Methinks there’s more trouble in Victory Mosque paradise than they’re letting on.
(MORE) — On January 14, in what the New York Times described as a rift among the players behind the proposed Islamic community center, the project’s developer announced the appointment of a different imam — not Khan’s husband, the imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — as the center’s senior advisor (Rauf is still on the board). The developer, Sharif el-Gamal, also said the couple would no longer “be speaking on behalf of Park51, nor will they be raising funds for the project.”
This change in the imam’s status came as a complete surprise to Khan, who says the couple was not told about it in private or in advance; she says they only learned of it when reporters began to call. And she insists that the couple’s plan for a large, interfaith, Muslim-run community center near ground zero “will still be realized.”
“While we were traveling, the developer changed the name [from Cordoba House] to Park51. [But ours] is a big vision, not just an address,” Khan tells More.com, adding that while they may have their differences with el-Gamal—his focus is more local, theirs more global—“We can’t step down from our very own creation. We are the vision behind it.”
Khan says the press is making too much of the so-called split, that the move was simply to insure “continuity” for Friday services during her husband’s hectic travel schedule (the new imam will conduct those services at the temporary mosque that’s been set up where the center is planned). It’s understandable that they’d need a different “point person” to handle the “day-to-day functions” of the facility, she says. And, “If [my husband] chooses to go in and do services, of course there would be no objection.” But Khan bemoans the “timing, the tactics, the way the change was announced.” She and her husband are about to embark on separate speaking tours to promote their vision of moderate Islam and the interfaith center, and “the nation is in mourning right now” over the Arizona shootings. So to announce these changes on Friday was in “bad taste,” Khan says.
As for fundraising, Khan says it would have been premature anyway. “You have to have a complete board, you don’t want to jump the gun. Important behind-the-scenes decisions have to be made” before fundraising starts. She is confident that any differences with the developer will be ironed out over the next month or so—differences that should not be worked through “in the public eye,” she adds. Meanwhile, despite el-Gamal’s statement that the couple will no longer speak about Park51, Khan maintains that she is very much “still speaking about the Cordoba House vision my husband and I created.”
About that fundraising:
“I think that the center has become so public,” she says with a laugh, “that fund raising is now much easier than we thought.” So much easier, it seems, that in recent weeks Khan and her husband have increased their fund-raising target, to $150 million. There have been rumors that the couple were trying to recruit backers in the Middle East and that they have gotten commitments from the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia, but Khan says only that some countries have expressed “an interest in the vision.” Except for their application in November for about $5 million in federal grant money earmarked for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after 9/11—another tin-ear moment that prompted a small uproar—she insists that no fund-raising campaign has yet been organized. She hopes, though, to “reach out to every person of conscience and faith” in America who “wants to be part of building the center.” Whether this will happen—and whether it will succeed—is anyone’s guess