A Listener Asks for Your Suggestions
by Nancy Rosenbaum, associate producer
Reem El Shafaki, an Egyptian now living in New Jersey, stands in front of the proposed site of the Park51 mosque and cultural center in lower Manhattan. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The news has been thick with polarized debates about proposed Qur’an burnings in Florida and the Park51 project. Tamara Lee, a listener from Hopewell, New Jersey, writes us looking for some advice:
“I’m increasingly frustrated by the inability of so many people, particularly Americans, to distinguish between the religion of Islam and the culture of some Islamic countries. I’ve long respected the religion even though some aspects of the culture are less appealing to me. Of late, I am particularly concerned that Muslims seem to be afraid of non-Muslims. I would like to become involved with a group that strives to combat this fear. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.”
If you have any recommendations to pass along to Tamara, post a comment here and we’ll be sure to relay them to her.
Seeking Sanity - Regarding Islam, NYC, Florida, America
by Krista Tippett, host
Following on Trent’s thoughtful post a few days ago, I share two pieces of helpful thinking that have crossed my desk. These refresh my spirit over media-generated confusion, false symbolism, fear, and vitriol. They are by a Jew and a Muslim, people who have been on our program in the past. I like to think that the ethos of discourse towards which they strive and we strive has its effect on the world, though what is distressing is so much noisier, and so distracting.
Yossi Klein Halevi has written an open letter to Imam Feisal in The New Republic. He opens up the “controversy” with a proposal that is provocative in the best sense of the word.
And for Eid al-Fitr, just past, Omid Safi opens a wide lens for viewing events of recent days. Click on every link in his Huffington Post article, if you have time, and find some hope.
"Ground Zeros"
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Hendrik Hertzberg ends his latest, masterful commentary on the mosque near Ground Zero with a passage culled from the correspondence of a Founding Father of the United States:
“In a famous letter—the one that holds that the United States ‘gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens’—George Washington offered a benediction:
May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.
Lower Manhattan is a little short on vines and fig trees nowadays, though there are some excellent wine bars. Washington’s point remains. His letter was addressed to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island. But, as he knew, Muslims are Abraham’s children, too. By the McCain standard, George Washington was a three-time loser: as President, he lived in New York City; the nation’s capital bears his name; and, even by the standards of his time, he was an élitist. Nevertheless: he was right.”
