My recent reflections on the debate over the Park Islamic Cultural Center have been fueled and inspired by my personal experiences surrounding the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.
After 9/11, I despaired. As I put it in The Politics of Small Things, it hurt to think. I knew that the people who attacked the World Trade Center really were a threat, but the political responses to the threat seemed to me to be wrong.
The attack hit very close to home. Two close friends were in the Towers, one survived, a childhood friend, Steve Assael, but one was killed, Mike Asher, my closest adult friend . On that fateful day, I didn’t know what had happened to either of my friends. In the days, weeks and months that followed, as I attended to personal consequences of the attacks, I was dismayed by the public response.
A war on terrorism was declared which didn’t make much sense, as the very real threat of Al Qaeda was not sufficiently recognized by anti-war critics. Terrorism and anti-terrorism seemed to be replacing Communism and ideological anti-Communism (the most radical and resolute form of which were Fascism and Nazism), and many who were critical of these tendencies were not realisticly facing up to the challenges of the day. Simple Manichaeism again overlooked global complexity across the political spectrum. There did not seem to be any alternative, as the Republican President was getting carried away, pushed by a broad wave of popular support, and the Democrats in Congress, and reporters and commentators in the media, dared not question the patriotic effervescence.
My book, which was dedicated to Mike, was an attempt to explore how alternatives on the margins did provide grounds for hope. Specific small interactions provided alternatives to faulty grand narratives, people meeting each other on the basis of shared concerns and commitments, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. constituting political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I knew how important such power was in the development of the democratic opposition in Poland as it formed and supported the development of the trade union Solidarity. I examined how the same sort of power developed in the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign, opening space for the cultivation of critical opinions and policies among people who were concerned about the state of world affairs. Obviously, the same sort of power supported the Obama campaign, as I have explored on earlier posts.
I was very impressed to see how a focused political campaign provided coherence to a broad array of dissenters, observable in anti war demonstrations and on many websites. But the strength was not just the unity. It also was grounded in the diversity of experiences, opinions and actions that made up the movement. People concerned about a broad array of immediate circumstances came together in opposition to the Bush administration and its policies. But as important as the opposition was, their primary concerns were perhaps even more important. A broad coalition concerned with a broad set of issues, foreign and domestic constituted an impressive social movement and political campaign leading to the election of Barack Obama.
And herein lies the significance of the Park 51 Islamic Community Center. It is a local example of the politics of small things. Those involved have rejected civilizational conflicts and are promoting civilized inter-religious and inter cultural dialogue. They have planned a community center in their community, with places for people to hear lectures, discuss problems, play and exercise, and pray. They are clearly open to discussion, already engaging in it with their fellow New Yorkers.
In the planned activities and in the way they have engaged the broader community to date, they enact dialogue as the alternative to clashes of civilizations. This is ground zero of the opposition to terrorism and ideological anti terrorism. These are important facts on the ground that are in opposition to dogmatic truths of the Islamic and the Islamophobic fundamentalists. Intelligently thinking about their activities, taking them seriously beyond simplistic ideology doesn’t hurt at all. It is a way that honors my friend and many others who were lost on that bright and sunny September day.
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