Hamline University fired an art-history professor and branded her ‘Islamophobic’ for displaying a painting of Mohammed to her class. Now, she’s suing.
Hamline University fired an art-history professor and branded her ‘Islamophobic’ for displaying a painting of Mohammed to her class. Now, she’s suing.
T rigger alert: I couldn’t care less if there is an Islamic consensus on the question of whether it is halal or haram for Mohammed to be depicted in visual art. In this, I am confident that I am expressing the American consensus — although, admittedly, not the consensus of university administrators and managers, who now outnumber both academics and students.
The point is relevant thanks to one of these Commissars of Woke named David Everett, who serves as “Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence” at tiny Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. In early November, Everett branded an art-history professor “Islamophobic” for displaying a 14th-century painting of Islam’s prophet to her class in the course of quotidian instruction. In short order, the professor, Erika Lopez Prater, was on the receiving end of more bile from another Jacobin, dean of students Patti Kersten, who decried her “act of intolerance.” Professor Lopez Prater was duly canceled, which in this case means terminated from her employment, because — as Everett and Hamline president Fayneese Miller put it in an email to staff — “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”
This, we should note, was the Left’s age-old hubristic error of saying out loud the part that, for its strategic purposes, should never be uttered. Executed without comment, the Hamline administration’s project is the sort of thing that goes on all day, every day in the cultural-Marxist laboratories that many American universities have become. This one has gotten unwanted attention because, with Lopez Prater suing the school, it happens to have been reported. But while it may be newsworthy, it’s not news — it’s today’s “dog bites man” story: Leftists and their Islamist allies need you to go back to sleep so they can go back to turning your little darlings into apparatchiks.
All that said, I am not certain what is worse: the manner in which Lopez Prater was defenestrated or the contortions by which that outrage is being walked back.
Needless to say, the ouster of Lopez Prater is atrocious. But, again, it’s an old story.
“Islamophobia,” of which the professor was accused, is not actually a legitimate diagnosis of irrational hatred. It is a demagogic label developed by the Muslim Brotherhood. As the world’s most effective sharia-supremacist network, the Brotherhood studies American culture and collaborates seamlessly with the American Left. Grasping that the charge of racism, no matter how baseless, is the most ruinous defamation in our society, it conjured up “Islamophobia.” The charge is applied to anyone who dares to notice that fundamentalist interpretations of sharia are both blatantly incompatible with American constitutional principles, and — in their jihadist iteration — forcibly offensive. That, indeed, is why so many infamous jihadists got their ideological start in the Brotherhood and then moved on to even more militant organizations.
Naturally, the young adults (at least chronologically speaking) in Lopez Prater’s classroom suffered no actual harm from the depiction of the painting. This is America, where, university administrators notwithstanding, exposure to words and artistic expression is not equivalent to violent assault. In fact, such exposure can be better understood as the raison d’être of the university. More to the point, this was an art-history class, and Lopez Prater had made clear that Islamic art, which is a significant component of art in human history, was part of the syllabus.
The Muslim student agitators who posed as wounded victims are sharia-supremacist activists. One of them headed the school’s Muslim Students Association chapter, and the complaint they manufactured was trumpeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. As I related at length in my 2010 book on the Brotherhood, The Grand Jihad, the MSA and CAIR are key hubs in the organization’s American network: the MSA for purposes of indoctrination, and CAIR — conceived as a media-savvy Hamas apologist masquerading as a civil-rights organization — for purposes of victim-narrative PR.
This was not a good-faith complaint about a teacher who abused her station. It was a play that the Islamist team has been running in this country for over 30 years.
The supremacist agenda in the West is to implant and gradually spread sharia strictures — sharia (the path) being Islam’s societal framework–cum–legal code, whose fundamentalist construction is anti-liberty, anti-free-expression, systematically discriminatory, and cruel to the point of barbaric in its hudud penalties. The headline in the kerfuffle du jour is that fundamentalist Muslims find artistic representations of Mohammed (and Allah, of course) to be blasphemous. But the subtext of most sharia-supremacist aggression in the United States is that any critical examination of Islam is to be suppressed. That includes even laudatory critiques, such as Professor Lopez Prater’s lecture. After all, praise presumes the authority to judge, which in turn implies the power to condemn. The advance of the contra-constitutional Islamist agenda depends on intimidating Americans into silence by threatening to meet any criticism of Islam with rebuke and ruin.
This is why I believe Hamline’s walk-back is as offensive as the original outrage.
Understanding that they got out over their skis in a way that invites more scrutiny of their indoctrination center (and maybe a big-money judgment for Lopez Prater), the powers that be at Hamline issued a statement of regret over the incident. Did their change of heart come because they realized they had violated American principles of academic liberty and free speech? Yeah, right.
Fayneese, the aforementioned university president, and Board of Trustees chairwoman Ellen Watters explained their self-described “misstep” as a failure to appreciate the rich diversity of Muslim opinion and scholarship. Now edified, they’ve come to appreciate the “complexity” of Mohammed imagery. They would have you believe it is a revelation to them — I’m tempted to say, an epiphany — that many Muslims do not regard artistic representations of the prophet to be blasphemous. How remarkable that this dawns only now on leaders of a school that offers art-history courses that were known to feature Islamic art — at least until about five minutes ago, when the MSA and CAIR got involved. In any event, Hamline’s eminences suddenly realize that, because there are shades of gray in sharia interpretation, their labeling of Lopez Prater as “Islamophobic” was, well, “flawed.”
Although it is more alluringly presented in our pages by the estimable Mustafa Akyol, his liberal Muslim’s perspective is similar: Artistic representations of Mohammed — at least non-derogatory ones — are not necessarily blasphemous because “there is no Islamic consensus” on the question. While the Koran is silent on the matter, Akyol notes that “image makers” are condemned in “the reported sayings of Mohammed” — i.e., the long-accepted hadiths that most scholars regard as scriptural authority but that he seems to downgrade as a “secondary source.” Liberal Muslims contextualize these condemnations as merely a “concern with idolatry” that is similar to the banning of “graven images” in the Old Testament.
To my mind, that’s a stretch. Nevertheless, I welcome the modernizing effort in the battle for the Muslim mind against “ultra-conservative circles” of Islam that draw from Mohammed’s words a call to ban all artistic representation — not just religious iconography but even photographs of humans and animals. (The jihadists I prosecuted way back when similarly suppressed music — and anyone who deludes himself into thinking this is ancient history should explore Afghanistan, now once again under Taliban rule.)
Is Akyol right that it will someday become a consensus view among Muslims that “a critical study of Islam’s past and present isn’t Islamophobic”? I hope so, but that doesn’t mean I care very much. “Islamophobia” is a fraudulent label concocted by zealots who see liberals like Akyol as their adversaries. It is invoked to undermine critical thinking, even about all there is to admire in Islamic art and culture. So why would we ever accept their demagoguery as the gauge by which we measure ourselves?
More to the point, Hamline University is a disgrace because it has sedulously distanced itself from American principles. The appropriate measure of its behavior in cashiering a good-faith instructor is not sharia. It is the Constitution and enlightenment culture. In this society, we are expected to put up with expression we don’t like, from “Piss Christ” to the heinous messaging of the Westboro Baptist Church. It makes no difference to the propriety of academic exploration whether, by squinting hard enough, an analyst can manage to justify a lecture under some evolved “Religion of Peace” spin on sharia.
If we let the Muslim Brotherhood have a veto over American educational curricula, we will forfeit the culture of thought and surrender to intolerance. So I say without apology that, while I respect any Muslim’s right to believe in the tenets of sharia however he or she chooses to interpret them, those tenets are utterly irrelevant to what happens in American classrooms. If you don’t want to be “assaulted” with artistic representations of the prophet, then don’t take art history. If you do take it, open your mind and maybe learn something.
In this society, we don’t edit life based on the tender sensibilities and theatrical anxieties of agitators. They should give freedom a try. They may find it aggravatingly wondrous.