“This is not really a mosque, it is a community center”
The “Park 51 controversy”—erupting over the construction of a mosque/community center in the vicinity of “Ground Zero” in New York—highlighted an irresolvable contradiction at the heart of the American project: the very diversity and pluralism that forms the identity of the liberal state also threatens the stability of that identity. The liberal state strives to secure the promise of freedom and autonomy for all its citizens. This promise, perhaps, lies at the root of the relatively recent embrace of spirituality as marker of one’s own freedom and autonomy. This embrace, moreover, is accompanied by the perceived threats of pluralism and difference, the latest being the physical attacks against Muslims and Sikhs mistaken for Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, or the spectacle of Islamophobia that captivated public discourse during the Park 51 saga. Each of these moments reflected a crisis in which the fictitious harmony of liberal pluralism was exposed, precipitating all manner of reminders to United States citizens about the virtue of tolerance.
The appeal for tolerating minority ‘others’ is integral to certain registers of spirituality—a language that secures the secular promise of respect and equality for all citizens.
Tolerance serves as the soothing balm that promises relief from both the threat to liberal freedoms and the threat of impending violence. Such promises, however, are never fulfilled.
If anything, such promises work to exacerbate the initial contradictions. A politics of tolerance that demands respect and understanding for the threatened minority ‘others’ accomplishes little more than further inscribing the distinctions of majority/minority, citizen/alien, identity/difference and so forth. Such a dynamic of tolerance was at work during the Park 51 debate, if one may call it that. Rather than offering another critique of the outright racist characterizations of Islam and Muslims that populated various media during this episode, I want to instead think about a statement that was frequently aired by both Muslim and non-Muslim supporters of this project: “This is not really a mosque, it is a community center.”
It may well have been a community center. But what must demand our attention is the kind of politics that authorizes and sustains the desire to replace, substitute, and moderate the specter of a ‘mosque’ as a community center. The plea to remind hostile citizens that what they think is a mosque is not really a mosque but something else participates, perhaps unwittingly, in a politics that strives to humanize, moderate, and civilize—shall we say spiritualize—religion so as to make it more palatable to modern sensibilities. This kind of critique demands its object to separate from itself, to differ from itself while keeping its name; a community center that is also a mosque. This secular demand for the name to retain itself while also differing from itself resonates with the categorical use of spirituality and illuminates a central contradiction.
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