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Abstract
The local controversy over Cordoba House or the “Ground Zero Mosque” peaked at a May 2010 Lower Manhattan Community Board meeting that was open to the public. Examining the tolerance rhetorics evoked both for and against Cordoba, this paper argues that both tolerance rhetorics function differently to re-center the white non-Muslim subject and to structure inclusion and belonging within the nation. Extending the literature of tolerance, which tends to focus on the discourse of normative subjects, I analyze the tolerance rhetorics of two Muslim-American rhetors whose testimonies reveal the tensions, contradictions, and complicities involved in claims of national belonging.
Notes
[1] The center was eventually renamed as the Park51 Community Center and opened to little controversy in September 2011.
[2] Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Strongly Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site,” New York Times, August 13, 2010, accessed November 10, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/us/politics/14obama.html?_r=0
[3] Nick Wing, “Newt Gingrich Calls ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Organizers ‘Radical Islamists’ Seeking Supremacy, Compares Them to Nazis,” The Huffington Post, August 16 2010, accessed November 10, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/newt-gingrich-calls-groun_n_683548.html
[4] CB1 ultimately passed the resolution with 29 votes for, one against, and ten abstained. “Community Board #1-Manhattan Resolution,” New York City Government, May 25, 2010, http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb1/downloads/pdf/Resolutions/10-05-25.pdf
[5] My analysis focuses on the arguments made during the open session of the CB1 meeting. The CB1 committee provided me with the audio recordings from the meeting, consisting of three different files, lasting over four and a half hours. Over one hundred residents spoke on the matter during the open session. Unless otherwise noted, all testimonies cited are from the CB1 meeting tapes.
[6] A recent article by Lee Pierce also investigates the Ground Zero Mosque controversy. Although we both are concerned with the construction of the US nation, our projects diverge in important ways. First, Pierce focuses on the media discourse concerning Cordoba. Second, Pierce takes as her emphasis the anti-Cordoba discourse, while I examine both anti- and pro-Cordoba arguments, including those made by Muslim-American rhetors. Lee Pierce, “A Rhetoric of Traumatic Nationalism in the Ground Zero Mosque Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100 (2014): 53–80.
[7] Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2012); Vanessa B. Beasley, Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration (College Station, TX: Texas A& M University Press, 2006); Leo R. Chavez, Covering Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 362–87; Anne Demo, “Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 291–311; J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 569–601; Sara L. McKinnon, “Positioned in/by the State: Incorporation, Exclusion, and Appropriation of Women’s Gender-Based Claims to Political Asylum in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 178–200.
[8] A smaller body of scholarship in rhetorical studies examines representations of Islam and/or Arab or Muslim subjects. See in particular: Johanna Hartelius, “Face-ing Immigration: Prosopopeia and the ‘Muslim-Arab-Middle Eastern’ Other,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43 (2013): 311–34; Nadine Naber, “The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post 9/11,” Cultural Dynamics 18 (2006): 235–67. For work focusing on the European context, see: Bradford Vivian, “The Veil and the Visible,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 115–39; Radha S. Hegde, “Eyeing New Publics: Veiling and the Performance of Civic Visibility,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life, eds. Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 154–72.
[9] Marita Gronnvoll, “Gender (In)Visibility at Abu Ghraib,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10 (2007): 371. Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306; Deepa Kumar, Islamaphobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2012); Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, Globalization and Empire: The US Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of Democracy (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2006); John M. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment’: George W. Bush and September 11th,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 607–32.
[10] Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Whose ‘America’? The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in the Formation of US Nationalism,” Radical History Review 89 (2004): 116; Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291–309.
[11] Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 142–56; Karma R. Chávez, “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigration Rights Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010):136–55; Josue David Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 26–49; Marie Bernadette Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 1–21.
[12] Cisneros, “(Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary,” 41.
[13] Chávez, “Border (In)Securities,” 150.
[14] Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Gerard A. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2012); Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Ralph Cintrón, “Democracy and Its Limitations,” in The Public Work of Rhetoric, eds. John M Ackerman and David J Coogan (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 98–116.r
[15] Tolerance is often evoked to mitigate the risks posed by diversity and plurality. John Rawls, for instance, offers a procedural version of tolerance whereby religious and moral tenets must be bracketed and tolerated in order to promote public deliberation. Others such as Michael Ignatieff, Will Kymlicka, and Bernard Williams forward a normative account of tolerance designed to protect minority positions and ensure individual or group rights. See in particular: John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996); Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1989). Michael Ignatieff, “Nationalism and Tolerance,” in The Politics of Toleration in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 77–106; Bernard Williams, “Tolerating the Intolerable,” in The Politics of Toleration in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
[16] Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (London, UK: Zed Books, 2011); Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Fantasy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998); Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, UK: Verso, 1991).
[17] Brown, Regulating Aversion, 11
[18] Brown, Regulating Aversion, 9.
[19] A timeline of major events: In December 2009, the plans for Cordoba House were first publicized. On May 6, 2010, CB1’s Financial District Committee passed a unanimous resolution in favor of the Cordoba House. On May 25, the Cordoba Resolution was debated and passed at the monthly board meeting. On August 3, the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission voted against granting landmark status to the Old Burlington Coat Factory Building, removing Cordoba’s last hurdle.
[20] Anne Bernard, “For Imam in Muslim Center Furor, a Hard Balancing Act,” New York Times, August 21, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22imam.html
[21] The Poll also found that 61 percent of respondents opposed the project, while only 26 percent supported it. Alex Altman, “TIME Poll: Majority Oppose Mosque, Many Distrust Muslims,” TIME, August 10, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2011799,00.html
[22] Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood, “Muslim Prayers and Renewal near Ground Zero,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/nyregion/09mosque.html/09mosque.html
[23] Laura Ingraham and Daisy Khan, “Impact Segment: Controversy Surrounds Islamic Mosque at Ground Zero,” The O’Reilly Factor, Audio transcript, December 21, 2009, http://www.billoreilly.com/show?action=viewTVShow&showID=2497&dest=/pg/jsp/community/tvshowprint.jsp
[24] Justin Elliot, “How the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Fear Mongering Began,” Salon, August 16, 2010, http://www.salon.com/2010/08/16/ground_zero_mosque_origins/
[25] Michelle Boorstein, “In Flap over Mosque near Ground Zero, Conservative Bloggers Gaining Influence,” The Washington Post, August 19, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/18/AR2010081802582.html.
[26] In coordination with SIOA and the “American Freedom Defense Initiative,” Gellar later directed an anti-Cordoba documentary, The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of 9/11 Attacks (DVD).
[27] Pamela Gellar, “Sean Hannity Show Podcast,” Atlas Shrugs (blog), May 13, 2010, http://pamelageller.com/2010/05/hannity-show-podcast-atlas-vs-muslim-american-congress.html/
[28] Oliver Willis, “Mark Williams Calls Allah a ‘monkey god,’ Is He Still Welcome on CNN’s Air?,” Media Matters, May 18, 2010, http://mediamatters.org/blog/2010/05/18/mark-williams-calls-allah-a-monkey-god-is-he-st/164941
[29] Chin recounted this statement during the Public Session of the May 25 CB1 meeting. I have been unable to locate the original statement.
[30] A staff member from Senator Squadron’s office read the statement during the May 25 CB1 public session, but he also made essentially the same statement to media organizations in the preceding weeks: John Bayles, “Squadron Supports Cordoba Move,” Downtown Express, May 21, 2010, http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_368/de_369/cordobamove.html
[31] Many speakers also single out for criticism councilwoman Margaret Chin, who does criticize the intolerance of the anti-Cordoba camp.
[32] Whenever possible, I identify the speakers by their name. Because the audience often yells over speakers and because not all speakers introduce themselves, I am only able to use the name of speakers in some cases.
[33] Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2004), 15. Mamdani traces the good/bad Muslim binary to the work of Bernard Lewis. If Samuel Huntington depicted Islam as uniformly backwards, Lewis focuses on a clash within Islamic “civilizations.” See especially 20–27.
[34] Brown, Regulating Aversion, 182.
[35] Hage, White Nation, 86.
[36] Lentin and Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism, 13.
[37] Ahmed, “Liberal Multiculturalism.”
[38] Lentin and Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism, 14.
[39] Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 291. The authors detail how appeals to crisis often justify the “crossing of certain thresholds of intolerance.”
[40] Something else of note here is the move to separate tolerance from multiculturalism. Although the speaker does not expand upon this argument, I suggest that she may be seeking to privatize tolerance.
[41] Lentin and Titley as well as Jodi Molamed trace the development of “good” versus “bad” diversity under neoliberalism: while diversity may be officially celebrated in multicultural societies, not all diversity is recognized, desired, and valued. Lentin and Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism, 7; Jodi Molamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 39–42.
[42] This line of argument is mirrored in other texts, including editorials written in response to the proposal. For instance, in a September 11, 2010 letter to the editor of The New York Times, Stanford Anthropology professor Carol Delaney chides that while American students learn about other cultures and religions, very few Muslim countries include a similar emphasis in their curricula. “Letters; After 9/11/10,” The New York Times, September 14, 2011, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E0D6153BF937A2575AC0A9669D8B63
[43] Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), 8–19.
[44] This appeal functions within what Jodi Molamed terms neoliberal multiculturalism, which depicts the United States as a model for the world and establishes neoliberal policies and values as central to postracial freedom and equality. Molamed, Represent and Destroy, xxi.
[45] Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 128.
[46] Habermas, Derrida, and Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 16.
[47] Brown, Regulating Aversion, 27; Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 128.
[48] Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 127.
[49] Lentin and Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism, 31.
[50] We might argue, then, that tolerance can be as much about the preservation of the self as it is about protection of the minority positions or the promotion of stability. See in particular: Brown, Regulating Aversion, 27.
[51] The economic value of Cordoba Muslims is also evoked. The depiction of Cordoba Muslims as “good” Muslims by Hasam, Imam Feisal, and Daisy Kahn and others includes demonstrating Muslims’ value to capital. These arguments are reminiscent of the economic arguments identified by Ono and Sloop in the discourse about California’s Proposition 187.
[52] Sara Ahmed, “Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony: It’s an Empirical Fact—a Response to Slavoj Žižek,” Darkmatter: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture 19 (2008).
[53] Since 9/11, Hamdani has gained visibility as a Muslim-American activist. See, for instance, one of her appearances on Democracy Now: http://www.Democracynow.org/2010/8/18/as_gop_and_some_top_dems
[54] Hamdani’s potentially subversive appropriation may mark an instance of what Isaac West terms “impure politics.” West contends that not all claims for inclusion and performances of citizenship are normative, and that citizenship itself can be subverted and rearticulated in the process. West, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2013).
[55] In this way, Hamdani points to an ethic of vulnerability as outlined by Judith Butler in Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York, NY: Verso, 2004).