New York, August 21: The wife of the cleric of the controversial mosque to be built at Ground Zero here has said that they will not back down in the ongoing debate to build the place of worship near the site of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre.
“We have too important a moment to back down. We have to take our opponents and transform them,” Daisy Khan, the wife of imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, said.
“We have to convince people that not all Muslims are extremists. We have to educate them on being able to distinguish between us and on the issue of Islamophobia. This is a bigger fight,” she told the Washington Post.
She said that mosque developers were considering having a “healing dialogue” with the community and the 9/11 families. Khan blamed the current fallout over the mosque on the Republicans.
Meanwhile, imam Rauf said extremism is a security threat in both the West and the Muslim world but refused to discuss the political firestorm over plans for an Islamic cultural centre.
-PTI