In dispute, cultures meet

By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff 

A bitter battle over a Roxbury mosque being built by the Islamic Society of Boston has deeply chilled Muslim-Jewish relations in Boston. But elsewhere in the region, interfaith activities and thoughtful dialogue between the two groups are blossoming, according to imams, rabbis, and lay people from both communities.

And while construction of the Islamic Society’s large $24.5 million mosque and cultural center proceeds at a snail’s pace, other Islamic mosques, schools, and community centers — some modest, others richly appointed — are opening in Revere, Billerica, Brighton, and other communities.

The building boom underscores the diversity and prosperity of a Muslim community around Boston that now includes an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 people and more than 30 mosques in Massachusetts, community leaders say. And the interfaith dialogue reflects a determination among Muslims and Jews that their relations not be derailed by what many see as a Boston political spat.

The fight involves criticism from the Anti-Defamation League and others that the Cambridge-based Islamic Society of Boston has failed to distance itself from anti-Semitic comments made by society trustees. At the same time, challenges have been mounted about the deal with the city under which the society obtained the land for the mosque. The society is suing the Boston Herald, WFXT-TV (Channel 25), and a number of individuals and groups, many of them Jewish, alleging that they illegally conspired to block the mosque project.

Many Muslims and Jews say they are far more concerned about negative stereotypes of their religions and about the dangers posed to both communities by continuing ignorance and alienation between them.

”There are good people and bad people in all communities,” said Imam Talal Eid, the region’s longest-serving imam, who is currently Muslim chaplain at Massachusetts General Hospital and at Brandeis University. ”People should look closely at Islam so to know the difference between good Muslims and bad Muslims.”

Nancy Kaufman, director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, said that communications between leading Jewish groups and the Islamic Society of Boston have largely halted because of the lawsuit.

But in surrounding communities, because of concerns that the Boston clash and other issues could escalate tensions, Muslims and Jews are reaching out to each other.

One of the newest Islamic enterprises is a still-unnamed prayer and education center on Chestnut Hill Avenue in Brighton. Anwar Faisal, an Allston-Brighton real estate man, paid about $1 million for a run-down American Legion post which he plans to turn into a center to promote interfaith understanding and exchanges.

Faisal said that he wants younger Muslims, including those who came to the United States to study, to run the center, which will offer classes to members of the public in Islamic culture, Arabic, and the Koran.

Space also will be available for Allston-Brighton community meetings and for the American Legion, Faisal said.

”We want this to be a place where cultures meet,” he said.

Some who are involved in organized dialogues say the efforts of Muslims and Jews in the metropolitan area to get to know each other in recent years are paying off now, by keeping tensions over the bitter charges and countercharges surrounding the Islamic Society of Boston from getting out of hand.

The controversy over the society and the Roxbury mosque was the subject of January’s meeting of the Muslim-Jewish Dialogue of Greater Boston, a group created by the New England chapter of the American Jewish Committee and the Masumeen Center of Hopkinton, an organization of Shi’ite Muslims.

Mahmoud Jafri, a cochairman of the dialogue, said it was the most polarized issue the group has taken on, and it prompted a broad range of opinions among the 50 people gathered, who represented various streams of Judaism and Islam.

”We decided to go back to our communities and tell people this is not an issue of Muslim versus Jew,” Jafri said. ”We are telling people, ‘Don’t let this venom and fire spread to our communities.’ ”

Imam Salih Yucel of the Boston Dialogue Center, which has its roots in the moderate Islam of Turkey, says the top priority of his organization is to foster interfaith education and understanding.

”We do not bring politics into the place of the Prophet, and we try to be positive as much as we can,” Yucel said during a walk through the partially renovated sanctuary of the former Church of St. Theresa in Revere, which members of the center are converting to a mosque at a cost of nearly $1 million.

In Revere, too, openness to non-Muslim neighbors is a priority. During Ramadan, the Muslim month of daylight-hours fasting, neighbors are invited to share in the evening fast-breaking meal.

Last year, in cooperation with nearby St. Anthony of Padua Parish, they held a bake and cook sale for the benefit of the local library; a similar event is planned this year to benefit the Fire Department.

Yucel said he has told the group’s Jewish dialogue partners that both sides need to put aside big geopolitical issues and concentrate on gaining basic understanding of one another.

”We cannot solve the Israeli-Palestinian situation in a small group in Boston or Cambridge,” he said. ”Let’s bring our children together. Let’s know each other. We do not know the Jews and the Jews do not know us.”

Both groups are learning. Jews are discovering that Massachusetts Muslims are extremely diverse, with many thousands of Pakistanis, Somalis, and Turks.

”The world paints us with a very broad brush,” Jafri said. Many Jews ”do not understand that the ‘take’ on Israel of Muslims from Pakistan is very different than the ‘take’ of a Muslim from Lebanon.”

Rabbi Moshe Waldoks of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline believes that more interfaith exchange and education are needed.

”If we in Boston, who say we are committed to civil discourse and civil society, can’t talk to each other and sometimes agree to disagree,” he said, ”how can we expect it to happen in the really troubled places of the world?”

Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com.  

From Jihad Watch:

Controversial Boston mosque run by Muslim Brotherhood opens, will broadcast call to prayer over loudspeaker

Sure, the controversy has faded — except the Muslim American Society is running this mosque. According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune exposé, the Muslim American Society is the name under which the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States. Nor does it mention thataccording to a 1991 Brotherhood memorandum about its strategy in the U.S., it is embarked upon a “grand Jihad” aimed at “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

“Making peace, and prayers: Mosque opens its doors as controversy fades,” by Michael Paulson for the Boston Globe, September 15 (thanks to Solomon):

Sixteen years after 2 acres near Roxbury Crossing were designated for use as a mosque, the area’s growing Muslim community has quietly begun using the building for regular worship.Every night since the start of Ramadan this month, hundreds of Muslims have been gathering for evening prayers at the mosque, now called the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. Officials of the Muslim American Society, which is overseeing the project, say they plan to gradually add activities throughout the fall and winter and hope to hold a formal opening of the building early next year….

“This is such a happy occasion for the Muslim community – this has been a project in the making for decades,” said Hossam Al Jabri, president of the Muslim American Society’s Boston chapter, which has taken over management of the mosque from the Islamic Society of Boston, which runs a mosque in Cambridge. “It’s strange, but I’m thankful that we had to go through the difficulty, because it forced us to come out of an isolation that we were comfortable in, and helped us to see that we have a world out there that is interested to know who we are. And it helped us to make so many friends.”…

The mosque has been controversial for years. A conservative Israel-advocacy organization called the David Project asserted that some of the mosque’s founding leaders had links to terrorism. In 2005, the Islamic Society filed a lawsuit against the David Project and two media outlets, saying that those allegations were defamatory, but dropped the suit last year after another suit, challenging the mosque’s construction, was also dropped….

“Usually we find there’s some level of resistance, but the situation in your area was unique in its level of vitriol and viciousness,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It was atypical in the level of controversy that was generated by those who were opposed to the mosque, and I don’t mean legitimate controversy, I mean fake controversy. There’s an effort by some minority of people in any community who seek to marginalize Muslims and demonize Islam, and that’s what we saw in this case.”

The leading critic of the mosque, Charles Jacobs, said he continues to have concerns about the mosque’s leadership, but that “our concerns were never with the rank and file of the Muslim community.”

Jacobs was president of the David Project until leaving the post in July.

“Our concern was with the leadership, and the ties that that leadership had, it seemed, to terrorism and the teaching of hatred,” Jacobs said. He said he has ongoing concerns about the Islamic Society of Boston and the Muslim American Society, both of which, he says, have expressed extremist views. He said “it’s been estimated that 80 percent of mosques are radicalized” but that “it’s very difficult for American citizens to speak about these things, because they don’t want to be labeled as bigots or Islamophobes, so that has allowed these connections to go much unspoken and unreported.”…

 

CAIR, of course, is an unindicted co-conspirator in a jihad terror funding case. It is a spinoff of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which is listed in that same 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum on strategy in the U.S. as part of its “grand jihad.” Several CAIR officials have been arrested and convicted on terror-related charges, and one of its founders has made Islamic supremacist statements, hoping that one day the Qur’an would be the only law of the land in America. But the Globe, of course, mentions none of this.

And the Boston Mosque will also be broadcasting the call to prayer into Hyde Park via loudspeaker. From “A view from the minaret, by Michael Paulson in his Articles of Faith blog at the Globe, September 14 (thanks again to Solomon):

I made it high enough to report that there’s a nice view to be had of the crescent-topped mosque dome silhouetted against the distant skyline, but not high enough to tell you what it would be like if you were the muezzin who had to go up there five times a day to chant the call to prayer. Of course, the muezzin can’t tell you either — he’s no fool — they’re going to broadcast the prayer summons (which will only happen during the day out of respect for the neighbors) by loudspeaker.

Of course he’s no fool. That they’re going to broadcast the call to prayer at all, despite previous assurances that they wouldn’t, according to Solomon, is a supremacist statement. For in the modern world, with cell phones and phone alarms and clocks everywhere and all sorts of related amenities, there is no need whatsoever for an amplified call to prayer. It is simply an assertion of Islamic dominance over the area.