Varying beliefs
The Hamline University student newspaper reports on the showing of images in an art history class a few weeks ago:
Hamline undergraduate students received an email from the Dean of Students on Nov. 7, condemning an unnamed classroom incident as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
That must have been weird. “Hi students. There was a bad bad bad incident. Love, the Dean.”
The Oracle has since learned that the event in question occurred on Oct. 6, when a professor shared two depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in class, while discussing Islamic art. One was a 14th century depiction of the Prophet and the other was a 16th century depiction of the Prophet with veil and halo.
In other words a professor showed images in a discussion of art history. What else are instructors supposed to do? Nobody has claimed (as far as I’ve seen) that the instructor was discussing Islamic art for no apparent reason and that he was supposed to be teaching Marketing 101. Assuming he was teaching art history or history or comparative religion or similar, what law or rule says he’s not allowed to use images in teaching? Hamline University is not a madrassa so why wouldn’t he shouldn’t he couldn’t he refer to images in doing so?
Why is there an assumption that this is at least rude (at worst all but murderous) to Muslim students? Why should their rules (or Catholic rules or Hindu rules or Lutheran rules) govern teaching at a university?
I tell you what, I don’t think there is any genuine religious outrage here. I think any Muslim students fanatical enough to be horrified by images labeled “Mohammed” in an art history class wouldn’t be at a secular university in the first place. They wouldn’t be in Minnesota in the first place. People that narrow and confined in their thinking aren’t going to run off to a mongrel country like the US, full of people from a whole range of religions, and with a hefty fraction of the citizenry that’s not religious at all.
It’s not real outrage, it’s an excuse to make a big stink and get a lot of attention.
The Oracle goes on:
Within Islam, there are varying beliefs regarding whether the representation of the Prophet Muhammad is acceptable. The majority of those practicing Islam today believe it is forbidden to see and create representations of Prophet Muhammad.
That’s nice, but their beliefs about what is forbidden don’t govern anyone else. It’s like someone who works for Facebook moving over to Twitter and getting into a rage over some Facebook rule that isn’t a rule at Twitter. You’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy.
Aram Wedatalla, a Hamline senior and the president of Muslim Student Association (MSA), was in the class at the time the photos were shared.
“I’m like, ‘this can’t be real,’” Wedatalla told the Oracle. “As a Muslim, and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
What respect is that though? What images are forbidden in that other community that Wedatalla respectfully keeps out of sight?
Crickets.
Minnesota has a very large Somali community, and there have been numerous conflicts over the years with observant Muslims. One huge issue years ago was taxi drivers, a significant number of whom are Muslim, not wating to drive passengers from the airport who were carrying alcohol. I don’t doubt the story that an observant Muslim student was offended by the class. Like every immigrant community, they realize the path to success is higher education. That doesn’t mean they abandon their religious beliefs. Hamline is one of the few universities, aside from the State University, without a strong religious background. Most other universities in the Twin Cities are either strongly Catholic or Lutheran.
There’s that language about feeling like one belongs again. Where the actual fork is this coming from?
The person who will kick up a stink and try to have a professor fired or course material banned when they’re in a minority, is also the person who will enslave you, cut off a hand, stone or burn you at the stake when they have power over you. Doesn’t matter if they are muslim, christian, Hindu or whatever. Autocracy or theocracy, it all ends badly.
That must have been weird. “Hi students. There was a bad bad bad incident. Love, the Dean.”
Classic Ophelia! LMAO
I can’t be arsed to look it up at the moment, but didn’t this professor tell his students he was going to show these images ahead of time, and encourage them not to show up that day if it was sort of thing that would upset them?
Gruber’s article says
In other words, this was a trumped up outrage. The ‘offended’ student chose to be offended. The professor WAS being respectful – too damn respectful, IMHO. I don’t let my fundamentalist students sit out my evolution lecture. It’s part of the class, and it’s part of the curriculum.
This is designed not to protect Muslim students from offense, but to make sure everyone else bows and scrapes to their god.
I wonder how many of them are “outraged” because they’re supposed to be outraged; it’s what’s expected of them, and that failure to do so makes them suspect? Mustn’t slack! Must be offended! From there it could very easily turn into a game of one-upmanship, particularly within a small community or organization, with “offence” spreading far beyond the tiny number present at the lecture, so it is turned into a taken-as-read, free-floating Islamophobia, completely divorced from its original context, much like “obvious” yet unevidenced JK Rowling’s “transphobia.”
But there was a warning, she had the choice to not expose herself to this and get offended. It sounds like what she’s really objecting to is these images being shown to anyone at all and that her “offendedness,” even if she had decided not to attend the lecture, should be sufficient for a veto on the images being shown at all, ever.
Excuse me, but what does it matter whether outrage be real and true or feigned and false? Doesn’t entertaining the question assume that real offense does, in fact, justify not talking about something, not studying this, and not teaching that.
There’s a movie I’m quite fond of called The Man From Earth. It’s essentially a one-act play on a single set. Most of the script involves one character’s revealing incredible information and doing his best to convince the others he’s telling the truth. Once he finally gets everyone to start to accept his claims, he sees how much it upsets the devout Christian among them and recants everything he’s said until that point, passing it off as a bit of a lark. Every time I watch it, I feel anew the frustration that our progress as a species is held back by the petty tyranny of people’s discomfort. Consideration of that character’s discomfort denies everyone else the opportunity to grasp a part of the world as it truly is. My consequentialist intuitions balk at that.
“I don’t feel like I belong.”
So? What’s your point? Is there some kind of right to “feel” like you “belong”? What does that even mean?
At least since the time of Plato and his Academy in Athens, students have been going to university in order to have their existing beliefs confirmed, and in a non-challenging environment.
;-)
Hamline was the first University in Minnesota, founded by the Methodists. They currently emphasize interfaith (including those with no faith) co-existence. When I was thinking of Law School I was seriously contemplating pushing for attending their Mitchell Law School since they place a high value on using the Law as a tool to fight The Man. My son graduated from a charter school sponsored by Hamline, and they emphasized intellectual freedom in education.
So, this comes as a surprise, in one sense, but then when I think about it? Perhaps not so much? I see that so many liberal institutions have taken on fear of offense as a measure of intellectual freedom, that offending would make one “not feel like they belong.”
Note: I don’t think that political correctness, like anything else, has a lberal nor conservative origin. Yes, it was mostly liberals who policed language to get people to stop calling Vietnamese-Americans “gooks,” to stop calling Chinese-Americans “chinks,” to stop calling black Americans “niggers,” and so on. But in the 1990’s there was also a push from conservatives claiming that their students felt excluded and uncomfortable in their classes because all the dang perfessers were liberal, and besides real Americans don’t need hyphens. Christians claimed they are persecuted in education by teaching evolution and attempted to get teachers and professors fired for “bias.”
Administrators and Deans probably feel like they are walking some sort of tightrope, and in a culture of zero tolerance don’t want to take any chances. Would terrorsts on motorcycle go on a rampage at Hamline like they did at Charlie Hebdo? It’s very unlikely in Minnesota, but in a polite society we don’t want to offend anyone and take chances. Integration into a pluralistic society is a fraught journey, and there is give-and-take.
The taxi drivers Eava mentioned were refusing to provide services from the airport for people who had wine or liquor in their luggage due to the prohibition against drinking. They were also refusing to pickup fares for people with service dogs. The airport sued them for discrimination specified in the ADA act. They lost, and the Imams decreed that they must live in two worlds, the secular world and the Muslim world. It also extended to cashiers at Target Grocery stores who were refusing to scan ham or bacon for their customers.
The prohibition against depictions of the Prophet (PBUH) comes from the commandment against idol worship. I think it’s very strange, myself, because on the one side it elevates Muhammad to godhood, but then they also say there is no god but allah. I often think that the priestly class intentionally makes religion more difficult to live with, make it impossible not to SIn, so that adherents are constantly calling on priests for forgiveness. Mo money! but also a creation of submission for forgiveness. Religion doesn’t set people free, it calls submission freedom. Jewish scholars will admit this outright, with all the devices that strict Jews setup in their homes to make sure they don’t do any work on the Sabbath. “We do these things as service to G*d because they are hard.”
The ban on representation is a relatively recent ‘consensus’ in Islam which has become rather more robust since Saudi oil money got behind Wahabi orthodoxy. This is precisely the equivalent of the Protestants rejecting Catholic art and Orthodox icons….which would be impossible to imagine any credible university doing.
Fine, Aram. Leave the university, leave the community, leave the country. Go live in an Islamic state, since you’re obviously unclear on the concept of religious freedom in a secular society.
Nothing of value will be lost.
My own take on this is that it’s a matter of how politely one says “No.” If the “offence” is manufactured and inflated, then you get to say “Fuck no!” The decision to not heed the warning given puts this in the “Fuck no!” category.
If so, my rights have been violated my entire life! I have always been an outsider looking in, or an outsider intruding. Somehow I manage to get by…without calling my professors on the carpet for petty annoyances. Especially not if they are part of the meat and potatoes of the class.
[…] a comment by Mike Haubrich on Varying […]