FEISAL ABDUL RAUF, the imam promoting the Ground Zero mosque, is a man for his time, the perfect lubricant for an ecumenism that acknowledges faith and at the same time renders it meaningless. See this excerpt from his book What’s Right with Islam in which he argues:

The language of good versus evil is precisely the language of the fundamentalists whose worldview we oppose. Once we define as evil those who counter us, we lose the moral high ground and begin to descend an exceedingly slippery ethical slope.

Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

I recommend the reader Brendan’s excellent commentary in this post. He writes:

Imam Rauf claims to be a Sufi, which is rather problematic for a few reasons.  The first is that, as a Sufi, he doesn’t really represent mainstream Islam — either of the Sunni or Shi’ite variety.  Sufis are considered anything ranging from terribly eccentric to outright heretical by mainstream Muslims, and so pretty much anything Imam Rauf says is very suspect when he tries to paint in broad brush about Islam as a whole based on his own views as an American Sufi.  The second problem is that because Sufis are so syncretistic (one of the main criticisms of them from the Islamic mainstream), it’s very convenient for the American left to embrace him has a “model” for Islam consonant with their own hippy-dippy kumbaya version of ecumenical engagement which has, as its root, the pernicious and false idea that all religions are basically the same.  Imam Rauf has been banging this particular drum quite emphatically of late, and of course it’s finding resonance in an American leftist elite that prefers non-Western religion in general, and specifically abhors the idea that religious differences matter to anyone who is not a hopelessly ignorant fundamentalist bigot.  In other words, Imam Rauf is almost tailor-made to serve as a tool of the American left to attack conservative Christianity in the United States at its core — namely at its insistence that it, and it alone, contains the fullness of truth, and that Islam (and other religions or non-religious spiritual traditions like Hinduism or Buddhism or what have you) are simply not true.  The left sees that perspective as bigoted and fundamentalist, and actually prefers someone like Imam Rauf, who breezily claims that all Abrahamic religions are basically the same, and focuses on the need for everyone to

“drink deeply from that rich, nourishing current of spiritual traditions — those immutable principles of divine origin that have been given form in so many ways in human societies.  Religion must be more than mere custom or habit, more than the transient styles and cultural fashions of passing ages.”

Please follow and like us: