Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

The most vicious current anti-Muslim diatribes express a belief in an organized world-wide Islamic
social and political agenda of infiltration and violent overthrow of Western democracy in favor of an Islamic
state. A recently aired CNN documentary called “Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door,” tells of two
hundred and fifty local Muslim families, long term residents of Murfreesboro, TN, who pooled resources
and raised money to purchase fifteen acres of land to build a mosque and community center on the outskirts
their town. They had lived as friends with their Christian neighbors for over thirty years and those friends,
immediately after 9/11 had shown support, understanding, and reassurance that they were not conflating
their Muslim neighbors and all Muslims with radical terrorists. But, in the frenzy of anti-Islamic political
rhetoric that reached a crescendo last summer over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, many of these
Christian neighbors became opponents of the mosque, saying they “were outraged that something of this
nature was being shoved down our throats” (O’Brien). Opponents of the mosque filed suit, asking for a
restraining order, and during the proceedings, the plaintiff’s lawyer attempted to question the validity of
Islam as a religion.
Why are we drawn to this sort of rhetoric?
In his Pulitzer prize winning book, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says that we fight for life
against the threat of death, but, among all animals, we alone have self-consciousness and awareness of the
inevitability of our impending death. Becker says that we transcend death by finding meaning for our lives
in the symbolic constructs of our culture. Because we fear extinction with insignificance, because we cannot
bear the knowledge that we will die without leaving a trace behind, we work to have an effect on eternity.
Our culture embodies our attempted transcendence of death. (Becker 5)
But, in reality, any symbolic denial of mortality is a figment of the imagination. Whatever our
belief in an afterlife, we each know that we will die, one day. Self-transcendence via culture does not give
us the solution to problem of death. We have shifted our fear of death onto the higher level of cultural
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