When Woke Sensitivity on ‘Islamophobia’ Surpasses That of Muslims

I n the past two decades, the world has seen various controversies over visual depictions of the prophet of Islam. They include the 2005 “cartoon crisis” in Denmark, where caricatures of Mohammad led to death threats and widespread violent protests, or the Charlie Hebdo affair in France, where similar cartoons published by the magazine in 2012 were followed by terrorist attacks that left twelve dead.

More recently, at Hamline University, Minnesota, another controversy — a very different one — erupted over the image of Mohammed. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor who teaches a class on the history of art, included a visual depiction of the Islamic prophet in her fall curriculum. This was no mocking cartoon made by infidels but rather a reverent painting found in a historical text by Rashid al-Din, a famous 14th-century Muslim vizier and historian. It showed Mohammed receiving his first Koranic revelation from the Angel Gabriel — a manifestation of the Islamic faith, akin to countless Christian works of art depicting the life of Jesus Christ.

Prater was sensitive to the chance that some Muslim students in her class might have a problem with the image. So she notified her students in advance, stating that if anyone was uncomfortable, he or she could skip the class. None of them did. But after the class, a senior student, who also heads the Muslim Student Association on the campus, complained to the administration. He also received support from the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Soon, on November 7, the university’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence censured the classroom exercise as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” He also informed Prater that she would not be given a job the next semester. On November 18, Hamline University’s student newspaper, The Oracle, reported the incident in an article about the latest “hate speech incidents and microaggressions” at the university. Meanwhile, Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, emailed all employees. “Respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom,” she said, “should have superseded academic freedom.”

There are, however, good reasons to uphold academic freedom over particular beliefs and feelings of students — freedom in fact will be good for them, helping them to mature intellectually and emotionally.

One of the most bewildering aspects of this story is that there was nothing “Islamophobic” in Prater’s presentation of the medieval artwork depicting Mohammed.

This was put well in New Lines Magazine, which deserves credit for breaking the story. As Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art, explained there, the painting, if anything, was “Islamophilic.”

Some prominent Muslim academics also publicly made the same point. Jonathan Brown, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University and a pious convert to Islam, tweeted:

With a similar approach, the California-based Muslim Public Affairs Council released a “Statement of Support for Art Professor Fired from Hamline University.”

As these diverse Muslim reactions show, what Hamline University did was to honor only one view among Muslims, the most rigid one, on whether Mohammed may be visually depicted.

There is no Islamic consensus on this question because, first of all, the Koran says nothing against it. The secondary source of Islam, the reported sayings of Mohammed, do include condemnations of “image makers,” which seem to reflect a concern with idolatry — similar to the banning of “graven images” in the Ten Commandments. Taken literally, these reports led in ultra-conservative circles to the banning of any human or animal image, even photography.

However, other Muslims, in earlier eras and also today, believe that images can be made not as blasphemous idols but as art, visualization — products of the imagination. This has allowed the rise of miniatures, an artistic genre that pictures many human figures. Some Turkish and Persian miniatures, one of which was shown during the Hamline class, even reverently depicted Mohammed.

Yet still, today, many Muslims think that prophets are too sacred to be depicted in images. However, this applies not only to Mohammed but also to any prophet, which, according to Islam, includes Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. By that measure, an ultra-conservative Muslim student could even find Christian artwork about Jesus “Islamophobic.” Would Hamline University ban such “microaggression” as well?

All this calls for a reality check on Islamophobia. This term is not inaccurate, especially when it refers to anti-Muslim hatred, which is a real problem in the world today. It describes the worldview of far-right preachers of hate who depict every Muslim as a potential terrorist, and to the bigotry of racist terrorists who attack innocent worshippers in mosques — the same way they attack synagogues. It pertains to regimes like that of Communist China, which has made Islamophobia a state policy, as demonstrated by its genocidal persecution of its Uyghur minority.

But a critical study of Islam’s past and present isn’t Islamophobic. And it’s certainly not Islamophobic to expose Muslim students at a modern university to the diversity in their own religion, of which they may be unaware. In fact, it would be only a service to Muslims today to warn them against such “cultural amnesia.”

The irony is that American colleges, which have in the past been beacons of open-minded learning, have lately been challenged by extreme identity politics. This latest incident at Hamline University shows just how far this trend has gone. It should be wake-up call for all, including Muslims who don’t want to sacrifice the richness of their tradition to a preposterous cancel culture.