Six years ago, while interviewing Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf for the New York Times, the journalist Chris Hedges mentioned the imam’s “Cordoba initiative, ‘a blueprint to mend the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.’” After the 9/11 attacks, Rauf had devoted himself to interfaith dialogue and collaboration, and was actively promoting reconciliation at Masjid al-Farah mosque just a few blocks north of Ground Zero. In fact, one week earlier Rauf had appeared in a 30-second advertisement on Arabic television with “American clerics of various faiths” to apologize for the Abu Ghraib prison abuses. Hedges – a former seminarian at Harvard Divinity College who would later publish a damning critique of the fascist tendencies in America’s Christian right – described Rauf as “a man increasingly caught in the middle. He preaches a moderate Islam, one that embraces the values of Western democracy, carries within it a love of America and calls on Muslims to respect other faiths.”

Today Rauf is at the centre of a political firestorm because of the Cordoba Initiative’s proposal to build a prayer room at Park 51, an Islamic community centre two blocks away from Ground Zero.  Although the centre will contain an auditorium, swimming pool, basketball court and culinary school in addition to the prayer room, it has quickly been transformed into the “Ground Zero Mosque” in the eyes of its wilder critics. As former speaker of the house, and current presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich explained to Fox News, the development at Park 51 is the work of “radical Islamists who want to triumphally prove that they can build a mosque right next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists… They’re trying to make a case about supremacy.”

Sarah Palin, also sensing an easy target, sent her legion of Twitter followers the now infamous message: “Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” Many other Republicans, among them former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have made similar remarks and  in true American style there is even a country-and-western song making the rounds on the Internet, warning anyone who can endure its tin-eared lyrics that  “We’ve got to stop the Mosque at Ground Zero / From thumbin’ its nose at every victim and hero.” The prospect of radical Islam colonizing downtown Manhattan has been such a tabloid-friendly trope that news coverage has been unrelenting. In the media frenzy Rauf has been blamed for associating with Islamic radicals, for refusing to condemn Hamas, and for a generally questionable attitude to Islamism – or, at least, for failing to condemn terrorism on every possible occasion.

Gradually, non-Muslims who believe the furore over Park 51 is a threat to the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment have begun to push back. In the Op-ed pages of the New York Times, William Dalrymple a British scholar on modern India has pointed out that Rauf is a Sufi whose embrace of tolerant attitudes places him on the “front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do.” On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann has lamented that “in a country dedicated to freedom, forces have gathered to blow out of all proportion the construction of a minor community center; to transform it into a training ground for terrorists and an insult to the victims of 9/11 and a tribute to medieval Muslim subjugation of the West.” Most importantly, President Obama’s somewhat lawyerly defence of  “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan” has helped to realign the issue in the public sphere.

Of course the most important audience to these overheated exchanges probably resides outside the United States. To them, whether the politics behind the strident opposition to Park 51 are disingenuous or merely foolish will make little difference. What they will see, and remember, is the country’s apparent fear and ignorance of Islam. This audience’s worst suspicions of American Islamophobia  will be confirmed. Many years ago, Edward Said wrote trenchantly about the follies of viewing Islam as a monolithic experience, especially one that is prone to violence or fundamentalist interpretations of scripture, but nearly three decades after the fall of the Shah, mainstream American media still struggles to provide balanced coverage of the Muslim world. Nobody in the West confuses Lutherans with Catholics or Methodists with Jehovah’s Witnesses, but when it comes to the Muslim world it seems quite permissible to confuse Sunni with Shia, Sufi with Salafist, moderate with radical.

The gravest danger of conceding to the strident opposition to Park 51, may be that it will embolden the least scrupulous religious zealots in America. Against this possibility stands the wisdom of the American constitution and the tenacity of secular civil society. So perhaps the last word on the matter should be given to Sharif El-Gamal, the developer who has defended his company’s proposal for Park 51 with great eloquence: “This is a defining moment for the United States of America, this is a defining moment for Muslim Americans across all fifty two states, this is a defining moment for you and I and the First Amendment and . . . I see us passing this test as Americans because that is what makes our country so great.”