“Dawa” may be an unfamiliar word to you. It is to most
Americans, but we had better learn to understand it for it is
almost certainly the motivation behind the drive to build the
“Ground Zero” mosque in Manhattan.
It is an Arabic word. As Andrew McCarthy, the former U.S.
prosecutor who put the “blind sheik” and his allies in prison for
their part in the 1983 World Trade Center garage bombing, puts it
this way: “Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World
Trade Center or elsewhere, is the missionary work by which Islam is
spread…The purpose of dawa, like the purpose of jihad,
is to implement, spread and defend sharia.”
The leader of the movement to build the 13-story mosque
and “community center” 600 feet from the hole in the ground where
the twin towers stood, is Feisal Abdul Rauf, imam of one of New
York City’s 100 or so other mosques. The site where he wants to
build it is owned by Sharif el-Gamal, who, until a few years ago,
was waiting tables in New York restaurants. He now owns several
expensive properties. The sources of his wealth are unclear as are
the sources of the $100 million that must be raised to build the
structure.
Imam Rauf, now on a U.S. State Department-sponsored “good
will” tour of Muslim countries, is widely considered to be an
example of “moderate” Islam; however, among his more memorable
quotations are these:
…United States policies were an accessory to
the crime (9/11) that occurred.
…the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than
al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims. You may remember
that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over
half a million Iraqi children.
While Rauf does not endorse violence, he professes to
understand its roots; that it is the reaction of oppressed people
to authoritarian regimes supported by the U.S. He has declined to
describe Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Rauf has been heading the Cordoba Initiative which
professes to create “an atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and
respect.” That should appeal to many Americans, but they should
note also that the name of the proposed mosque-community center is
Cordoba House, is derived from the Cordoba, Spain mosque built on
the ruins of a Catholic church after the Muslim conquest of Spain
in the 8th Century. The Christians reconquered Spain in 1492 and
Islam lost “al Andalus.”
This is one of the “humiliations” that ardent Muslims want
to avenge. Thus, the name “Cordoba House” stands for “conquest” and
the siting of it is an example of dawa in action: Islamist
triumphalism.
Large number of Muslims, in America an elsewhere, practice
their faith, but temper it by willingly living under secular
governments. Muslim purists, however, believe that every aspect of
life is prescribed in the Koran and the hadith (the
writings of and about Mohammed) which makes secular government
superfluous. Militants such as al Qaida and its allies seek to
eliminate these “infidel” institutions by violence. Other
determined Muslims, such as the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in
Egypt in 1928) choose to accomplish it by dawa —
stealth.
Rauf (and others like him) hopes and works for a world
that has fully adopted Islam and sharia, but wants to do
so without violence. Dawa is a one-step-at-a-time process.
Rauf’s State Department trip is dawa in action as is the
fact the FBI hired him after 9/11 to conduct sensitivity-training
sessions for its personnel. Two years ago, Rauf praised the
Archbishop of Canterbury for advocating that Muslim enclaves within
the United Kingdom be allowed to assert sharia law for
their members. Had the U.K. government agreed, it would have a
great success for dawa.
Their is no Muslim constituency in lower Manhattan. Mayor
Bloomberg and President Obama missed the point of Cordoba House
entirely. It is not a matter of religious freedom or property
rights. It is a matter of appropriateness. If it is allowed to be
built virtually next door to Ground Zero, it will be
dawa’s greatest triumph in the United States
to date.
