Posted Mar 30, 2011, 12:03 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,838
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/ny...1&ref=nyregion
Planners of Mosque Considering New Project
By PAUL VITELLO
March 29, 2011
Quote:
Two co-founders of the plan to build a Muslim community center and mosque in downtown Manhattan have begun exploring a new, and possibly competing, project: an interfaith cultural center that they said might be located at the currently proposed site, two blocks from ground zero, or elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, said on Tuesday that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, two co-founders whose involvement in the controversial community center plan was curtailed this year after a falling out with their real estate partner, might develop a new project that was “larger in concept” than what is now proposed at 51 Park Place.
The new project would be interfaith in character, rather than predominantly Islamic, she said, and it would include a center for inter-religious conflict resolution.
“Once we are ready to announce our new vision, we will talk to the property owner and see if it is the right location for us,” she said, referring to Sharif el-Gamal, the real estate developer and onetime protégé of Mr. Abul Rauf’s. Mr. Gamal announced in January that Ms. Khan and the imam, who first conceived the idea of a downtown Muslim community center, would no longer speak or raise money for the planned project, known as Park51, though the imam would remain on its board of directors.
“We had the vision. We still have the dream,” Ms. Khan said. “The location is not the dream, my friend.”
A spokesman for Mr. Gamal said the developer had no comment.
Whether either alternative comes to fruition will depend on the ability of each camp to raise the estimated $100 million in public and private funds needed.
...The rift between the two factions is partly personal, and partly based on differences of vision, spokesmen for the two sides have said. Mr. Abdul-Rauf and Ms. Khan initially conceived the project, which they referred to as Cordoba House, as a community center for the neighborhood grafted to a kind of world headquarters for interfaith dialogue — a place where tourists from around the globe might come to learn about other people’s religions.
Mr. Gamal, a businessman, had always favored a more down-to-earth approach, focused on providing much-needed downtown facilities like an indoor swimming pool, and prayer space for the large population of Muslims who work in the financial district.
On Tuesday, Ms. Khan said that since last summer, she and her husband had been meeting privately with family members of 9/11 victims and first responders in an effort to understand the source of some of the opposition to the original idea. She said that as a result of those meetings, the story of the 9/11 families “will be housed in our center.”
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