A Lesson on Pluralism? : Some See Bias in Fight Against Planned Muslim Campus

By Orange County standards, when the Islamic Center of Southern California bought 3.4 acres of property to build a small grade school in Rancho Santa Margarita, it seemed an innocuous little development.

Eight months later, it has become much more: a far-ranging tussle over traffic and ethnicity. Muslim leaders see it as something of a referendum on diversity, while leaders of the unincorporated community, which is nestled in the foothills of Cleveland National Forest and poised on the brink of cityhood, see it as a crucial battle against urban congestion.

Late last year, the Islamic Center pieced together plans to build a private, 400-student school called New Horizon. It would be the second Muslim grade school in the county, and demand was high. The purchase seemed to meet the terms of deed restrictions that earmarked the property for a religious institution. And, mostly through private donations, the Los Angeles-based center had raised the $1.1 million needed for the land deal.

“The process was going fine,” center Chairman Magdy Eletreby said. “Very fine.”

By June, though, sentiment in the community had turned sour. Ostensibly, protests focused on the volume of traffic the school would produce. But Muslim leaders say some of the stinging letters that flooded the offices of the Islamic Center and the offices of county officials suggest that the problem may reach deeper than that.

“If we understand correctly, the proposed school will cater to a very specific religious sect which has no members in the immediately surrounding residential communities,” one Rancho Santa Margarita homeowner wrote in a letter to the Islamic Center.

“Given the lack of practitioners of your faith in this community, we are again confounded by the logic which suggests that this site would even be considered. . . . If you really want to be a responsible neighbor and a successful business, we believe you should focus upon the neighborhoods where your customers are located.”

In just a decade, Orange County’s Muslim community has grown from 50,000 to, by some estimates, as many as 200,000, making it one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the nation. That growth, much of which has been in South County, has happened almost unnoticed, without the friction that has accompanied the growth of other ethnic groups. Some area Muslims say it was only a matter of time before their quiet expansion boiled over into controversy.

That time might have come. Leaders of Southern California’s Muslim community, while they concede that there has been no overt discrimination, are beginning to fear their proposal is being judged, at least in part, on their ethnicity.

“This is a test to see how the Muslim community has integrated into the Orange County area,” said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. “There is an apprehension that this is part of a missionary campaign, whereas in reality it is only a mission for coexistence and pluralism.”

Civic leaders in Rancho Santa Margarita, which was founded just 13 years ago and bills itself as “a small city with the soul of a village,” say coexistence is welcome. But traffic jams are not.

Traffic has always been the issue behind the debate--not race, religion or ethnicity, civic leaders say. According to the Islamic Center’s own traffic studies, the school, which would be near the intersection of Camino Altozano and Avenida de Las Banderas, eventually would generate an estimated 2,850 car trips each day on Camino Altozano. That’s more than a third of the residential street’s capacity.

“From our perspective, there is no issue at all with this being an Islamic center,” said Gary Thompson, a leader of a group lobbying for incorporation of Rancho Santa Margarita.

“That isn’t something anybody should be focused on. The residents of that area are really concerned with traffic. That’s really what’s driving the concern about that school. It certainly isn’t ethnic.”

Indeed, at repeated village meetings, residents have articulated that their protests are founded on quality-of-life issues, not cultural differences. And community officials make a point of referring to the proposed school as “New Horizon,” specifically to avoid unnecessary references to the Islamic Center or the Muslim community.

“I can’t answer if they are being oversensitive or not,” said Neil Blais, president of Rancho Santa Margarita’s Civic Council. In coming weeks, the Islamic Center will seek the blessing of the Civic Council, a sort of unofficial city council that will make a recommendation to county officials, who must approve the project.

“We have tried, definitely, to stay on the technical side of things,” Blais said. “Traffic is the issue.”

Civic leaders concede that, to a degree, the Islamic Center is the victim of bad timing: Several other development decisions made over the last 10 years already have made traffic a critical issue in Rancho Santa Margarita.

Residents, for example, staved off the county’s plans to put a courthouse inside a 300,000-square-foot building--by far the largest in the area--near the proposed school site. But now Cox Cable is moving a sizable chunk of its Orange County operations there. While it will mean 500 jobs, it will also mean more traffic.

Meanwhile, a crowded elementary school, Arroyo Vista, is just down the road. More than 1,100 students are dropped off and picked up each day. Area residents already complain that parents have begun taking to side streets to avoid traffic jams.

And Rancho Santa Margarita, just a dozen years after it was little but sagebrush, is at something of a crossroads itself: In November, the community and residents of adjoining areas will vote on whether to become Orange County’s 33rd city.

That’s why the tiny school proposal has became a bit of a civic sensation.

Early this summer, the community’s middle- and upper-middle-class residents began warning the Islamic Center of boisterous protest. Beyond their complaints of increased traffic, they raised safety concerns over everything from mountain lion sightings near the school site to the likelihood of brush fires in the nearby canyon.

“We will not go away quietly,” one opponent wrote the Islamic Center.

“At that point, it was no longer a rubber-stamp project,” said Jim Thor, the owner of an Irvine office furniture business and the founder of the community’s Civic Council. “These are impacts that really affect the community. We owe it to the community to have this project thoroughly reviewed.”

Thor acknowledged that the Islamic Center faces a disadvantage because its project comes several years into the development boom, in which the early bird gets the berm. “They just showed up,” Thor said. “You have to keep that in mind.”

The Muslim community is trying. But members say a nagging question keeps popping up: How can Rancho Santa Margarita, a community that’s grown from a handful of residents in 1986 to 30,000 today--and expects 20,000 more people to move in soon--suddenly draw the line at a 400-student school?

About 200 of those students would arrive at an elementary school in September 2000, if the plans survive, Eletreby said. The remaining 200 wouldn’t arrive until 2005, when the Islamic Center plans to open a middle school too.

“We see a double standard,” said the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Al-Marayati. “It is only more of an issue when it is a Muslim institution. . . . This project should be an enrichment to the community there. The way things are now, this doesn’t serve the community at all.”