Feisal Abdul Rauf (1948-) was a Kuwaiti-American Sufi imam who was the leader of the Park51 project, which was nicknamed the "Ground Zero Mosque" due to its location two blocks away from the center of the 9/11 attacks in Downtown Manhattan.
Biography[]
Feisal Abdul Rauf was born in 1948 in Kuwait to a father who was an Egyptian imam, and the family moved to New York City in the United States in the 1960s. He earned a master's degree in plasma physics from Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey, but he later focused on religion and became the leader of a mosque. From 1983 to 2009 he was imam of Masjid al-Farah in Tribeca, Manhattan, and he sought to improve relations between American society, American Muslims, and the Muslim World. After 9/11, he criticized terrorism, but he stated that the United States provoked the attacks through its foreign policy in the Middle East and said that Osama Bin Laden was made in the USA. He gained more controversy by saying that Hamas was not a terrorist group, and by leading the effort to build a mosque - Park51 - only two blocks away from the area where the World Trade Center had been destroyed.