Oops.

"Sometime in 1999, a construction electrician received a new work assignment from his union. The man, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, was told to report to 2 World Trade Center, the southern of the twin towers.

In the union locker room on the 51st floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam went through a construction worker’s version of due diligence. In the case of an emergency in the building, he asked his foreman and crew, where was he supposed to reassemble? The answer was the corner of Broadway and Vesey.

Over the next few days, noticing some fellow Muslims on the job, Mr. Abdus-Salaam voiced an equally essential question: “So where do you pray at?” And so he learned about the Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower.

He went there regularly in the months to come, first doing the ablution known as wudu in a washroom fitted for cleansing hands, face and feet, and then facing toward Mecca to intone the salat prayer.

On any given day, Mr. Abdus-Salaam’s companions in the prayer room might include financial analysts, carpenters, receptionists, secretaries and ironworkers. There were American natives, immigrants who had earned citizenship, visitors conducting international business — the whole Muslim spectrum of nationality and race.

Leaping down the stairs on Sept. 11, 2001, when he had been installing ceiling speakers for a reinsurance company on the 49th floor, Mr. Abdus-Salaam had a brief, panicked thought. He didn’t see any of the Muslims he recognized from the prayer room. Where were they? Had they managed to evacuate?

He staggered out to the gathering place at Broadway and Vesey. From that corner, he watched the south tower collapse, to be followed soon by the north one. Somewhere in the smoking, burning mountain of rubble lay whatever remained of the prayer room, and also of some of the Muslims who had used it.

Given the vitriolic opposition now to the proposal to build a Muslim community center two blocks from ground zero, one might say something else has been destroyed: the realization that Muslim people and the Muslim religion were part of the life of the World Trade Center.

Opponents of the Park51 project say the presence of a Muslim center dishonors the victims of the Islamic extremists who flew two jets into the towers. Yet not only were Muslims peacefully worshiping in the twin towers long before the attacks, but even after the 1993 bombing of one tower by a Muslim radical, Ramzi Yousef, their religious observance generated no opposition

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.

Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr. Abdus-Salaam and Mr. Sareshwala. Prof. John L. Esposito of Georgetown University, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/nyregion/11religion.html

is there a point to this?

If I have to point it out then no.

good, cause it seemed like more leftist, liberal crap

So we could have a prayer room in the towers but we can't have one two blocks away?

Muslims can help build the towers but they aren't good enough to have a mosque two blocks from the towers?



I already knew that the whole protest was stupid but now it got stupider.

a prayer room is not a mosque... read the whole article

I did and it makes the protest even stupider.

Prove there was a prayer room.

Just a pathetic story without proof.

Throws shoe at topic!!!

it does not make any difference whether there were muslims in the WTC or not or Hindus in the WTC or not or Bahai in the WTC or not or Shinto in the WTC or not.

of course the population in the WTC center at the time of the bombing reflected the diversity of our society. so what?

this does not make the attack any less heinous nor does it make the
butchers responsible any less Islamic terrorists...

if a group of crazed Christian fundamentalist terrorists decided to blow up a block of buildings destroying the Masjid an-Nabawi and killing thousands at worship, and then some developers proposed building a multi-story Christian Center a couple of blocks away do you think such a proposal would be received with great smiles, hugs and kisses, and a hearty hand clasp?



if some Christians had been killed in such an attack would that have any bearing on whether or not the Christian Center would be a good idea or not?

i don't think so.....

your know so much, prove that there wasn't.

Christian terrorists are not treated the same.

There has been no church not built or protested against because of Christian terrorists in this country.

The protesting of the community center with the mosque in it is stupid. Shows ignorance that exists in our society.
Shows that Americans still have a long way to go before they can be fair to other humans as they are to themselves.

what christian terrorist killed 3000 people and did over a billion dollars in damage?

Oh God not this crap again

So your saying one life taken means less than 3000? Or the amount of cost in dollars is more important than lives?

It doesn't matter how many lives, it matters that is it terrorism and the senseless lose of innocent lives.

All lives lost to terrorism are valued lives.

That said, there has never been a protest of a Christian church over Christian terrorism.

I could write a story about a nudie bar on the 19th floor of the south tower......it holds true as much as this story. Not saying it isn't, but can it be proved?

Tell you what, I learned long ago that life is not fair nor does it treat everyone fairly......deal with it and move on.

What possible reason can you find for not building a Christian church anywhere?

If there was an Islamic prayer room in one of the towers, then thats all the more reason to bring them down.

There are a whole slew of stories at reputable news sites that state this prayer room existed.

Hell what is a mosque but a prayer room?

keep grasping for those straws, maybe someday you'll get one... even a blind squirrel gets a nut every once in a while