Mosque Opens in Boston After Long Delay

A new mosque officially opened in the Roxbury section of Boston, Mass., on Friday, providing an unusual opportunity to find some of America's least-examined ethnic and immigrant issues sharing the same intersection—literally.

The mosque, called the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, opened with the Muslim call to prayer on a street named after Malcolm X in a traditionally African-American neighborhood while a pro-Israel advocate led a smattering of protesters across the street.

A rare moment when the creaky cliché “Only in America” truly applies.

Between 1,800 and 2,000 Muslims attended the opening, which took place on the Muslim day of worship. They were joined by the mayor, Thomas Menino, along with some other state and city officials.

The mosque had been puttering along informally as of last September, and was previously mired for years in controversy, litigation and fundraising issues.

As I've noted before, The Pew Center estimates that two-thirds of Muslims are immigrants. In the mosque's case, worshippers comprise four main groups: those of South Asian descent, Middle Eastern descent, African-Americans, and Somali immigrants.

The mosque met staunch opposition from the usual, disappointing quarters, once again affirming the trend that antipathy toward Muslims in America seems to be bound up not simply with a professed love of America (the typical cultural conservative cry), but love for Israel.

The most vociferous critic, Charles Jacobs, headed a pro-Israel advocacy group called The David Project, which led an infamous campaign to smear some Columbia professors as “anti-Semites” in 2005 for daring to dismantle pleasant fictions about Israel's policy toward the people it ethnically cleansed during its founding, a fact revealed by Israel's own historians who dug through declassified archives (1, 2, 3).

Like many who claim to have no problem with a minority group, Jacobs darkly hinted at conspiratorial “connections,” and laced his “facts” with the perennially suspicious poison of passive tense construction: “It's been estimated that 80 percent of mosques are radicalized,” Jacobs intoned in Sept. 2008, adding, “[I]t's very difficult for American citizens to speak about these things, because they don't want to be labeled as bigots or Islamophobes, so that has allowed these connections to go much unspoken and unreported.”

At the mosque's ribbon-cutting, its supporters walked up to the protesters and, instead of participating in polemics, tried to hand them white roses, as pictured in The Boston Globe article.

The mosque is operated by the Muslim American Society of Boston. Its executive director, Bilal Kaleem, said the center is meant to institutionalize interaction: “The main point is Muslim civil engagement. The center provides a place for the Muslim community to interact, and for broader society to engage with the Muslim community.”

Engagement is precisely what's needed, particular for the younger generation of Muslims who are already more attuned to American culture.

Those opposed to mosques--if their arguments can be taken at face value--have a very jaundiced and myopic view of how radicalism develops. Stopping people from worshiping in a common place doesn't magically force radical or militant ideas to evaporate; it likely only reinforces hostility and feeds a sense of grievance and ostracization, driving ideas underground.

Conversely, a publicly visible space for Muslims to congregate, and for others to meet them for interfaith functions, programming and visits, builds a sense of commonality.

Then again, if you don't take the neoconservatives at face value, their opposition to mosques in America makes sense: after all, isn't hostility a prerequisite for the "clash of civilizations" they are hankering after to begin with?

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam writes about America and Islam at his website, Crossing the Crescent, and for WireTap, where he is also the immigration blogger.