On Sept. 11 Anniversary, Rifts Amid Mourning - By ANNE BARNARD and MANNY FERNANDEZ - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/nyregion/12sept11.html?pagewanted=all

On Sept. 11 Anniversary, Rifts Amid Mourning

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

 

Relatives of the victims of 9/11 gathered at a reflecting pool near ground zero on Saturday to mourn their lost loved ones. More Photos »

By ANNE BARNARD and MANNY FERNANDEZ

Published: September 11, 2010

The ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was marked on Saturday by the memorials and prayer services of the past, but also by events hard to envision just a year ago — heated demonstrations blocks from ground zero, political and religious tensions and an unmistakable sense that a once-unifying day was now replete with division.

Multimedia

Photographs

Remembering the Events of Sept. 11, 2001

Slide Show

Protests on a Somber Anniversary

Video

Obama's Speech at the Pentagon

Interactive Feature

Reviving Ground Zero

Related

• At Memorial Ceremony, a Focus on Loss Before Tension (September 11, 2010)

• City Critic: In Your Palm, Memories of Horror and Valor (September 12, 2010)

• Lens Blog: Sept. 10, 2001 (September 10, 2010)

The names of nearly 3,000 victims were read under crisp blue skies in Lower Manhattan after the bells of the city’s houses of worship tolled at the exact moment — 8:46 a.m. — that the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. At the Pentagon, President Obama called for tolerance and said, “As Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam.”

The familiar rituals at ground zero — the reciting of names, the occasionally cracking voice of a reader, the silences — had a new element. The posters and photographs that victims’ relatives held aloft bluntly injected politics into New York City’s annual ceremony, addressing the debate over plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero.

Two posters commemorated the victims James V. DeBlase and Joon Koo Kang. One read, “Where are OUR rights?” The other: “We love you!! Islam mosque right next to ground zero??? We should stop this!!”

Differences were evident at the outset. About 7:25 a.m., as a choir finished up “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Zuccotti Park, just southeast of ground zero, Alyson Low, 39, a children’s librarian from Fayetteville, Ark., faced the media bleachers and held up a photo of her sister, Sara Low.

“Today is ONLY about my sister and the other innocents killed nine years ago,” read the text beside the photograph.

Nick Chiarchiaro, 67, a fire-alarm designer, gave her a hug. Ms. Low’s sister was a flight attendant on the plane that crashed into the north tower, where Mr. Chiarchiaro’s wife and niece were working and were killed.

“I’m tired of talking about everything else, tired of the politics,” she said. “Today is only about loss.”

But for Mr. Chiarchiaro, it was not. “A mosque is built on the site of a winning battle,” he said. “They are symbols of conquest. Hence we have a symbol of conquest here? I don’t think so.”

Thousands filled the makeshift plaza beside a construction site sprouting cranes and American flags on a crystal-clear morning a few degrees cooler than the one nine years ago. They carried cups of coffee and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the symbols of the response agencies that had paid so dearly. Until midday, they placed flowers at ground zero.

During the ceremony, knots of protesters wandered the area, sometimes arguing. In the afternoon, a few blocks away, police officers and barricades separated demonstrations, both for and against the Muslim center, that each drew about 2,000 people.

Around the country, people debated the meaning of 9/11 and the appropriateness of political rallies and protests on its anniversary. The day drew an array of national and international figures. John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the New York rally against the proposed Muslim center via video, and Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who tried to ban the Koran in his country, described Islam as an intolerant “power of darkness,” saying, “We must draw the line, so that New York, rooted in Dutch tolerance, will never become New Mecca.”

Thousands were expected to gather later in Anchorage, paying $74 to $225 to hear speeches by Glenn Beck, the conservative broadcaster, and Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska.
At the Pentagon, in a memorial honoring the nearly 200 victims of the attack there, Mr. Obama said that those responsible had sought to divide the country.

“They may seek to spark conflict between different faiths, but as Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” Mr. Obama said. “It was not a religion that attacked us that September day; it was Al Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion. And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so will we stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation.”

In Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed after passengers rebelled against the plane’s hijackers, the focus remained on the victims, with speeches by the first lady, Michelle Obama, and her predecessor, Laura Bush.

Mrs. Obama celebrated the bravery of the passengers. “They called the people they loved — many of them giving comfort instead of seeking it, explaining they were taking action, and that everything would be O.K.,” she said. “And then they rose as one, they acted as one, and together they changed history’s course.”
 
Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who had announced, and then suspended, plans to burn copies of the Koran, arrived in New York on Friday seeking a meeting with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed Muslim center. The pastor’s presence in the city, under police protection, only added to the day’s drama.

On NBC’s “Today” show, Mr. Jones said that neither he nor his congregants would burn the Koran, whether or not he met with the imam. “We feel that God is telling us to stop,” he said.
Yet scattered imitators adopted his idea. Near the White House, 10 members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue tore pages from the Koran that they said showed Islam’s intolerance. 

Near ground zero, a man burned what appeared to be a page of the Koran. Behind him, someone held a sign: “Real Americans don’t burn Korans.”

In Afghanistan, five people were wounded when demonstrators protesting the proposed Koran-burning tried to storm a provincial governor’s house.

At the New York demonstrations, there were no arrests, the police said, and the few clashes were verbal. Priscilla Lynch, 58, a Massachusetts social worker who supported the center and was wearing a T-shirt with Arabic writing, crossed a street near the opposing protesters. Some yelled: “Go back to Mecca!”

Supporters of the center rallied at City Hall Park, two blocks from the proposed center. The group was organized by left-wing and pro-Palestinian groups, following a separate vigil Friday by Christian, Jewish, Muslim, interfaith and neighborhood organizations.

Stephen Northmore, 24, an emergency medical worker who attended both, wore an American flag as a cape. Three friends from his native Staten Island served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. One lost a leg; another was the sole survivor when a Humvee hit a roadside bomb.

“I think it’s offensive that my friends are ordered to go to Muslim countries and defend Muslims there against the same radicals that attacked us,” he said, “but peaceful Muslims can’t build a community center in New York City in their own country."

Sharif Chowdhury did not attend the rally after honoring his daughter and her husband, both Muslims who died in the World Trade Center, at the ceremony. But he said that objecting to the Islamic center implied that all Muslims were terrorists and violated religious freedom. “If you want to stop this,” he said, “you have to change the Constitution.”

Opponents of the Muslim center gathered on West Broadway for a protest organized by the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both led by the conservative blogger Pamela Geller.

Jan Loght, 58, a pharmacist from Arizona, said she was “insulted” by the planned center and troubled by Islam. “If we allow them to build this, then that’s saying we gave in, and Americans don’t give in.”

Most of the crowd chanted “No Mosque” or “U.S.A.” When Ilario Pantano, an Iraq war veteran running for Congress in North Carolina, mentioned Muslims, some shouted, “Kill them all!”

It was a Sept. 11 starkly different in tone and emotion from those past. For the first time, the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil and New York’s deadliest disaster served almost as a backdrop to politics. The rancor of a ground zero riven by clashing views on Islam and the United States contrasted with the heartbreak of the place.

For many, the politics were cause for a new kind of mourning — for the setting aside of differences that many Americans felt on previous anniversaries.

“We need to get back to that commonality and spirit that we had after 9/11,” said Julie Menin, the chairwoman of the local community board, who supports the Muslim center.

Many 9/11 rituals went on unchanged. In the East Village, former workers from Windows on the World — the restaurant atop the trade center that lost 73 workers — shared a brunch at Colors, a restaurant some surviving workers opened after the attacks.

People of many faiths, born in places from Egypt and Yugoslavia to Brooklyn, passed around babies and pictures. Zlatko Mundjer, 38, who had tended bar at Windows on the World, said no one was talking politics. “We are all family here — we are neutral.”

Steve Harewood, 45, who had worked as a bartender, received a marriage proposal from Paula Sternitzky, 46. They set their wedding date on the spot: Sept. 11, 2011.

Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave, Helene Cooper, Adam B. Ellick, Angela Macropoulos, Colin Moynihan, Andy Newman, Sharon Otterman, Ashley Parker and Rebecca White.

My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American - By Porochista Khakpour - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12khakpour.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

Op-Ed Contributor

My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American

By POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR

Published: September 11, 2010

IN the late ’90s and early ’00s, I used to frequent a boutique in the East Village called Michael and Hushi. Hushi Mortezaie, an impish club kid born in Iran and raised in the Bay Area, made outlandish, psychedelic, robot-chic clothing and was getting the coolest of the East Village cool kids to wear his strategically slashed and torn Farsi-graffitied shirts, though none of them had any idea that in some cases they were bearing post-Iranian Revolution political slogans.

Enlarge This Image

Anna Bhushan

I — born in Iran, raised in the Los Angeles area — used to go to downtown parties in a skimpy halter top that featured newsprint-emblazoned mujahideen women brandishing machine guns, their bullets bedazzled in gold next to the words “Long Live Iran.” It was the first time I had worn anything having to do with my homeland; I loved that feeling of for once being able to both be Iranian and a play on it.

In one of the last days of August 2001, I remember being at the boutique again, and Hushi was giddy preparing for Fashion Week. His store windows were freshly adorned with his “Persian collection,” a new line of hijab-and-harem-pant Iranophilia. “Girl, get ready!” he said, “Iran is going to be the new black.”

Days later, there we were, two Middle Eastern 20-somethings who now had some explaining to do. Friends started speaking in roundabout inquiries: What exactly was the status of my green card? 

How were my father and brother faring? Were they Muslim, by the way?

Hushi’s stylists, meanwhile, were calling him to ask how he was — and when he was going to be getting rid of that window display. But somehow we really were fine, even under the heavy air of everyone’s condescending concern.

Little did we know that it would take almost a full decade for the proverbial 9/11 fallout to fall out, for anti-Muslim xenophobia to emerge, fully formed and fever-pitched, ostensibly over plans to build an interfaith cultural center near ground zero. Even in New York, stronghold of progressive ethics and cultural diversity, my former home of 12 years, August 2010 became the evil twin of that still-innocent August 2001.

In addition to the mosque, of course, there was the Florida pastor who wanted to burn Korans on the Sept. 11 anniversary, and who has yes-no-maybe-so reconsidered, after a hearty load of negative press and a dab of executive-branch headshaking. And, hey, what do you get when you put a drunk white college student, who had actually been to Afghanistan, into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? The wrong answer and a stabbing, allegedly.

It’s one test I would have passed. For the record: I am not Muslim. My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad “studying” Zoroastrianism. But most of the extended Khakpours are Muslim and, culturally, it’s a part of me insofar as I am a Middle Easterner.

I am also a New Yorker, a deal that was sealed forever nine years ago. I had just moved from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan to shack up with a boyfriend. The studio was 25 floors up, with a nearly all-glass wall that framed a perfect view of the World Trade Center.

Now, when I look back on ages 23 to 32, every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again. But what was once simple apprehension and mortification and trepidation has become increasingly entangled with feelings of exhaustion and marginalization and even indignation.

•

A deep dark admission: lately — and by lately I mean this era I worked so hard for, when a liberal person of color, a man who resembles my own father, would be our president — I’ve found myself thinking secretly, were certain things better in the George W. Bush era? Was it easier to be Middle Eastern then?

Just six days after 9/11, at the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind.” He added: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Did that assurance mean more to white Americans coming from someone who looked like them?

Xenophobia and racism still abounded, but the lid stayed on the pot. Perhaps when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, conservatives weren’t sweating a thing; for them, people of color, along with all our white liberal friends, were lumped together in one misery-loves-company fringe. But now that the tables have turned, conservatives have positioned themselves as aggrieved victims. (I recall the advice of an older female relative: Always let men you’re in relationships with have all the power; it’s when they lose power and get insecure that your problems start.)

Indeed, has the most irrational breed of 9/11 payback emerged precisely because we elected an African-American president whose middle name — the name of cousins of mine — has turned into an H-word slur? A commander in chief whom the most misled and confused perceive in cartoon cahoots with terrorists, or at least as their religion-mate? As if that weren’t enough, take last year’s Fort Hood gunman, add a helping of the would-be Times Square bomber and top it off with “ground zero mosque” — and voilà, a boiling hot summer of anti-Islamic assault. Suddenly, anyone with skin as dark as President Obama’s could be a “secret Muslim,” and any Muslim must surely be a not-so-secret terrorist.

The world Hushi and I were in, before 9/11 and just after, was not a picnic for brown people. And there’s no need to cast 2001 to 2008 in an ideal light. None of us breathed easy. It’s just that we expected to breathe easier as time went on.

•

My brother, who lives in Brooklyn, recently discovered that many of his Muslim friends in New York felt that the Islamic cultural center was a bad idea to begin with, for this sole reason: it was going to put them in danger. He and his friends feel a fear that they haven’t in ages, or ever.

During our late-night calls, my brother and I talk about nothing but what’s on the news, and we laugh a lot, but we laugh nervously. My sense of humor, honed in my immigrant childhood, was always my ultimate disarming mechanism, a handy way to infuse the blues with some off color.

This was my modus operandi during a book tour in 2007, when 90 percent of my Q-and-A’s were about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s notorious president, as my publication date coincided with his infamous visit to Columbia University. It was annoying and even baffling, because it had nothing to do with me or the book. But I laughed and joked with the audience so that it was clear to them I was, like, totally un-Ahmadinejad, dudes.

The hilarity started to curdle at the moment I was also feeling the most euphoric: during Mr. Obama’s bid for the presidency. It was around then that I began murdering whole days on the Internet, and not just on the Internet but in its dirty basement, the comments sections of blogs. 

There, an angry tribe of fake names spoke in misspelled obscenities and declaimed the true, evil nature of Middle Easterners and their intentions in this country. This is silly, I’d tell myself, these trolls aren’t representative of my neighbors or of Americans.

Then I’d go on Facebook, and engage in more online warfare with friends of friends, real flesh-and-blood people with real-life names, who a bit more politely and grammatically stated the same. And there was me — a non-Muslim, who has publicly criticized certain Islamic practices — flaccidly battling for Muslims worldwide. It got to the point that I was telling people I didn’t even know that their opinions were making my life downright “unlivable.”

It reminds me of how I used to experience so many mixed emotions when I’d see women in full burqa in Brooklyn: alarm at the spectacle (no matter how many times I’d seen it), followed by a certain feminist irk, and finally discomfiture at our cultural kinship. And then it would all turn into one strong emotion — protective rage — when I’d see a group of teenagers laughing and pointing at them.

•

Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. But I should still be in my honeymoon phase, since I’m actually just a 9-year-old American. And that’s my other association with autumn 2001. As luck would have it, my citizenship papers finally went through not long after the towers fell. That November, I was in a Brooklyn federal courtroom singing, along with a room full of immigrants, the national anthem that I hadn’t sung since K through 12.

I remember on that day, 9/11 leaving the foreground of my mind for the first time. I remember looking around that room and feeling, in spite of myself, a sense of optimism about the future. I remember feeling a part of something. I remember feeling thrilled at the official introduction of the hyphen that would from now on gracefully declare and demarcate my two worlds: Middle-Eastern American. The same hyphen that today feels like a dagger that coarsely divides had once, not too long ago at all, been a symbol of a most hallowed bond.

Porochista Khakpour, the author of the novel “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” is a professor of literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Is This America? - By Nicholas D. Kristof - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12kristof.html?th&emc=th

Op-Ed Columnist

Is This America?

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: September 11, 2010

For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider a blog post in The New Republic this month. Written by Martin Peretz, the magazine’s editor in chief, it asserted: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” 

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

On the Ground

Share Your Comments About This Column

Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.

Go to Columnist Page »

Mr. Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

Thus a prominent American commentator, in a magazine long associated with tolerance, ponders whether Muslims should be afforded constitutional freedoms. Is it possible to imagine the same kind of casual slur tossed off about blacks or Jews? How do America’s nearly seven million American Muslims feel when their faith is denounced as barbaric?

This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

It would have been natural for this test to have come right after 9/11, but it was forestalled because President George W. Bush pushed back at his conservative ranks and repeatedly warned Americans not to confuse Al Qaeda with Islam.

Now that Mr. Bush is no longer in the White House, nativists are back on the warpath. Some opponents of President Obama are circulating bald-faced lies about him that are also scurrilous attacks on Islam itself. One e-mail bouncing around falsely accuses Mr. Obama of lying and adds, “His Muslim faith says it’s okay to lie.”

Or there’s the e-mail I received the other day from a relative, declaring: “President Obama has directed the United States Postal Service to remember and honor the Eid Muslim holiday season with a new commemorative 44 cent first class holiday postage stamp.” In fact, it was President Bush’s administration that first issued the Eid stamp in 2001 and that issued new versions after that.

Astonishingly, a Newsweek poll finds that 52 percent of Republicans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” So a majority of Republicans think that our president wants to impose Islamic law worldwide.

That kind of extremism undermines our democracy, risks violence and empowers jihadis.
 
Newsweek quoted a Taliban operative, Zabihullah, about opposition to the mosque near ground zero: “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor. It’s providing us with more recruits, donations and popular support.” Mr. Zabihullah added, “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get.”

In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims. In their ignorance, they mirror the anti-Semitism that I hear in Muslim countries from people who have never met a Jew.

One American university professor wrote to me that “every Muslim in the world” believes that the proposed Manhattan Islamic center would symbolize triumph over America. That reminded me of Pakistanis who used to tell me that “every Jew” knew of 9/11 in advance, so that none died in the World Trade Center.

It is perfectly reasonable for critics to point to the shortcomings of Islam or any other religion. There should be more outrage, for example, about the mistreatment of women in many Islamic countries, or the oppression of religious minorities like Christians and Ahmadis in Pakistan.

Europe is alarmed that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated well, resulting in tolerance of intolerance, and pockets of wife-beating, forced marriage, homophobia and female genital mutilation. Those are legitimate concerns, but sweeping denunciations of any religious group constitute dangerous bigotry.

If this is a testing time, then some have passed with flying colors. Hats off to a rabbinical student in Massachusetts, Rachel Barenblat, who raised money to replace prayer rugs that a drunken intruder had urinated on at a mosque. She told me that she quickly raised more than $1,100 from Jews and Christians alike.

Above all, bravo to those Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who jointly denounced what they called “the anti-Muslim frenzy.”

“We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent,” said Rabbi David Saperstein. “It cannot happen here in America in 2010.”

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick put it this way: “This is not America. America was not built on hate.”

“Shame on you,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, a leading evangelical Christian, said to those castigating Islam. “You bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love your neighbor.”

Amen.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

Muslims and Islam Were Part of Twin Towers’ Life - By Samuel G. Freedman - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/nyregion/11religion.html?pagewanted=all#

On Religion

Muslims and Islam Were Part of Twin Towers’ Life

Michael McElroy for The New York Times

Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, now retired in Boca Raton, Fla., prayed at the trade center.

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Published: September 10, 2010

Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.

Related

• Times Topic: Muslim Community Center in Lower Manhattan (Park51)

In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and Vesey.


Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr. Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower.

He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.

On any given day, Mr. Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.

Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49th floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?

He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and Vesey. From that corner, he watched the south tower collapse, to be followed soon by the north one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition
“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.

Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr. Abdus-Salaam and Mr. Sareshwala. Prof. John L. Esposito of Georgetown University, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”

Moreover, the prayer room was not the only example of Muslim religious practice in or near the trade center. About three dozen Muslim staff members of Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower, used a stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors for their daily prayers.
Without enough time to walk to the closest mosque — Masjid Manhattan on Warren Street, about four blocks away — the waiters, chefs, banquet managers and others would lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.

During Ramadan, the Muslim employees brought their favorite foods from home, and at the end of the daylight fast shared their iftar meal in the restaurant’s employee cafeteria.

“Iftar was my best memory,” said Sekou Siby, 45, a chef originally from the Ivory Coast. “It was really special.”

Such memories have been overtaken, though, by others. Mr. Siby’s cousin and roommate, a chef named Abdoul-Karim Traoré, died at Windows on the World on Sept. 11, as did at least one other Muslim staff member, a banquet server named Shabir Ahmed from Bangladesh.

Fekkak Mamdouh, an immigrant from Morocco who was head waiter, attended a worship service just weeks after the attacks that honored the estimated 60 Muslims who died. Far from being viewed as objectionable, the service was conducted with formal support from city, state and federal authorities, who arranged for buses to transport imams and mourners to Warren Street.

There, within sight of the ruins, they chanted salat al-Ghaib, the funeral prayer when there is not an intact corpse.

“It is a shame, shame, shame,” Mr. Mamdouh, 49, said of the Park51 dispute. “Sometimes I wake up and think, this is not what I came to America for. I came here to build this country together. People are using this issue for their own agenda. It’s designed to keep the hate going.”

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 10, 2010

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the proposed Islamic center and mosque near ground zero. It is Park51, not Parc51. It also misstated the name of a chef at the Windows on the World restaurant who died on Sept. 11. He was Abdoul-Karim Traoré, not Abdul Karim. And the article misstated the order in which the World Trade Center towers fell. The south tower fell first, not the north tower.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 11, 2010, on page A12 of the New York edition.