JUCS 4 (a+2) pp. 263-282 Intellect Limited 2027, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies Volume 4 Numbers 3&2 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article English language doi 10 1386/jucs.41-2263_2 HUMA MOHIBULLAH University of British Columbia and Seattle Central College Sacred space: Muslim and Arab belonging at Ground Zero ABSTRACT The area surrounding New York's World Trade Center was politicized immediately after the 9/11 attacks and named ‘Ground Zero’. This article discusses how orien. talist tropes as well as narratives of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘sacred space’ came to be embedded there, It uses foo exxmples to examine how such spatialized politics have impacted Arab and Muslims New Yorkers: the Park51 community centre (popularized through media as "The Ground Zero Mosque’), and the less Known Little Syria district. It sheds light on Ground Zero’s significance for Arab and Muslin belonging in the United States ~ specifically, how Arab and Muslin: claims to space around the World Trade Center subvert Islamwophobic rhetoric that hem as outsiders and enemies, and position them instead as fully American. The World Trade Center is inextricably linked to memories of the September LUth, 2001 terrorist attacks, and is now a site where orientalist tropes and media representations of the threat posed by ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ are deeply embedded. The space became politicized immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and a variety of meanings were assigned to it in the process of its rebuilding. For instance, One World Trade has been made to symbolize distinctly American notions of liberty and democracy, a ‘line between the KEYWORDS Ground Zero sacred space ona Islamophobia ‘Muslim Americans Arab Americans 263Huma Mohibullah 264 The building was demolished to become nay condominiurs ‘with a proposed space for Muslims below. Meanwhile Parks host religious and celtural events in floating spaces around New York city, national self and the anti-national other’ that cannot be crossed (Cressler 2011), and stands in overt triumphalism against foreign enemies (Simpson 2006). The perceived enemies are Arabs and Muslims, who are viewed as a collectivity of religious fanatics, terrorists and otherwise high-risk citizens (oseph 2008). The area encompassing the World Trade Center too has became a loca- tion where orientalist tropes produce ideas about who and what constitutes ‘American’, and who has rights to the space. Such frictions have material- ized in disputes about Arab and Muslim claims to space in ‘Ground Zero’, an ambiguous area including and surrounding the World Trade Center. This article focuses on two locations that are in tension with the sacred configura- tion of Ground Zero: primarily, the well-known Park51 Community Center (aka, ‘Ground Zero Mosque’), and to a lesser degree, the former Little Syria district, through which multitudes of tourists make their way to the World ‘Trade Center each day. Before proceeding, I will clarify that the two places differ in significant ways. First, Park51 was" a contemporary, functioning place while Little Syria is @ heritage, remnant site. Second, although Little Syria's legacy potentially legitimizes Park51 as a continuation of long-standing Arab and Muslim exist- ence in Lower Manhattan, the former's population was overwhelmingly Christian. While there were Muslim residents in the area, as well as a mosque dating back to 1910, efforts to preserve Little Syria have more to do with Arab nationalism than any religion. Despite these distinctions, ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ have been collapsed into a single ideological category, and mention of Syria instantly conjures images of Muslims in public imagination, especially with the tise of ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis. Since the two groups are perceived as the main enemy of the United States, and since hegemonic representations of the World Trade Center position it as a sacred space in opposition to that enemy, I argue that Park51 and Little Syria hold enormous significance in the struggle for Arab and Muslim belonging in New York Cit and more broadly, the United States. Tbecame interested in this topic as a graduate stuclent exploring how lega- cies of the Twin Towers’ collapse affected the religious and political subjec- tivities of Muslim New Yorkers, specifically examining how their senses of self were tied to their senses of place. While many authors, such as Elizabeth Greenspan (2013), Jennifer Bryan (2005) and Louise Cainkar (2009), have published on related topics — the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and the impact of 9/11 on Arab and Muslim Americans, for instance - to my knowledge, only one has written extensively about ParkS1. Rosemary Corbett's Making Moderate Muslims (Corbett 2016) covers the Park51 contro- versy within a wider project on moderate Muslims. This article departs from Corbett’s work with its explicit theoretical focus on space, for as I show, senses of being Muslim or Arab American are not just discursive but highly spatialized. This became immediately apparent in 2010, shorlly before 1 began my doctoral fieldwork, when a spike in anti-Muslim sentiment followed highly publicized plans to build ParkS1 two blocks from the World Trade Center. At the same time, I learned about local preserva- tionists who were trying to publicize the history of the nearby (and largely forgotten) Little Syria, I communicated on several occasions with one of the preservationists, Todd Fine, and conducted research on the districts history. However, Park51 remained my main focus. I followed the centre for approxi- mately five years between 2011 and 2016, through three locations: its original Journal of Urban Cultural Studieshome, the defunct Dakota House bar immediately next door, and an art gallery on Leonard Street, neat Chinatown. I used ethnographic methods to immerse myself within its day-to-day: volunteering, regularly attending. religious services, and building relationships with workers and worshippers there. This allowed me to go beyond the limitations of formal interviews, gain deeper insight into participants’ experiences, learn first-hand how they responded to campaigns against Park51, and vividly capture the controversy’s, discursive, spatialized and emotional dimensions, ta which I now turn. THE ‘GROUND ZERO MOSQUE’ Park51 emerged at a time when Islam’s political currency had been leveraged to stoke nationalist fervour, specifically, as Lee Pierce (2014) has noted, in the wake of the failed War on Terror. It quickly became a polarizing campaign issue during the 2010 midterm elections, resulting in non-stop media cover- age. Opposition to the project was couched in a language of jingoism that framed it as a three-fold problem, discussed in this article: (1) the physical threat of Islamic terrorism; (2) the ideological threat of ‘creeping’ Islamic values wiping out the American way of life; (3) insensitivity and disrespect to the memory of 9/11 victims. Consequently, the project was dubbed the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ by right-wing commentator Pamela Geller and many Americans reacted with anger about what they perceived as Park5i’s true purpose: Muslim trium- phalism, a ‘Victory Mosque’ saluting extremists who transformed the World ‘Trade Center to rubble, or a sounding board for the dissemination of Islamic law into broader American society. Debates about the place raged as hostile crowds protested near the building, positioning Muslims as outsiders who sullied the hallowed space of Ground Zero with their presence. Through these incidents, the case of Park51 became the most visible mosque issue to date.’ Asoutlined by Justin Elliott (2010), Park51 was initially treated as fairly unre- markable. In December 2008, the New York Times ran a favourable front-page news story about the project, which generated no public response (Biumenthal and Mowjood 2009; Greenspan 2013). While conservative media did report on it once in late December 2009, and also referred to it as a mosque, the matter only exploded after it came to the attention of Geller and her colleague, Robert Spencer, the engineers of the anti-mosque movement following the ParkS1 controversy. They picked up the story in May 2020, after the New York City ‘Community Board's unanimous vote to approve Park51’s development, and rebranded it as the triumphalist ‘Mega Mosque at Ground Zero’. Geller’s first blog entry on the topic read: ‘Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World ‘Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction’ (Geller 2010). Days later, a reporter for the New York Post quoted Geller extensively in the first news- paper article that depicted Park51 as immoral and warranting suspicion. For reasons still unclear, the piece titled ‘Mosque Madness at Ground Zero’ erro- neously reported that the project would open on the tenth anniversary of the 9111 attacks (Peyser 2010), and became the landmark piece upon which stories throughout conservative and then mainstream media were built. The idea of a “Victory Masque’ became a new anti-Muslim platitude, one that would resur- face repeatedly, for instance, in Noveriber 2014, when the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, hosted its first Muslim prayer service. Of the occasion, the conservative newspaper Washingion Times wrote: ‘[m]any Muslims will see it as akin to raising their lag over a conquered enemy’ (Knight 2014). sacred space 2. Gelleris the founder ‘of American Freedom Defense initiative, Which is considered ‘hate group by the Southern Poverty La Center 3, Presemtation by Corey Saylor, Legislative Director for Council ‘on american islamic Relations, wwww.intellectbooks.com 265