Ground Zero (Cordoba House) Mosque is Not for Allah

By Jawad Hakim

The controversy surrounding the Ground Zero mosque is dividing our entire nation, as we approach the 9th anniversary of the worst historical terrorist attack against America.  There should be no mosque built close to Ground Zero.  Such a mosque is in extremely poor taste and is definitely not built for Allah, and the building of it will bring repercussions against the Muslim community in America.  The people building the mosque should be flogged by American Muslims as traitors, for putting the entire nation of Muslims at risk for their idiotic egotistical purposes.  Mosques are places to worship God.  Mosques are not footholds of expanding influence.

First, who is behind this Islamic Center? Really just one man, Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, imam of Masjid al-Farah, an existing mosque located at 245 West Broadway. He wants to raze the 153-year-old former home of the Burlington Coat Factory and build in its stead an Islamic Center to be named the Cordoba House, supposedly overlooking ground zero.  Rauf is said to be from an Ikhwani family—his father fled Egypt in 1948 where he had taught at Al-Azhar for years, and then lived around the world, including Kuwait and the United States.  The elder Rauf is the man who found international financing for the 96th Street mosque.  Apparently following in his footsteps, the younger Rauf appears to have secured about $5 million to buy the former Burlington Coat Factory property in cash, and appears very confident in his ability to obtain the planned $100 million to construct a 13 story glass and steel Islamic community center and mosque, despite reports that the current cash assets of his not-for-profit amount to about $20,000.  Reporters have documented significant financing that Rauf has secured from international donors, particularly in the Middle East.  In fact, Rauf has good relations with Western and Muslim financiers. He apparently fully expects to finish building the project in time for a grand opening… on 9/11/2011.  Could he have chosen a worse date? Benyamin Netanyahu must be chortling over his pancakes.

Most Americans blame Muslims for 9/11, and in fact because of 9/11 consider all Muslims to be terrorists—which has led to firestorms of bigotry and mistreatment of Muslims in this country and around the world—in fact because of 9/11 very many Muslims have been discriminated against, tortured, maimed, and killed.

Suicide bombing is a crime which harms Muslims.  First it is clearly haram because every idiot knows that in Shari’ah it is not permitted to kill people indiscriminately, especially Muslims, because any Muslim who kills another Muslim faces hell.  And killing one person (Muslim or non) is tantamount to killing all of humanity.  The people who commit suicide bombings do so more frequently in the Muslim world than elsewhere, killing Muslims more often than not.  They also deliberately target groups, including Sufis and Shi’a, that disagree with their own idiotic version of Islam.

The deviated sects, Wahhabi and Salafi, which teach that it is permissible to commit suicide, to commit suicide bombings, and to kill innocent people indiscriminately have, unfortunately, a level of influence and power all out of proportion to the number of people who believe in them.  When they commit these heinous acts, such as 9/11, or the Madrid train bombings, or the many other terrorist attacks or the suicide attacks—the outrages that have become routine, especially in the Muslim world—when they commit these acts they push people away from Islam, and help to convert millions of Christian and other observers worldwide from passive spectators into animated anti-Muslim activists.  Just as American bombs that kill civilians turn non-combatants into insurgents, just so Muslim suicide bombs turn would-be potential friends into committed enemies of Islam and Muslims.  What effect does the daily barrage of news coverage of satanic suicide bombings have on public perception?  Much has been made of the American “hearts and minds” campaign—but Muslims have to think about their own hearts and minds campaign, and they must go beyond the shallow rhetoric that the real problem for Muslims is the “anti-Muslim media bias.”  Maybe if Muslims weren’t committing atrocities every day the negative media coverage would be less (although this is not to give a pass to the anti-Muslim writers and journalists, some of them funded by interested governmental parties, who alter facts and use twisted logic to attack Islam and Muslims).

9/11 was a suicide terrorist attack, which harmed Muslims more than any other group because it focused the hatred and mobilized the peoples of the world to come against Muslims and even against Islam itself.  The level of vitriol and rhetoric directed against Muslims today is unparalleled, has certainly transgressed the freedoms secured by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and likely could not have been imagined by non-Muslims on September 10, 2001—however that is the world in which we live and we Muslims can place the blame squarely at the feet of nineteen hijackers who died September 11.  In the wake of 9/11 many innocent Muslims were interrogated in the United States, untold tens of thousands faced employment discrimination.  Outside the United States, the 9/11 attacks led directly to: (1) revenge killings in which thousands of Taliban prisoners (who never knew about 9/11 before it happened) were stuffed in shipping crates and sent to the desert to slowly die from the heat; (2) war-based turmoil which swept Afghanistan and Iraq, potentially killing over 1 million people (according to some studies of Iraqi civilian casualties)—minimal realistic casualties for Iraq alone consist of about 100,000 civilians killed there; (3) imprisonment and torture of many innocent Muslims swept up by American forces in the orgy of revenge after 9/11 in and around Pakistan and Afghanistan; (4) the tortures and executions of thousands of people in Iraq during the sectarian war; (5) the replacement of functioning governmental regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan with incompetent and corrupt American client regimes.

These have been the results of the 9/11 attacks.  And yet comparatively the 9/11 attacks were less of a crime than the Cordoba House. At least a suicide attack ends when it ends.  Some people grieve a lifetime afterwards, but at least the event itself does not actively goad them every day. 

Even worse than suicide bombing is the quiet suicide bombs, the catastrophes of faux-pas that idiotic Muslims do in the name of Islam.  These gross overreaches beyond common courtesy are like continuous long-term suicide bombings that build resentment, anger and hatred over years and years—just such a gross deviation from common courtesy is the Ground Zero Mosque, called the Cordoba House.  Notwithstanding the fact that Cordoba is not actually at Ground Zero, rather it is blocks away—the mere existence of the Cordoba center will be a lightning rod, a rallying cry for every anti-Muslim act done in the next twenty or thirty years by angry Americans.  Doubtless there will be Muslims and potentially others killed solely because of the existence of this one mosque.

Allah says in Qur`an that Mosques are for Allah.

Waana almasajida lil Lahi fala tad’oo ma’a Allahi ahadan

Al-Jinn:18

If Cordoba House were for Allah, then you would have wanted to put the mosque in a quiet non-controversial location where thousands of people had not been murdered in the last ten years.  You wouldn’t have wanted the controversy that you appear to be relishing.  You could have built it, Mr. Rauf, by expanding your current mosque.  You could have built it more cheaply in New Jersey rather than Manhattan.

The above analysis does not even touch on the fact that Muslims are not supposed to build large buildings, anything over two stories is for satan. 

So please don’t tell me that this mosque is for Allah, or for Islam, or to serve Muslims. 

No, this mosque is a monument to the egos of the idiotic Muslims who feel that in order to be a good Muslim one must oppose the West, must oppose Western powers.  Given that so much financing was from Muslims outside of the United States, and that Rauf explicitly sought out a site tangent to Ground Zero, one gets the sickening feeling that this time for once the anti-Muslim bigots are actually right, that this really is a kind of sick 9/11 Victory Mosque. 

You are so busy opposing the West that you have forgotten that Islam is East-West neutral.  Islam is to support and worship God, and oppose satan.  In Qur`an there is no injunction to oppose the West.  While you are opposing the West, in this case you are opposing God.  And the one leading you, Mr. Rauf and your Cordoba House, into more and more chaos and confusion, happily condemning the innocent Muslims in this country to weathering lifetimes of discrimination and hatred, is satan. 

Mosques are supposed to be for Allah, not for satan.  Your Cordoba mosque is not for Islam.

Build the condominiums that developer Sharif El-Gamal originally planned for the site—build Rauf’s mosque elsewhere.