In collecting some of the reportage and commentary on the ongoing Cordoba House controversy, I remissly overlooked Edward E. Curtis’s brief but educative piece in the Daily News, which brings to light the historical intimacy of Muslim immigrants and lower Manhattan:

Muslims have always been a part of lower Manhattan‘s past. In fact, Islam in New York began near Ground Zero. From an historical perspective, there could hardly be a better place for a mosque.One of the first Arab-American enclaves in New York City was located on Washington St. in lower Manhattan – the very area in which the World Trade Center was later built. Founded by Arabic-speaking Christians and Muslims from Ottoman Syria in the 1880s, it was called Little Syria.

[. . .]

Lower Manhattan is also the final resting place of Muslims and other Africans, often slaves, who were forcibly resettled in New York when it was still New Amsterdam. The African Burial Ground, discovered in 1991, is six blocks away from the proposed Muslim community center. Scholars continue to debate the religious identity of the hundreds buried there, but the fact that some of the dead wore shrouds and were interred with strings of blue beads, frequently used as Islamic talismans, suggests Muslim were among the enslaved people who helped build Manhattan into a bustling city.

While we’re at it, Talking Points Memo reports that opponents of the construction of a new mosque in Temecula, CA, have adopted a  rather disturbing tactic:

It seems the anti-mosque protesters in California have torn a few pages from the Abu Ghraib field manual. Protesters of a planned mosque and Muslim community center in Riverside County, California are calling on locals to come to a rally outside an existing mosque with their pet dogs because, as the protest organizer says, Muslims “hate dogs.”

Continue reading here, or read Curtis’s editorial in full here.