“I HOPE THEY COME,” SAID DEVELOPER SHARIF EL-GAMAL. “WE DON’T SEE THIS BEING A SUCCESS UNTIL THERE HAS BEEN A BAR MITZVAH.”
OPPONENTS CALLS TO INVESTIGATE FINANCING WAS MOOT—THERE WAS NO FINANCING. NOW THE PLAN IS TO ATTRACT MUSLIM AND NON-MUSLIM DONORS AND THOUSANDS OF COMMUNITY RESIDENTS OF ALL FAITHS TO SIGN UP AS FITNESS CLUB MEMBERS.
The developer of the planned Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero hopes to finance the bulk of the $140 million project using instruments developed to allow many Muslim investors to comply with religious prohibitions on interest.
The developer, Sharif el-Gamal, said on Wednesday that he envisioned raising $27 million through a nationwide campaign focused on small donations from Muslims and other supporters, and financing much of the rest that consultants estimate it will cost to build the 15-story center.
Mr. Gamal is counting on the center’s eventually having about 4,330 paying members, about half of them paying $2,700 a year for the most expensive family plan, which would include use of a planned fitness center and pool.
Most of that core group, Mr. Gamal expects, would be non-Muslim neighborhood residents and commuters. Muslims from around the region would make up a larger but less frequently visiting group — what he calls the “dinner and a date” crowd — many of them choosing the cheapest $375 family membership for cultural programs.
These still-evolving plans, which Mr. Gamal revealed publicly for the first time in an interview on Wednesday, are among the many details that he has been working on behind the scenes in recent weeks amid a national furor over the more basic question of whether the project, known as Park51, should go forward at its planned location, two blocks from the northern edge of the World Trade Center site. Many opponents have said that a Muslim center so close to ground zero would be inappropriate.
Sitting in his frenetic Flatiron district office, decorated with black leather and chrome furniture and a calligraphied “Allah” painted by his wife, Mr. Gamal said he had spent recent weeks working with focus groups, local organizations, architects and programming consultants to try to nail down specifics that might make the project easier to understand and sell to investors and the public.
Mr. Gamal and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is his planning partner in the project, have promised that they will invite the federal government to review all the donations.
Most of the financing, Mr. Gamal said on Wednesday, would come through religiously sanctioned bondlike investments known as sukuk, devised in Muslim nations to allow religious Muslims to take part in the global economy and increasingly explored by American banks. Sukuk and other Islamic banking instruments are tracked on the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index.
In sukuk construction projects, the investors own the real estate asset, and the developers lease it back; the investors’ profit on the rent is analogous to the yield on a bond. Some Islamic scholars do not accept the system, but it is widely used in places like Malaysia and Dubai.
Mr. Gamal, a broker and property manager with Soho Properties, uses conventional mortgages on other deals, but said using sukuk would attract a broader range of Muslim investors.
He restated his hope of getting the bonds issued tax-free through a public development authority, but said he would do so privately — which would require higher payments to investors — if that was not possible. Besides individual investors, Mr. Gamal said he would court corporations interested in tapping Muslim-American markets, foundations that finance international development, and Jewish, Christian and Muslim philanthropists.
A tentative sketch of the project shows the prayer space, whose construction cost is estimated at $17 million, in the basement. (Technically, it would be a musalla, because its construction would not meet religious rules required to sanctify a mosque; it is not uncommon for a Muslim congregation to pray in such a space but call it, colloquially, a mosque, or, in Arabic, masjid).
Mr. Gamal envisioned a congregation of 2,000, mainly Muslims who work in the area; the existing building on the site already draws scores to prayers on Fridays, easing overcrowding at the neighborhood’s two existing mosques.
On the upper floors there would be a 9/11 memorial and prayer space, open to people of all faiths for prayer, contemplation and meditation. “Most people truly hold us responsible for this,” Mr. Gamal said, referring to the terrorist attacks.
According to the still-tentative plans, the upper floors would also include rooms for interfaith programs run by Mr. Rauf.
The project’s biggest challenge, beyond winning over a skeptical — and angry — public, will be to serve widely disparate constituencies: wealthy residents downtown; economically varied workers and students; the 57,000 Muslims estimated to live within 20 minutes of the location; the 695,000 Muslims believed to live within a 90-minute trip; Jews, Christians, nonbelievers; and the 50,000 to 100,000 tourists that Mr. Gamal expects to visit each year.
“I hope they come,” he said. “We don’t see this being a success until there has been a bar mitzvah, a Hindu wedding.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Thursday, September 30th 2010 at 9:37AM
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