Over the past decade, many Americans have based their thoughts and feelings about Islam in large part on a single place: the blasted patch of ground where the World Trade Center once stood. But a rival space has slowly and silently taken shape over those same years, about six miles to the north. It is a vast, palacelike suite of rooms on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where some of the world’s most precious Islamic artifacts sit sequestered behind locked doors.
DEARBORN, Mich. — The clock reached midnight as Sunday ticked into Monday, and someone yelled, “It’s go time!” Football season could officially begin. New balls appeared, and players at Fordson High School prepared to do what had long been done in this hometown of Henry Ford: build something with assembly-line precision and reliability.
It is his fault. When his people rose up, he turned his armies on them; when they fought back, he slaughtered them. He laid siege to Benghazi, and promised a massacre. He was the one who seized power, who oppressed, repressed, tortured, humiliated, and offended. And yet.
I was ecstatic over Egypt’s revolution, thrilled by Tunisia’s, and still hurt to see what’s happening in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. As much as I was concerned by the far more violent turn Libya’s revolution took, I wanted Qaddafi gone. And now he is gone. But I sense in his rise, fall, and expiration a moral lesson we seem uninterested in.
At the pulpit of an inner-city Chicago mosque, the tall blond imam begins preaching in his customary fashion, touching on the Los Angeles Lakers victory the night before, his own gang involvement as a teenager, a TV soap opera and then the Day of Judgment. "Yesterday we watched the best of seven.... Unfortunately we forget the big final; it's like that show 'One Life to Live,' " Imam Suhaib Webb says as sleepy boys and young men come to attention in the back rows. "There's no overtime, bro."
