the disintegration of public discourse and the death of freedom in America.

          What is the answer?  One element surely is to support the enlightened purpose of Cordoba House.  As explained in my essays, “Cordoba House: Missing the Message,” published on August 19, 2010 in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, and the subsequent article, “Cordoba House: Spiritual Narratives”, the purpose of the so-called “Mosque at Ground Zero” is not to demonstrate freedom of religion, nor should it be supported only on that basis. 

          The dream of its founder, Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, a renowned Qaderi Sufi shaykh, has been to create an interfaith center to bring out the best of all religions in America.  The importance of this dream was only reinforced by the terrible tragedy of 9/11.  His proposed interfaith center is named after the flourishing of religion and culture in Cordoba, Spain, once the largest city in the world with more than a hundred libraries.  For more than two centuries before it was destroyed by petty tyrants from both within and without it was an intellectual and spiritual center of the Abrahamic religions unrivaled in human history as a symbol of interfaith understanding and cooperation.  The purpose of Imam Abdul Rauf’s proposal for Cordoba House is to bring into reality the Common Word of all world religions, which is to seek reconciliation for the hurts of the past so that together in solidarity we can reduce the mutual hatred spawned by the crime of collective guilt and build a better future.

          Ideally the funding for Cordoba House should come from representatives of all three of the Abrahamic religions involved in the two-phase Common Word project, and from representatives of Buddhism, perhaps the Dalai Lama, as part of the third phase, now known as Common Ground. 

          A major challenge to all people of faith today is to rehabilitate the role of religion in the world as a cure rather than as a cause of chaos.  This requires mutual understanding of each other’s faith traditions in order to bring out the best of all faiths, as well as solidarity in action to address the issues of conscience that concern all people of faith in their search for peace, prosperity and freedom through faith-based reconciliation and compassionate justice.

          The key to such understanding and cooperation is mutual respect based on equality in human dignity, unity in diversity, recognition of everyone’s personal relationship with God, and a common search for transcendent truth, as developed in my recent book, The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice: An Islamic Perspective, January 2010, 224 pages, which became available on Amazon at the end of August.

          Interfaith dialogue and cooperation rely on the common conviction that the search for solutions to the issues of conscience in the world must follow the path of inclusive pluralism and constructive cooperation as the best means to marginalize those who seek solutions through confrontation and violence.  The task of bringing out the best in all faiths, rather than surrendering to the worst, requires a mindset of hope.  This task requires an opportunity mentality rather than the self-defeating threat mentality produced inevitably by the paranoia of fear.

          Success in marginalizing the forces of fear by marshaling the forces of civilizational renewal through ecumenical pluralism will depend on reviving in every religion its classical or traditionalist wisdom embodied in the Jewish “fear of God”, the Christian love of God, and the resulting Islamic search for truth and justice, based on recognition that all three originate in God’s love for everyone of us.

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Dr. Crane earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in legal problems of international investment.  He is Chairman of the Board of Global Vision, a management consulting firm; Founding Chairman of The Center for Understanding Islam, established in New Jersey across the river from Manhatten a few weeks after 9/11; and Director for Global Strategy at the Abraham Federation: A Global Center for Peace Through Compassionate Justice.  In September 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to be his first U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, responsible also for two-track diplomacy with the Islamist movements in the Middle East and with Iran.