President Barack Obama (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
I don’t see how strict constitutionalists in the US, many of whom tend to be his trenchant and kneejerk critics, can possibly object to President Barack Obama supporting the right of the Muslim community to build a mosque not too far from the Ground Zero in New York. It is part of the fundamental rights guaranteeing religious freedom irrespective of whose religion and whose freedom.
Quite aware of the pile of political dung he has walked into by upholding the constitution, Obama has now somewhat nuanced his response saying,“I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”
“As a citizen, and as president,” Obama said earlier during an iftar at the White House on Friday, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”
To those who define America as a “Judeo-Christian” nation—and they have certainly grown in their assertiveness if not necessarily in their numbers in recent years -- the very idea of an Islamic center, housing a mosque, in the vicinity of the site where the Twin Towers once stood constitutes an unpardonable affront.
Many, who otherwise swear by the US constitution when it comes to the Second Amendment that guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, show expedient suppleness when it comes to religious freedom of the kind that the proposed Islamic center seems to test. It is almost as if they want to qualify that religious freedom to mean freedom that is hued in Judeo-Christian tones. I seriously wonder whether there would have been so much outcry had a Christian center or Jewish center been proposed at the same site.
The founders of the United States in all their wisdom charted a course for their country they knew would be particularly demanding to maintain in the ensuing decades and centuries. It was a result of some profoundly felt political, cultural and social convictions. If the constitutional purists now think that the document, which they otherwise believe is set in stone and must not be altered in fundamental ways, then they have to uphold the right to religious freedom, particularly the kind they don’t like.
Separately, those who have proposed the Islamic center in Manhattan could not possibly have been innocent to its political and symbolic implications at a time when America is getting so deeply divided. To that extent they too are consciously testing how far they can go. It would be hard to believe that the planners of the Islamic center did not pause and reflect on whether their proposal would be seen as controversial at the very least, if not provocative altogether.
If the effort by those behind the Islamic center is to reclaim the loftier elements of Islam from the more sinister interpretations that drove the 9/11 attackers notwithstanding that it would provoke strong reactions, then it is a bold one. I am not sure though if that is what it is at the heart of the proposal.
In sharp contrast to the reactions from the lunatic right wing fringe in the US to the current debate, in the 1990s even some of the most rabid constituents of the Hindu right in India had expressed their willingness to have a “grand” mosque not too far from the site where they wanted to construct a Ram temple in Ayodhya after the Babri mosque was razed.
As an aside, I wonder what would the reaction have been had the Swaminarayan followers proposed to build a Hindu temple at the site where the Islamic center is being proposed.