A Mosque at Ground Zero

In 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson first referred to the First Amendment as creating a “wall of separation” between Church and State. Few principles have been more central in building the United States than the conviction of the Founding Fathers that all citizens should have the right to worship freely. That the State should be secular and tolerant has become the closest a secular state gets to a sacred idea, a noble thought that was exported to democracies around the world.

So the question of whether a mosque should be built 400 yards from Ground Zero is a fundamental one. The United States must answer it with appropriate conviction: it would be a terrible betrayal of American principles if the government sanctioned when and where people should pray.

Precisely because the question is so fundamental, it has excited a political debate that both exposes America’s state of mind and tests its resolve. Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, has signalled that he disagrees with the mosque’s construction. Newt Gingrich missed the central point when he argued that “there should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. That is, surely, the point: the United States is not Saudi Arabia.

The constitutional position is clear and unequivocal. The State should not withdraw the right of people to pray on their chosen ground. That said, not everything important is contained in the contract. To acknowledge the anguish and discomfort that many Americans feel about a mosque and Islamic centre, 13-15 storeys high, being built just yards away from the site of the worst act of terrorism committed on American soil, is not a violation of the constitution but a recognition of the need for sensitivity.

President Obama, at the risk of the charge of inconsistency, has been trying to keep both positions open. Last Friday, he told guests at a dinner honouring Islam’s holy month of Ramadan that Muslims in the United States had every right to practise their faith, including the right to build a mosque “on private property in Lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances”. The following day, Mr Obama added that he endorsed the right to build the centre, but not the wisdom of doing so.

That is a perfectly reasonable position to take. The dead and those who mourn them may not have their rights enshrined in the Constitution but their memories and grief surely deserve to be honoured too. The Muslim community of New York would best show the compassion and humanity of Islam by respecting the feelings of others and choosing to build their mosque elsewhere. The right exists but it does not necessarily need to be exercised.

Nonetheless, every so often, in a land made, in de Tocqueville’s evocative phrase, “in broad daylight”, a controversy encapsulates the difficulty of living according to constitutional axioms laid down two centuries ago. This is one such case. It is a test case precisely because it is so difficult and precisely because it is so sensitive. It is in these instances that democracies show their resolve. The question should be thrown back to the Muslims of New York but surely there is no better embodiment of the ideals of the Founding Fathers than that a mosque should be permitted on such a site.
 

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/leaders/article2690913.ece