Thursday, September 02, 2010
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim cleric who wants to build a $100 million mosque and community center near Ground Zero in New York City, has received a lot of attention relating to his religious beliefs, but there is another aspect of his life that is worth noting: as a longtime landlord, he has a history of operating poorly maintained housing complexes in New Jersey.
A review of city health documents by the Bergen Record uncovered “page after page” of complaints from tenants of Rauf’s. The problems ranged from failure “to pick up garbage, to rat and bedbug infestations and no heat and hot water.”
Rauf began acquiring and developing apartment buildings in the late 1970s. Since then he has been threatened with multiple foreclosure actions, all of which were settled before foreclosure. In October 2008, Rauf and his wife were sued for alleged fraud when they transferred ownership of an apartment building without telling the holder of their mortgage and then obtained a second mortgage from a bank using the new entity. The case was settled out of court before it went to trial.
Cynthia Balko of Union City, who has lived in one of Rauf’s buildings for years, found it hard to believe the same man intends to build and operate a world-class Islamic community center. “He can’t even repair the bells in the hallway. He doesn’t take care of his properties,” Balko told The Record. “But he’s going to take care of a mosque?”
The son of an Egyptian cleric, Rauf was born in Kuwait in 1948 and moved with his family to New York City when he was 17 years old. He became a citizen in 1980. After working as a teacher in Harlem and as a salesman, he began meeting Islamic scholars and soon embraced Sufism, a more mystical and open-minded branch of Islam than the one practiced by his father. He married an interior designer, Kashmir-born Daisy Khan, in 1997, the same year that Rauf founded the American Society of Muslim Advancement (ASMA). After the 9/11 attacks, the couple became visible representatives of moderate Islam, and in 2007 President George W. Bush’s State Department sent Rauf on speaking tours to the Middle East.
-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff
Imam in Mosque Debate Has History of Tenant Troubles (by Peter J. Sampson and Jean Rimbach, Bergen Record)
Feisal Rauf: Ground Zero's Lightning Rod (by Paul Harris, The Observer)
'Ground Zero Mosque' Imam Helped FBI With Counterterrorism Efforts (by Sam Stein, Huffington Post)
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