Q&A with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Dallas Morning News, July 9, 2004
By Gretel C. Kovach
"What is flawed is not the religion."
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf leads a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City. He says Muslim terrorists have hijacked his peaceful and pluralistic religion. This has deepened his life's struggle to build stronger ties between Americans and the Muslim world.
Islam, Christianity and Judaism, he says, have much more in common than modern geopolitics would suggest. In the fundamentals of Islam, he finds reaffirmation of the Abrahamic ethic of loving egalitarianism that is at the heart of all the great monotheistic religions.
As an American educated here and in Egypt, England, Malaysia and Kuwait, Imam Rauf is distinctively positioned to bridge the growing gap of misunderstanding between the Western world and Islam. Born to a long line of imams, he graduated from Columbia University and is the founder of the New York-based ASMA Society, a nonprofit group "dedicated to fostering an American-Muslim identity and building bridges between American Muslims and the American public."
The author of a new book, What's Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West (HarperSanFrancisco, $23.95), Imam Rauf was in Dallas last week for a conference on Islam. He spoke with Dallas Morning News Staff Writer Gretel C. Kovach . Here are excerpts.
Question:Why did you write this book?
Answer:In some respects it was to right the notion, popularized by some books, that something is flawed with the religion itself. What is flawed is not the religion, what is flawed is people.
When people do wrong acts and wrap themselves in the flag, whether the American flag or the Islamic flag, that doesn't make what they are doing right.
Question:How can the Abrahamic ethic you speak of heal growing tensions among Muslims, Christians and Jews?
Answer:The core ethic is the two major commandments: To love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind and soul; and to love your neighbor - to love for your fellow human being what you love for yourself.
Question:Are people surprised to learn how much in common the three great monotheistic religions share?
Answer:Often they are, and they wonder why, in spite of this commonality, there is so much conflict.
Conflicts, I believe, are usually about power and assets. When we have a disagreement we look at what differentiates us.
Question:Is the Muslim God different from the Christian and Jewish God?
Answer:No. The word Allah is just the Arabic name for God. In fact it is cognate to the Hebrew El, or Eloh. It's the same word.
Question:Is there any contradiction between being a good Muslim and being a good American?
Answer:Not if America is defined by the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution - a very Islamic document.
A thousand years before the American Republic was founded, Islamic jurists, those who wrote the philosophy of sharia [Islamic law], stated that all of sharia serves to further and protect five fundamental objectives, which are really human rights - the right to life, the right to freedom of religion, the right to property, the right to family, and the right to mental well-being. These are God-given rights in the American Constitution. Rule by consent of the governed, an independent judiciary, the rule of law - these are all Islamic principles.
Question:Yet the message of tolerance and moderation, put forth by many American Muslims, is often drowned out by rising radicalism in the wider Islamic world.
Answer:That, in my opinion, is primarily political. What we have seen in the last century - a hard-edged militancy wrapped in the name of Islam - is part of the growth of religious fundamentalism which developed both in the West and in the Muslim world. It's the reaction to a militantly secular philosophy that is anti-religious in sentiment.
But moderate Islam is not unique to America. It emanates out of a very, very deep and long tradition.
Question:Is your book available in Arabic?
Answer:No, not yet.
Question:Given the global state of affairs, can American Muslims do much to influence Islam - to bring the faith back to what you see as its roots?
Answer:That is my hope, because we live in a climate of democracy and pluralism, where you can argue your case.
Question:Do terrorists who fight in the name of Islam hate our freedoms, or our foreign policies?
Answer:It's because they love what we have here, and we have prevented them from having it there. We have supported regimes that have been authoritarian and oppressive to their own people. This is why people are angry with us.
If we had encouraged democracy in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden would have run for political office there.
Question:Particularly since Sept. 11, you have tried to promote interfaith understanding. Is it working?
Answer:I think so. There is a very clear recognition by the leading minds in this country that there needs to be a coherent, intelligent policy towards the Muslim world.
At the same time, the adventure in Iraq - which was pushed by some people as something that would reduce the gap and the tension and the polarization between the United States and the Muslim world - appears to have resulted in the opposite. It's increased the dangers of terrorism rather than attenuated them.
What can we do to help bridge the gap between the Muslim world and the United States? The Cordoba Initiative [a multifaith think tank he helped organize] is one answer. The name is intended to evoke the happy, pluralistic society under the Muslim caliphate that existed in Cordoba, Spain, where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived and prospered together.
It is a reminder today that Muslims are not existential enemies of Jews or of Christians.
Copyright © 2004 by Dallas Morning News. Reprinted with permission.
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