The reminder “this is not really a mosque but a community center” is also detained in this contradictory logic of difference. This statement labors to moderate, pacify, and substitute the apparently threatening specter of a mosque by gifting it a new metaphorical life as a community center. However, this gift can never be gifted; it will always be suspended and deferred. The exhortation to correct the misrecognition of a community center as a mosque strives to repudiate the prejudice and ignorance of those who refuse to make that correction. But ironically, the desire to ensure that a community center is not mistaken for a mosque perpetuates the very politics of secular critique that takes religion, indeed life, as something out there, as something readily available, to be moderated and rendered less extreme. Far from combating the racist assumptions that underlie various stripes of Islamophobia, this seemingly pacifying gesture further confirms those assumptions. Ultimately, this kind of politics, ensconced in the secular inheritance of religion as a substitutable object of critique, can achieve nothing new. It can only perpetuate the irresolvable contradiction of a liberal logic of tolerance that seeks to moderate religion through the language of spirituality.
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