To the Editor:
Before voicing my disagreement, I wish to make clear that there is much to praise in Amna Khalid’s piece (“Most of All I Am Offended as a Muslim,” The Chronicle Review, December 29). She is right to remind us of the importance of primary sources and the role that historians ought to play in education. She is also right to point out that the accusation of “Islamophobia” has no serious factual basis.
Nevertheless, there are two points on which I think that we should take issue. First, it is largely irrelevant whether the prohibition on pictural representation of holy figures is based on a narrow interpretation of Islam or not. Second, it is also unwise to focus on the intent of the artist or the patron to evaluate the pedagogical value of an artifact. If anything, ill intent is a good reason to present artifacts to a classroom.
Khalid writes as if the problem is that Hamline University has taken it upon itself to act upon the wrong interpretation of Islam. In siding with the student’s complaint, we are told that the administrators at Hamline have “privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view.” We are told that these are reductive and simplistic views of Islam, that siding with the ultra-conservatives and a view of the religion overly reliant on theology we somehow err.
One could debate just how widespread this “most extreme and conservative” view is. We could inquire just how widespread it was in the past. Citing a single 14th-century king as a counterexample is not exactly evidence that this was a minority view. One could also ask whether this “most extreme and conservative view” has become the dominant or one of the dominant interpretations of Islam. It is perfectly possible that an interpretation of a religion went from minority status to majority status. But we can bracket all these issues because they are largely irrelevant. Suppose that the view that Khalid calls “most extreme and conservative” was the most widely accepted and influential view of Islam both historically and presently. Suppose that the student was, regrettably, voicing the dominant, even the overwhelming sentiment amongst Muslims. Why should this matter? Not only should it not, but I doubt that Khalid can really think that it does.
Return to her analogy. She rightly notes that we should not interfere with the teaching of biology, or any other academic discipline, because it offends evangelical Protestants. I agree. But this does not hinge on the fact that the offended Protestants are the “most extreme and conservative” among the flock. The force of the example is that it reminds us that we are not committed to the idea that offending religious sensibilities is an intolerable transgression. Similarly, I suspect that we would reject a demand from an ultra-orthodox Jew to have the men and women study separately however unlikely it is that such a student would enroll at Hamline University. In either case, the appropriate response is not to ask whether the theology underpinning the objection is truly representative of the larger community of the faithful. The point is that religious prescriptions and prohibitions do not rule the public sphere.
Put otherwise, if one could show that the student’s objection was giving voice to the dominant interpretation of Islam, among both theologians and ordinary believers today, would she be more receptive to it? I hope not.
The second problem with Khalid’s piece is that she argues as if the goodwill of the artist makes a difference. I demur. So far as I can tell, since the end of the Second World War, history books all over the Western world have presented anti-Semitic caricatures and images. If memory serves me right, I saw such images in secondary and in post-secondary. To put it mildly, I suspect that I was not alone. These images are offensive and yet that is beside the point. They are also instructive. It is very challenging to learn about anti-Semitism and the use of propaganda if one never observes it.
The key difference is not authorial intent. No one is seriously debating whether those images or films were made to support anti-Semitic propaganda. Nor do we try to sort between the propaganda made by guilt-stricken but starving artists and the works made by ardent believers in Nazim. We use and should use the artifacts that are instructive.
The unstated problem is well-known: the notion that members of certain groups are treated as infallible moral compasses. We are not allowed to question or ignore their objections and sentiment of offense. Either the administrators, like David Everett, know that it is so and they are cowards, or they do not and they are fools.
Renaud-Philippe Garner
Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science
University of British Columbia Okanagan
