What Muslim New Yorkers feel about Ground Zero Mosque

New York: In the storm of anger and accusation over an Islamic center and mosque planned near ground zero, one thing seems clear to Laique Khan: His fellow Muslims have a right to build the project.

"If this really is a free country," said Mr Khan, 56, the manager of a trucking company in Brooklyn, "then, by all rights you must, you must, allow it."

The same holds true for Pervaz Akhtar, a tailor who keeps a shop a few blocks from the center's site -- and who lost his first shop and nearly his life in the September 11 attacks. "There is a principle involved," Mr Akhtar, 58, said. "We believe in the American Constitution."

Yet with equal confidence, both men -- who squared their shoulders and seemed to address an imaginary town hall meeting when discussing the issue -- embrace a seemingly contradictory conviction about the center: It does not have to be two blocks from the site of the attacks.

"If they want to put it 10 blocks away, that's fine," Mr Akhtar said. "I believe in compromise, too."

The debate over building a Muslim community center so close to where terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam killed more than 2,700 people has attracted the intense views of political and religious leaders, victims' families and pundits. But the outcome could have its most lasting impact on the estimated 600,000 Muslim residents in New York and its suburbs.

Many of them expressed a welter of mixed feelings in interviews this week on street corners, in stores and in mosques: Some said they felt embittered or hurt by criticism of the project, and of Islam in general, yet understood opponents' misgivings. Others said Muslim-Americans should continue to push for the center's construction as a means of asserting their full citizenship rights -- but not too hard, lest they draw even more resentment. A few said they wished the project had never been proposed in the first place.

While these few dozen conversations do not represent the views of all Muslim New Yorkers, they show that many are grappling deeply, through the current tension, with the lingering ambiguities of their place in American society nine years after 9/11.

Malik Nadeem Abid, an insurance agent whose storefront window on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn framed a steady stream of men walking to pray at the mosque next door, said he was "not a big fan" of the decision by the Cordoba Initiative, a Muslim group that promotes interfaith cooperation, to build the center near ground zero.

"It was not a politically smart move, from my perspective," said Mr Abid, 45. "No one wants a center in downtown Manhattan that stands as a permanent fixture of this terrible tension."

Yet the decision has been made, he said, "and we can't let the loudest voices dictate what happens." Still, he added, if the center were built 5 or 10 blocks away, as some people have proposed, "I don't think it would matter very much."

That kind of ambivalence over the downtown project, some said, was partly the point: Muslims in America embody the same diversity as everyone else.

"I see both sides," said A. Chowdhry, 27. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, and teaches in a New Jersey grade school. "As Americans, ground zero is our hallowed ground, too. But it pains me to be excluded from this part of being American."

For many Muslims, nothing since the 2001 attacks has crystallized the difficulties of being both American and Muslim like the fight over the nine-story center on Park Place, which is to be called Park51. Several compared the experience to the years just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japanese-Americans were presumed by many to be disloyal.

"It's been nine years, but it feels like we haven't moved an inch since then to come to terms with the issues," said Muntasir Sattar, 30, an anthropology student at Columbia University. "And now it is all coming back," almost like a symptom of post-traumatic stress, he said.

Some have noticed more anti-Muslim graffiti in the subways. Young Muslim-Americans said they had found themselves cornered at social events, usually by the older relatives of non-Muslim friends, and asked to justify what was usually referred to as "a mosque on top of ground zero."

Majeed Babar, 39, a Pakistani journalist living in Queens, says he talks to people concerned for the safety of their loved ones. "People just want to be able to go to work and support their families, and not worry that their children will be attacked in the streets because of all this drumbeat of anger," he said.

At the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens, Imam Shamsi Ali, the director, said the debate over Park51 was almost a distraction from what he believed was the real concern: "the Islamophobia that is causing the same resistance to the building of mosques in Staten Island and Tennessee and California."

He added, "I am more worried about the larger issue than about whether this project succeeds or not."

In Muslim neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, a mixture of bustle and otherworldly quiet defines street life these days, during the holy month of Ramadan, when as a spiritual exercise in patience and humility, observant Muslims refrain from eating or drinking between dawn and dusk.

Moinul Haque, 25, a soft-spoken graduate student in mathematics at the University of Texas, home for the summer in Jackson Heights, winced when asked about the hubbub over the Manhattan center. As a person who guards his privacy, he said, he was a little resentful at having to defend Muslims' citizenship rights in what he called "a wholly artificial controversy."

But he felt that the center's developers should not unilaterally withdraw from the downtown site. "It will solve nothing if the organizers back down now," he said. "It has to be worked out. There has to be dialogue."

Misunderstandings only compound themselves unless confronted, he said.

That was exactly the concern of Ahmed Habeeb, president of the Islamic Center of Long Island, in Westbury. He recently reached out to neighbors and the police through the local news media with a special appeal: Because the festivities marking the end of Ramadan this year will occur close to September 11, Mr Habeeb asked that residents not misinterpret the party atmosphere at the mosque on that final evening, when more than 1,000 people are expected to share a meal and exchange gifts.

"It will not mean that we are celebrating the 9/11 attacks," he said. "It sounds strange to have to say this, I know. But in this climate you can't be too careful."

Like many Muslims asked about the center near ground zero, Mr Habeeb said he was tired of talking about it, and would be happier if it had never been conceived. "If I were in charge, I would probably rethink the whole thing for the sake of communal harmony," he said. "But there are risks in backing off."

In such a fierce conflict, he explained, the center's foes may interpret compromise as a sign of weakness -- fueling opposition to new mosques everywhere.

"If we back off on it, it could be seen by them as 'One down, two thousand to go,' " he said. "It's very complex at this point."