NEW YORK TIMES, August 20, 2011—This time the silence was thunderous.
A year ago, a Muslim group tried to open a mosque in a vacant Roman Catholic convent in the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island and set off furious protests, with many opponents raising the specter of the 9/11 attacks to explain why they did not want a mosque in their midst.
The controversy was so heated that the affiliated church’s board of trustees, whose members included Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, eventually rejected the sale of the convent, even though it had originally been approved by the parish’s priest.
But the same Muslim group, the Muslim American Society’s chapter for Brooklyn and Staten Island, quietly opened a mosque this summer on a street of modest brick and wood-frame homes in the nearby Dongan Hills neighborhood, and there has been little public outcry by neighbors or anyone else.
Lately, dozens of Muslim families have streamed to the mosque, an orange cinderblock social hall on Burgher Avenue, to mark Ramadan, the monthlong daylight fast that features late-night and early-morning prayers and light communal meals.
Many neighbors have been annoyed by cars parked on stretches of street that by neighborhood custom have been used by residents’ second cars. But those people have not responded with the public rage that undermined the previous effort.
“We did a way better job of outreach,” Ibrahim Mossallam, the Muslim organization’s director for outreach, said. “We learned our lesson from last time.”
This time, members of the society knocked on doors to get acquainted with neighbors. They promised that the hall would also be a community center for groups like the Boy Scouts. And on July 29, they held an open house at the mosque, and dozens of neighbors, along with representatives of the local congressman and assemblywoman, went to dine on pita and kebab.
Because they wanted the building ready for Ramadan’s start on Aug. 1, Mr. Mossallam said, they moved quickly to complete the purchase before those groups “who were making a profit out of spreading Islamophobia and motivating outsiders to protest” could mobilize.
The society was also fortunate that its purchase of the building required no zoning changes or votes by trustee boards that might have created forums for public debate. And the highly publicized controversy over a proposed mosque near ground zero, which seemed to fuel the anger in Staten Island last year, had died down.
It was also important that the Dongan Hills building, in a largely Catholic neighborhood, had previously been owned by a Hindu group that used it as a temple, so another relatively unfamiliar religious group like Muslims was not regarded as very exotic.
William Yozaites, 60, who has lived 33 years in a house close to the mosque site, said he found the worshipers friendly, respectful and willing to listen to concerns about parking and noise. Mr. Yozaites, who manages a pub and sports leagues, said his wife, Theresa, enjoyed the open-house reception and said afterward, “They’re nice people.”
“They’re my neighbors now,” he said.
To be sure, there are more than a few neighbors in the enclave — where every third house seems to display an American flag — who are resentful.
One, Dorothy A. Abbruzzi, 68, a retired ceramics teacher who has lived two doors from the mosque property for 45 years, said she found the sight of women in robes and head scarves “scary” and was upset to wake in darkness and see men arriving to pray.
Another resident a few doors down from the mosque, who wanted only his first name, Jeffrey, published, said the Muslim worshipers had not disrupted the neighborhood’s serenity. But he pointed out that he worked for the Fire Department and had lost several friends from Rescue Company 5 in the World Trade Center. He said he was aware that the worshipers had no connections to the Muslims who flew planes into the towers, but he said the mosque’s presence “makes me uncomfortable.”
“It’s not right to be this bitter,” said Jeffrey, who is 55. “There’s good and bad in everything, but those guys were my friends and it hurt.”
Staten Island has long been seen as the city’s outlier, more rural, suburban, white and Republican than the other boroughs, and so insular that in a 1993 referendum residents voted to secede from the city.
But the borough is much changed. Since 1964, when the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connected it to Brooklyn, its population has doubled, to 468,000; many of the newcomers are foreign-born — 20 percent, according to the 2010 census — or immigrants’ children.
Staten Island’s Muslims, with roots in places like Egypt, Albania, Pakistan, the Palestinian territories and Indonesia, are largely professionals — doctors, engineers, physical therapists and the like, Mr. Mossallam said. He is a pilot for North American Airlines, a charter service, and flies contract flights for the American military.
“It’s very hard to find a family without a degree,” he said.
Staten Island has a half-dozen mosques, but they are mostly scattered around the densely populated urban north shore, not in a suburban mid-island neighborhood like Dongan Hills, where many one-family homes were built in the housing boom after World War II.
James S. Oddo, a Republican city councilman from Staten Island, said, “Staten Islanders in large measure understand that the Muslim community has a right to purchase property and open a mosque, so it’s not an issue for them.”
He said he told the Muslim American Society last year that it made a mistake by not reaching out to the community and to elected officials.
But he attributed the contrast between its reception this year and last year to the anger within the Catholic parish, St. Margaret Mary, at the secrecy with which the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York had tried to sell the vacant convent. Without “speaking to more irrational behaviors,” he said, “a lot of anger got displaced and projected onto those who wanted the property.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Monday, August 22nd 2011 at 11:52AM
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