Worshippers at the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) still pack into their cramped mosque in Cambridge, Mass. The crowd spills out into the parking lot for the Friday prayer service. Their hopes of celebrating this past Ramadan in a brand-new mosque and cultural center were dashed.
The stated aim of the quarter-century-old society was to build a center for worship, education, and community outreach. Instead, the $24 million project in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood is snarled in accusation, acrimony, and lawsuits. It’s a microcosm of the suspicions about Islam that have played out across America since 9/11.
After the city of Boston conveyed a parcel of land to the ISB, articles appeared in the Boston Herald in 2003 linking society leaders to Islamic extremists. The ISB denied the story, responding in detail to what it saw as inflammatory distortions. “When you place a picture of Osama bin Laden next to a picture of our mosque, that is completely misrepresentative of who we are,” says Salma Kazmi, assistant project director.
Four years after 9/11, mosques in many communities continue to encounter wariness and resistance ranging from suspicions raised at zoning hearings to vandalism and worse. On Dec. 20, two pipe bombs damaged an Islamic center in an upscale neighborhood of Cincinnati. The FBI said the powerful explosion could have been deadly had people been present.
“It’s all part of the unfortunate temper of the times,” says John Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington. “There is such a thing as Islamophobia.”
“Everyone in a democracy has the right to argue for their views and engage in public debate. But there is no equality when it comes to how the British government treats those who want to give physical support to Israel and those who want to do the same for the Palestinians. Such double standards feed resentment in Britain’s Muslim community at the government’s failure to recognise its legitimate grievances, as highlighted in yesterday’s report by the thinktank Demos.
The GALHA dispute (see 
“The Extreme Right has finally found a clever way to arrest America’s march towards asserting its foundational principles of equality, religious freedom, and the rule of law. Their strategy is to transform the war on terror into a war against Islam and use security needs to subvert constitutional protection.”
Human rights campaigners demanded a full inquiry yesterday into mounting evidence that MI6 agents were involved in the abduction and torture of terror suspects in Greece.
Yusuf Smith draws our attention to the fact that nominations have been opened for the second annual Brass Crescent awards, for the best blogs either by, or of interest to, Muslims.
The incendiary words came flying out of an exuberant, cheering crowd, words exalting the rise of Islamic power in Canadian politics. Now they’re being called an election smear that involves Islam and might have lasting repercussions for Muslims who have only recently become active in Canadian politics.
“The Muslim world is a strange and formidable place to an average American, in some ways a perennial zone of magic, mystery and disorder,” said Dr Ghazi Falah, of the University of Akron, Ohio, on Monday at the American University of Beirut. It is regarded in “a framework of violence, disorder and unreason contrasted with the rationalism of the West.”