Sacred Ground

by Eboo Patel

  It was not the first time on these shores the forces of prejudice had sought to deny the contributions of a religious community, and it was not the first time someone had stood up to defeat those forces. There were battles between pluralism and prejudice long before this land was a nation, even before New York City had its name.

  In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch director-general of what was then New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, banned Quaker prayer meetings. Quakers were viewed as dangerous rabble-rousers—“seducers of the people”—who posed a threat to his city. Stuyvesant ordered the public torturing of a twenty-three-year-old Quaker convert named Roger Hodgson and issued an ordinance that punished with imprisonment and a fine anyone found to be harboring Quakers.12

  In most cities in most countries at most times, that’s where the matter would have ended. Another religion banned, another community banished. But Edward Hart, the town clerk in a village just outside of New Amsterdam (now the site of Flushing, Queens, maybe the most religiously diverse neighborhood in the country) was determined that this land would be different. He gathered a group of his townsmen and drafted a petition taking a stand against what he viewed as blatant prejudice and in favor of a value he was willing to risk everything for: pluralism. Among the most remarkable things about the document is its breadth. The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 did not speak only about Quakers, and it did not speak only of rights. There were lines about the dignity of all humans, coming as we do from the same single ancestor: “The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam.”

  There was an exhortation that we see the good in all people, given that we are each of us animated by a divine source: “Whatsoever form, name or title hee appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them.”

  And there was the continual insistence that human beings of all faiths represent the greatest of God’s gifts—love—and that for this reason, when a person or community comes in love, they ought to be received with grace: “Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses.”13

  The Flushing Remonstrance is frequently cited as being among the earliest articulations of religious freedom in America. But love is too central a theme for it to be understood as a narrowly legal document. In my view, the Flushing Remonstrance belongs more in the tradition of imagining America as a beloved community, a country that welcomes the contributions of all people, than as one outlining a code. Even more inspiring than the document’s beautiful language and broad vision is this: none of the signers was a Quaker.

  And while Edward Hart was a minor official, the stand he took for pluralism was mirrored by someone we lionize as one of our Founding Fathers. In 1790, President Washington heard a plea from Moses Seixas, of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. Seixas was worried about the fate of Jews in the new nation. Would they be harassed and hated as they had been for so many centuries in Europe? Washington knew other religious communities had similar concerns. He chose the occasion of his response to Seixas to state plainly his vision for America:

  The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens. . . . May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.14

  Like the writers of the Flushing Remonstrance, Washington is offering a vision of a national community, not simply articulating a legal doctrine: in America, people will have their identities respected, their freedoms protected, and their safety secured. They will be encouraged to cultivate good relationships with fellow Americans from other backgrounds, no matter the tensions and conflicts in the lands from which they came. And they will be invited—and expected—to contribute to the common good of their country. Respect, relationship, and commitment to the common good—those were Washington’s three pillars of pluralism in a diverse democracy.

  Washington came to his views through both principle and practical experience. As the leader of the Continental Army, the first truly national institution, Washington recognized he was going to need the contributions of all willing groups in America. The rampant anti-Catholic bigotry at that time was disrespectful to Catholic identity, a divisive force within the Continental Army, and a threat to the success of the American Revolution. Washington banned insults to Catholics like burning effigies of the pope, told his officers to make sure the contributions of Catholics were welcomed, and scolded those who disobeyed with words like these: “At such a juncture, and in such circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused.”15

  It was the same in Washington’s private life. When seeking a carpenter and a bricklayer for his Mount Vernon estate, he remarked, “If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mohometans, Jews or Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists.”16 What mattered is what they could build.

  A few months after 9/11, my father went to a banquet hosted by a Muslim activist organization. Somber prayers were offered for the victims of the attacks, and appropriate anger was directed at the terrorists. One of the hosts gave a passionate address about the coming threat to Muslims in America: how our rights were about to be trampled by the government in the name of security. The response, he told the fired-up crowd, should be a Muslim civil rights movement.

  The chief guest at the dinner was the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Perhaps the Muslim speaker felt as if he was paying homage to the movement Jackson had helped lead. If so, what happened next must have come as something of a shock. Jackson opened his speech by saying there is no such thing as Muslim civil rights.

  There is a well-honed sense of victimhood in some segments of the American Muslim community. You can see it in the e-mail newsletters of certain Muslim organizations. Every other story is an incident of a Muslim being wronged. Some Muslims have become expert in stringing such stories together, collecting them into a grand narrative of Muslim suffering stretching from Gaza to Green Bay. During the Ground Zero Mosque episode, I half-expected to see such newsletters linking the prejudice faced by American Muslims to the oppression of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Chechens. Instead, something very different happened. American Muslims contextualized the Cordoba House events not in the narrative of global Muslim suffering, but in the arc of American minority groups that have experienced discrimination. The talk was not about Palestinians and Iraqis over there, it was about blacks and Jews right here. Muslims began studying the American experience from the perspective of minorities that had been marginalized. They expected to find parallels to their own suffering. What they did not expect was a lesson in what it means to be American.

  America has not been a promise to all its people. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock,” Malcolm X said. “Plymouth Rock landed on us.” Whatever the faiths of the workmen who came to Mount Vernon, they laid their bricks next to Washington’s slaves. We are a nation whose creed speaks of welcoming all communities and whose practice has too often crushed them. But, to borrow from Maya Angelou, the dust was determined to rise, and generous enough to carry the rest of us with. People who knew the whip of the slave master in Alabama, the business end of the police baton on the South Side of Chicago, people who could easily have called our nation a lie, chose instead to believe America was a broken promise, and gave their bodies and their blood to fix it. As Langston Hughes wrote, even though “America never was America to me,” he was still committed to making the promise of this nation real, declaring one line later in his poem, “America will be.”17

  That night at the Muslim activist ba
nquet, Jesse Jackson wanted to make sure his audience left with a full understanding of the meaning of the civil rights movement. The marches, the sit-ins, the braving of fire hoses and attack dogs, had not been about safeguarding the rights of one community. The purpose was to expand and secure a framework that protected all communities. “We weren’t fighting for black civil rights,” Jackson told his audience. “We were fighting for your civil rights. You have a choice right now: you can talk about an America where your people don’t get sent to the back of the bus, or you can talk about an America where no one gets sent to the back of the bus.”

  I could sense the emotion in my dad’s voice when he called to tell me about the event. He paused for a long time, collecting his thoughts, and then said, “We owe our presence in this country to that movement.”

  It was a movement not for the African American Dream but, in the words of Jesse Jackson’s mentor, Martin Luther King Jr., for “the American Dream, the dream of men of all races, creeds, national backgrounds, living together as brothers.” It was not only a movement that helped pass legislation dismantling racist policies in the domestic realm but also a movement whose spirit changed immigration laws as well, ushering in the Immigration Act of 1965, legislation that allowed people like those gathered at that Muslim banquet to come to America. King had a vision of a nation where all communities participated in the privilege and responsibility of pluralism, a vision that included religious identity as readily as race: “One of the first things we notice about this dream is an amazing universalism. It does not say some men, it says all men. It does not say all white men, but it says all men which includes black men. It doesn’t say all Protestants, but it says all men which includes Catholics. It doesn’t say all Gentiles, it says all men which includes Jews.”18

  Registering your story in the narrative of American discrimination offers opportunities for commiseration, but more importantly, it gives your community a dramatically expanded set of responsibilities. You quickly learn that other American communities used their moments of suffering to work for a nation where no one suffers. You quickly realize that other people’s struggles have secured your rights. It begins to dawn on you that you have a responsibility to use the moment when the spotlight shines on you to secure the rights of others. “Whoever degrades another degrades me,” wrote Walt Whitman.19 That is the heart of the American spirit.

  It was a lesson I learned from John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League. One of John’s earliest memories was being released from an internment camp. His father held him by the shoulders and said, “Son, do not forget this moment, and do not let America forget it. This country is too good for what it did to us.”

  On the morning of 9/11, John was heading south on I-5 out of Seattle, driving to an early meeting. He was casually turning the radio dial when he caught the news of the first plane hitting the tower. He turned the volume up and listened as the second plane hit, the towers collapsed, and threats directed at Muslims started to pour in. He turned his car around and called his assistant. “Cancel my meetings for the rest of the week,” he said. “And start calling our regional directors. Tell them to cancel their meetings. The focus of our organization has just become about the protection of American Muslims.” When I asked him why he did that, he told me how grateful he was for the people who stood up for Japanese Americans during World War II. Had there been more, he believed, the internment camps would not have happened. When it was his turn to protect another community, it was his responsibility to take it. The most American thing you can do is stand up for someone else.

  We hosted an intern at Interfaith Youth Core during the Ground Zero Mosque crisis who embodied that ethic. His name was Nick, he was from nearby DePaul University, and he had the task of tracking the hurricane of media relating to Muslims during that time. He spent hours every day reading the hundreds of articles and blog posts on the slings and arrows suffered by Muslims, and compiling reports on the trends, highlights, and points of concern. One day, he wrote an article of his own. It was about Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University student who committed suicide after his sexual encounter with a man was streamed live.20 Nick wrote that he understood Tyler Clementi because, as a gay man, he had planned his own suicide many times. He described it in detail: the note he would write, the pills he would swallow, the look on his grandmother’s face when she found his body.21

  I had been so consumed by the rampant Islamophobia of 2010 that I had completely missed the bigotry others were suffering around that same time. Yes, we Muslims faced an ugly strain of intolerance, but nothing like what the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community had suffered—torture in the Bronx, bullying so severe it led to multiple suicides. It amazed me that a member of that group was spending his time sticking up for Muslims. Why would Nick volunteer for an organization advocating for religious pluralism? For Nick, the reason was simple: if he wanted his community to be free and safe in America, he had to work for an America where everybody was free and safe.

  Talking to Nick about his essay, I realized just how many people had stood up for Muslims during the Ground Zero Mosque crisis. Our allies included Evangelical Christian ministers, hip-hop moguls, Jewish comedians, gay atheists—the list goes on. I couldn’t help but wonder, would we Muslims take risks to stand up for them? Would we support Nick when he suffered antigay bullying? You cannot ask from others what you are unwilling to give.

  My interview with Fatima was at City Hall. I wanted to speak with her in her work environment, and I wanted to see the famous chair facing two computer screens in the bullpen where the mayor sat. I didn’t realize that City Hall was so close to Ground Zero and thus to 51 Park Place, the site of Cordoba House. I started out in that direction and was soon lost in the spaghetti bowl of streets in Lower Manhattan—Park Row, Park Place, Chambers, Beekman, Broadway. The longer I walked, the more I tasted the flavors of New York’s urban masala: A guy wearing a cowboy hat standing outside a doorway saying, “Dominican hair salon, Dominican hair salon.” Groups of suburban high school students dressed in canary-yellow T-shirts on a field trip to the city. Bankers and secretaries catching discreet smokes fifteen feet away from office buildings. On Broadway, a few blocks north at Astor Place, a small group of Hare Krishnas beating their drums, chanting their chants, and serving free food underneath a Kmart sign.

  The sculpture of the large black cube at the Astor Place subway stop brought to mind the Ka’aba in Mecca. I thought about the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The openness of the invitation from the Muslim poet Rumi would fit alongside perfectly: “Come, come, whoever you are . . . Ours is not a caravan of despair.”22

  My conversation with Fatima had been inspiring. I viewed her as part of a new turn in the immigrant thread of the American Muslim experience. Being Muslim wasn’t a default mode for her, something she had blindly absorbed from her parents and continued practicing robotically. Islam was a proactive choice, one that she had made in a world of other options. It was a religious identity nurtured by being around people of other faiths, one deeply connected to serving the diverse community that surrounded her. Dr. Umar Abd-Allah of the Nawawi Foundation, perhaps the most broadly respected Muslim scholar in America today, speaks of the importance of indigenizing Islam in America.23 The manner in which Fatima carried out her work as an American Muslim in a senior post in the Bloomberg administration illustrated that indigenizing.

  Even though she had personal sympathies with the Muslims campaigning for Eid as a public school holiday, Shama ultimately advised the mayor against it. She simply could not justify disrupting school for over a million students, teachers, and staff so that a fraction of those could celebrate a religious holiday. Rather, she advised, Muslims would be free to take those days off to celebrate with their families, schools should accommodate appropriately, and everyone else should show up to learn. I asked her w
hy she chose that course. “My job is to advise the mayor to take policy positions that will help this whole city thrive,” she explained to me. “When the whole city thrives, individual communities thrive.”

  She was equally clear in her support for Cordoba House. It was an American institution founded by Muslims that would serve the city. Lower Manhattan would benefit enormously from a swimming pool, a public art space, and a beautiful auditorium. She told the mayor that it was exactly the kind of place she wanted to bring her children, a place where they could say their prayers as Muslims and then engage in arts projects with Jews, Christians, and humanists. That was exactly the kind of institution Bloomberg wanted in his city. And then he shared why the issue was so personal to him.

  It turns out that Michael Bloomberg, one of the richest people in America, a man who had won an unprecedented third term in one of the most visible and influential positions in American politics, a Master of the Masters of the Universe, had a childhood memory of prejudice that still stung. He remembered a time when his family, because they were Jewish, could not purchase a home outright in the Boston suburb of Medford. They had to ask their lawyer—a Christian—to buy it and sell it back to them. It was a personal thread in the fabric of religious prejudice in America. Some people experience bigotry and respond, “I’m going to help build a world where that never happens to my people again.” Michael Bloomberg experienced it and decided, “I’m going to help build a world where that never happens to anyone again.”24