The planned Islamic centre is not at Ground Zero, nor is the nearby strip club. It’s un-American to take such offence

Last Friday, in New York, I discovered a strip club near the site of the planned Islamic centre, described by its opponents as “the mosque at Ground Zero”. As pole dancers gyrated with all the sizzling eroticism of a weary Wal-Mart checkout assistant at the end of a long shift, I asked the burly front-of-house man – Scott, from Brooklyn – whether they had faced any protests about this profanation of hallowed ground. Had any Fox News commentators, for example, been beating an angry path to their door? Well, he replied, one or two passers-by had raised objections since the controversy erupted about the Islamic centre. “People are entitled to their opinions,” said Scott, but the “New York Dolls” Gentlemen’s Club had been here for 30 years and the folks working in it had to make a living.

Now a strip club at the memorial site of the worst terrorist atrocity on American soil would truly be a profanation. Though obviously not comparable to a strip club, planting a large new mosque directly on that site would nonetheless show an acute lack of sensitivity. Nine years on, the place where the twin towers stood is still a building site, but in a nearby exhibition you can see the plans for a commemorative ensemble of pools, trees and a museum, as well as a soaring new “freedom tower”. As at the sites of Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima or Ypres, so in the footprint of the World Trade Center, historical tact and commemorative mission should override all other considerations.

But here’s the point: the strip club on Murray Street is not “at Ground Zero” any more than the site of the planned Islamic centre, a former Burlington coat factory in Park Place, is “at Ground Zero”. They are, respectively, three and two blocks away. Neither would be visible from the World Trade Center memorial site, which may in some important if secular sense be considered hallowed ground. In New York, two blocks is a country mile. By the time you get to Park Place, there is no doubt that you are already somewhere else, amid the city’s habitual huggermugger craziness, with the Amish Market on the corner selling Amish BBQ chicken, Amish fettucine and Amish sushi – all of them as authentically Amish as I am Chinese.

Then the critics of the proposed centre in Park Place – sorry, “Ground Zero Mega Mosque” – go on about dubious sources of funding and suspect statements by its principal protagonist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And so, they say, it should be built further away. The leap of illogic is as big as any leap of faith. Were the centre to have terrorist sources of finance, or radical, bloodthirsty Islamist leadership, it should be stopped anyway, whether it is two blocks away from Ground Zero or 200.

In the event, these claims too turn out to be twisted, or absurdly thin. The anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, for example, has a characteristic rant on her website, arguing that Rauf was associated with a Malaysian peace group which funded the Gaza aid flotilla. Her headline: “Ground Zero Imam Rauf’s ‘Charity’ Funded Genocide Mission”. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart did a fine riff on this kind of guilt by association, pointing out that the second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – who is associated with the Carlyle Group, which has done business with the Bin Laden family, “one of whose sons – obviously I’m not going to say which one – may be anti-American”.

In a clumsy, provocative comment during a television discussion soon after 9/11, Rauf said that US policies had been “an accessory to the crime that happened” and that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA”. That was wrong, and offensive. But it has to be put against the rest of his words and deeds, which have been devoted to promoting a gentle Sufi version of Islam compatible with a free society. I’m not a huge fan of his kind of interfaith waffle, but if the Muslim world were comprised entirely of Raufs, we would not have the problems we face today – and there would have been no 9/11 attacks. That is why the state department has been funding him to travel round the Middle East explaining American Islam.

There is therefore no reasonable objection to this Islamic centre, with its mission to promote peace, love, interfaith dialogue and swimming, being built in Park Place. Yet in the runup to the US mid-term elections on 2 November, senior politicians, pundits and even supposed opponents of religious discrimination are either condemning it or ducking out with weasel words. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, denounced the scheme, saying: “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.” Fox star Bill O’Reilly says it should not be built because “Muslims killed us on 9/11″. Sarah Palin famously tweeted ”Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate” (sic). Facing a tough re-election race even Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, distanced himself from President Obama’s cautious endorsement of Muslims’ constitutional right to build the centre.

Most grotesquely, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League insists it should be moved. Talking of the relatives of 9/11 victims who oppose it (though some other relatives support it), Foxman says “their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorise as irrational or bigoted”. An organisation established to combat bigotry thus comes out in defence of … bigotry. And the upshot of all this is that, in a Pew poll this August, 51% of Americans asked said they opposed the building of the centre near the World Trade Center site.

There is now no good way forward. If it goes ahead, it will be a constant bone of contention. If it is moved, more Muslims will believe radical Islamists when they say: “You see, we told you so – America is Islamophobic.” Either way, America is doing something extremely stupid. As if it did not have enough problems of its own, it is conspiring to give itself a problem which, up to now, it has not had – or at least, has had much less than most European countries.

Yes, there have been a few home-grown American jihadists, but there is a lot of evidence that American Muslims are generally better integrated, and more supportive of the state in which they live than most of their European counterparts. There are several reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the First Amendment tradition of free speech and freedom of religion, which is now at issue in those blocks just up the road from, but not at, Ground Zero.

That great tradition, which Scott, the doorman at “New York Dolls”, seems to have understood better than Foxman, Gingrich or Reid, says: this is America, where Geller can rant, strippers can grind, Christians, Jews and Muslims can pray – and Stewart can make fun of them all. This is America, where no one has the right not to be offended. For God’s sake, America, don’t catch our European disease.

Sitting in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a metal arrow on the ceiling of my hotel room pointing to Mecca and the television showing a female news presenter in full hijab, I feel impelled to write about our troubles with Islam.

Four years after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which were perpetrated in the name of Allah, most people living in what we still loosely call the west would agree that we do have troubles with Islam. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but most of the terrorists who threaten us claim to be Muslims. Most countries with a Muslim majority show a resistance to what Europeans and Americans generally view as desirable modernity, including the essentials of liberal democracy.

Why? What’s the nub of the problem? Here are six different views often heard in the west, but also, it’s important to add, in Muslim countries such as Iran. As you go down the list, you might like to put a mental tick against the view you most strongly agree with. It’s logically possible to put smaller ticks against a couple of others, but not against them all.

1 The fundamental problem is not just Islam but religion itself, which is superstition, false consciousness, the abrogation of reason. In principle, Christianity or Judaism are little better, particularly in the versions embraced by the American right. The world would be a much better place if everyone understood the truths revealed by science, had confidence in human reason and embraced secular humanism. If we must have a framed image of a bearded old man on the wall, let it be a photograph of Charles Darwin. What we need is not just a secular state but a secular society.

This is a view held by many highly educated people in the post-Christian west, especially in western Europe, including some of my closest friends. If translated directly into a political prescription, it has the minor drawback of requiring that some 3 billion to 5 billion men and women abandon their fundamental beliefs. Nor has the track record of purely secular regimes over the last hundred years been altogether inspiring.

2 The fundamental problem is not religion itself, but the particular religion of Islam. Islam, unlike western Christianity, does not allow the separation of church and state, religion and politics. The fact that my Iranian newspaper gives the year as 1384 points to a larger truth. With its systematic discrimination against women, its barbaric punishments for homosexuality and its militant intolerance, Islam is stuck in the middle ages. What it needs is its Reformation.

A very widespread view. Two objections are that such a view encourages a monolithic, essentialist understanding of Islam, and tries to understand its history too much in western terms (middle ages, Reformation). If we mean by Islam “what people calling themselves Muslim actually think, say and do”, there is a huge spectrum of different realities.

3 The problem is not Islam but Islamism. One of the world’s great religions has been misrepresented by fanatics such as Osama bin Laden, who have twisted it into the service of a political ideology of hate. It’s these ideologists and movements of political Islamism that we must combat. Working with the benign, peaceful majority of the world’s Muslims, we can separate the poisonous fruit from the healthy tree.

The view promulgated by Qur’an-toting western politicians such as George Bush and Tony Blair. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to insult millions of Muslim voters and the foreign countries upon which the west relies for its imported oil. But do they really believe it? I have my doubts. Put them on a truth serum, and I bet they’d be closer to 2, while many atheist or agnostic European leaders would be at 1. On the other hand, this analysis is made with learning and force by distinguished specialists on the Muslim world.

4 The nub of the problem is not religion, Islam or even Islamism, but a specific history of the Arabs. Among 22 members of the Arab League, none is a home-grown democracy. (Iraq now has some elements of democracy, but hardly home-grown.) Needless to say, this is not a racist claim about Arabs but a complex argument about history, economics, political culture, society and a set of failed attempts at post-colonial modernisation.

A case can be made. There are democracies with Muslim majorities (Turkey, Mali). The political scientist Alfred Stepan has written a fascinating article suggesting that, in the democracy stakes, non-Arab Muslim countries have fared roughly as well as non-Muslim countries at a comparable level of economic development. But I’m struck by the fact that even in a traditionally anti-Arab country such as Iran, very few people think the trouble is just with Arabia.

5 We, not they, are the root of the problem. From the Crusades to Iraq, western imperialism, colonialism, Christian and post-Christian ideological hegemonism have themselves created this antipathy to western liberal democracy; and, at the extreme, its mortal enemies. Moreover, after causing (by the Holocaust of European barbarism), supporting or at least accepting the establishment of the state of Israel, we have for more than half a century ignored the terrible plight of the Palestinians.

A widespread view among Muslims, and by no means only among Arabs in the Middle East. Also shared, from a different starting point, by some on the western left. Of course, even if this simplistic version of history were entirely true, we couldn’t change the past. But we can acknowledge the historical damage for which we are genuinely responsible. And we can do more to create a free Palestine next to a secure Israel.

6 Whatever your view of the relative merits of the west and Islam, the most acute tension comes at the edges where they meet. It arises, in particular, from the direct, personal encounter of young, first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants with western, and especially European, secular modernity. The most seductive system known to humankind, with its polychromatic consumer images of health, wealth, excitement, sex and power, is hugely attractive to young people from often poor, conservative, Muslim backgrounds. But, repelled by its hedonistic excesses or perhaps disappointed in their secret hopes, alienated by the reality of their marginalised lives in the west or feeling themselves rejected by it, a few – a tiny minority – embrace a fierce, extreme, warlike new version of the faith of their fathers. From Mohammed Atta and the Hamburg cell of al-Qaida, through the bombers of Madrid to those of London, this has become a depressingly familiar story.

I wish I could find some compelling evidence against this claim. But I can’t. (Can some reader help?) Even if we were to assist at the birth of a free Palestine and pull out of Iraq tomorrow, this problem would remain. It threatens to make Europe a less civilised, comfortable place to live over the next 10 years.

Now, which of the six views got your largest tick? In answering that question, you will not just be saying something about the Islamic world; you will be saying something about yourself. For what we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves. Tell me your Islam and I will tell you who you are.

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