A university assigns its 3,500 incoming freshmen a slim volume called "Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations" as an introductory course on Islam. The university, along with its chancellor and trustees, is besieged by conservative groups who see reading a book considered holy by well over a billion people in well over fifty countries a somewhat seditious act; and then assailed on the airwaves by a nationally watched talk show host who not only compares the assignment to "teaching Mein Kampf in 1941" but questions the wisdom of making freshmen "study our enemy’s religion."
Now, what country do you suppose this crude agitprop has come from?
No, it wasn’t from Stalinist Russia, where orthodoxy assumed the dour and turgid guise of communist aesthetics; or Nazi Germany, where literature that was not in accord with the party line was burned; or Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution where books that did not take a "correct" line on Socialist realism were discarded (and their authors imprisoned) in favor of those whose message "forged a weapon for the proletariat." Nor did this crude agitprop originate in some repressive country today where thought and discourse are reduced to "a small cog and a small screw" in the mechanism of the totalitarian state.
It is, in fact, happening right here, before our eyes, in the good old US of A. The educational institution in question is the University of North Carolina. The agitators are Christian evangelists and other conservative groups, and the nationally watched talk show host is the notoriously reactionary Bill O’Reilley of Fox News Network.
To the university, it is all about upholding the tradition of academic freedom. To the university’s critics, including the Virginia-based Family Policy Network, which filed a suit on June 22 against UNC to block the project, it is "unconstitutional" for a publicly funded university to require students to study the Qur’an, a book that, according to the FPN’s president, one Joe Glover, exhorts Muslims "to kill infidels and has served as an inspiration or justification for some terrorists."
In fact, long before the story broke, one of these critics, the Rev. Franklin Graham — you may remember him as the man who gave the invocation at President Bush’s inauguration — had denounced Islam as an "evil" religion. Though his remark caused a furor, Graham, in several appearances on radio and television in recent weeks, repeated this repugnant canard, asserting that the Qur’an "teaches" violence and that terrorism is condoned by "mainstream" Muslims around the world.
Clearly this totally kooky, at times hysterical, but always desperately puerile view of Islam is not held by all Americans or even a substantial number of them. But in those pockets of bigotry where it is held, the view was initially given impetus and made fashionable soon after Samuel P. Huntington’s piece, "The Clash of Civilizations," appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, in which he warned that an impending "clash of civilizations will dominate global politics." In his 1997 follow-up book, Huntington, an influential scholar, opinion maker and former government official, concluded that "Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards."
Since one does not get into a spitting competition with a skunk, or into cheap name-calling with a bigot, it is clearly unnecessary to dignify remarks like that with a comment. Though most Americans do not espouse such rabid views, the fact remains that few of them are familiar with Islam as a faith and a culture.
In his admirable new book, Unholy War, John L. Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University, quotes "one Senate leader," without naming him, as saying: "I know a lot about many things, but nothing about Islam and the Muslim world — and neither do most of my colleagues."
If that is the case, with that kind of ignorance knocking around, it is all the more reason, you would imagine, why there should be more, not less, universities teaching more books and throwing more light on a religion that has spoken so cogently to millions of people, across centuries and cultures.
A lot of Americans believe that. In a letter to the editor in the Washington Post last Sunday, commenting on the controversy, a reader said: "We can’t ignore on of the world’s most influential religions because we fear the fanatics. Discouraging education about Islam will promote ignorance that will evolve into fear." Another wrote: "The best way to make a public statement about American values is to promote the diversity of America." Other readers wrote similar letters.
But what of prominent commentators like, say, George Will, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, whose Eurocentrism is passionately worn by him like a badge of courage?
In an earlier piece, for example, he berated the New York state education department for a report it had issued recommending that the state school curriculum reflect the diversity in the ethnic composition of the student body. The report decried an educational system that "deliberately leads students to disrespect people who are different," and where "a subtle message is given that all science and mathematics originated within European culture." In essence, the report called for an end to Eurocentrism in education and advocated the dissemination of knowledge through a system where all cultures are declared of equal moral worth and of equal importance in the making of America.
Will did not like that at all. Not one bit. "Eurocentricity is right, in American curricula and consciousness, because it accords with the facts of our history, and we — and Europe — are fortunate for that," he wrote in his scathing and dismissive column. "The political and moral legacy of Europe has made the most happy and admirable nations. Saying that may be indelicate, but it has the merit of being true and the truth should be the core of any curriculum."
Perhaps so. But it is also true that "the moral and political legacy of Europe" would not have been forged had it not been for the Renaissance, and the Renaissance would not have come about were it not for the Muslim diffusion into Europe, between 711 and 1492, via the Iberian Peninsula, of Greek, Arabian, Persian and Indian knowledge that shaped the future of Western civilization.
The problem with the semiliterate, quasieducated, like those simple folk from the Family Policy Network and strident talk show hosts on Fox News, and with the half-baked, pseudo-intellectual, like George Will and his rightwing cohorts, is that for them to define Islam is to define it through the actions of deluded individuals and abhorrent movements purporting to speak in its name — an exercise as equally egregious as defining Christianity, say, through the excesses of the Inquisition. In European history, how many venomous ideas were embraced and horrifying actions taken by free-lance Christians advancing themselves as spokesmen of their religion? It was no less a figure than Walt Whitman who wrote in this regard: "Oh, Bible, what
The anthem of Americans of Will’s generation used to be, back in the late 60s, "We are the world, we are the children." Today, the latter remains true. As for the former, well, that’s what the whole problem has been about — Eurocentric obnoxiousness. And that sentiment doesn’t cut it in today’s world.
<15 August 2002>
