In October of 2021 at Hamline University in Minnesota, an adjunct professor Erika Lopez Prater was teacher a class on Islamic art. During the course she spent two minutes showing a 14th century depiction of the prophet Muhammad. This picture was made by a devout Muslim who painted it to celebrate and embrace the religion of Islam.
One student, Aram Wedatalla, the president of the Hamline University’s Muslim Student Association, filed a complaint with the university claiming she was blindsided by the image. In a press conference, Wedatalla said, “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.” Word? A picture made you feel unsafe?
Ultimately, Prater was fired because of the episode and was called a bigot, and Islamaphobic, and so on and so forth. To be clear, Prater included in the syllabus at the beginning of the voluntary course that the image would be shown, and provided students who were uncomfortable with the image and alternative to seeing such a horrifying site. But Wedatalla was somehow blindsided.
It gets worse. Jaylani Hussein is the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and he also spoke with Wedatalla. Hussein, who as far as I know is not an art historian, declared that there was “absolutely no benefit” to the professor showing an image of one of the most famous pieces of Islamic art in a global art history class. The image, he said, was “blasphemy.”
“If this institution wants to value those students,” he said, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.”
Blasphemy? Are you kidding me? Is the fact the school serves pork food products in its cafeteria blasphemous? Is a professor who teaches a philosophy of religion class, and provides arguments in support of atheism Islamaphobic, since those arguments are literally saying your God is fake news and so are all these beliefs you have that descend from him? Is that philosophy professor going to be labeled an Islamaphobe and canceled?
To be clear, Islamaphobia is when you discriminate against someone simply because they are Muslim. If you apply for a job and the boss says I don’t hire muslims, that is Islamaphobic. If you apply for a job, get the job, but spend half your time proselytizing to customers about how they’re going to hell if they don’t accept the teachings of the prophet Muhammad, and then get fired because of it, that’s not Islamaphobia. Most of us on the left followed the classical liberal value of religious tolerance and the rights of religious minorites to exist when Former-President Donald Trump smeared, slandered, and waged literal war against muslims.
As Jill Filipovic says:
“But standing up for a religious minority’s right to exist, believe, and worship freely does not mean leaving all your other values at the door, and allowing the most vocal and conservative members of that minority to demand censorship or compliance with their views.”
In the Quran it says:
“Those who have disbelieved so that it is the same whether thou warn them or warn them not, will not believe. God has set a seal on their hearts and their ears, and over their eyes there is a covering. For them there is a great punishment.”
(2.6-7)
If I as an atheist refuse to believe that am I being Islamaphobic?
We as secular society do not have to follow the dictates of a handful of religious tyrants (who apparently can’t even read a syllabus or follow their instructors instructions). Your personal beliefs do not supersede the needs of academic freedom and the societal need for college to challenge your core beliefs. That’s literally what college is supposed to do. We shouldn’t be cow-towing to the conservative religious demands—all of which are authoritarian, disrespectful, anti-intellectual, and illiberal.
The student isn’t saying “I should have the option to not view these images.” She had that option. She is saying “No one should have the option to view these images, because they offend my particular religious beliefs.” #No, and #sorrynotsorry.
Perhaps if Wedatalla had bothered to pay intention in this Islamic art history course, she’d have learn there’s this whole minoritarian strand of Islamic art that does draw pictures of the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). She might have learn how over time, that minoritarian tradition, which she is trying to wipe out, evolved from showing Muhammad with all his features, to adding fire around him marking his divinity similar to how much Christian art depicts Jesus with a halo around him, and how eventually Muhammad was only drawn with a veil over his face or without any facial features whatsoever. I wonder what artistic implications this has? Or how these artists relationship to Islam caused this change to occur? I guess we’ll never find out because the teacher was fired.
Of course, it’s Islamaphobic to assume all Muslims believe a certain thing when they don’t. The National Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released a statement supporting the professor.
“Although we strongly discourage showing visual depictions of the Prophet, we recognize that professors who analyze ancient paintings for an academic purpose are not the same as Islamophobes who show such images to cause offense. Based on what we know up to this point, we see no evidence that Professor Erika López Prater acted with Islamophobic intent or engaged in conduct that meets our definition of Islamophobia…
“Academics should not be condemned as bigots without evidence or lose their positions without justification.”
I had to throw this in later. This also happened because of the neo-liberalization of corporatization of the university. If this teacher wasn’t an adjunct and had actual worker protections, I doubt she would have ever been fired. Some people would still get triggered and complain about it. But, universities have increasingly reduced professorships, especially tenure track, relying more and more on temporary and unstable adjuncts, graduates, and undergraduates to do the labor that actually gets the university that sweet sweet tuition money. Across academia, these positions are criminally underpaid & overworked. We also see the enforcement of a very naive, shallow, identitarian strain of identity politics which has become vogue among the neoliberal crowd (think Amazon saying Black Lives Matter, while underpaying their black warehouse employees and openly union-busting them). You have people like David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence at Hamline University, whatever the fuck that even means, saying things like, “Showing the image was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic,” wrote David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, who also deemed the professor’s actions “unacceptable” and spelled out a plan to deal with “bias and hate incidents.”
You have the president from the university president Fayneese S. Miller saying, “As a caring community, there are times when a healthy examination of expression is not only prudent, but necessary. This is particularly the case when we know that our expression has potential to cause harm. When that happens, we must care enough to find other ways to make our voices and viewpoints heard.
“Perspectives should be informed, mindful and critical, as befits an education steeped in the tenets of a liberal arts education. We believe in academic freedom, but it should not and cannot be used to excuse away behavior that harms others.”
Another overpaid administrator, Nur Mood, assistant director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations at Hamline, (again, whatever that means) told the student newspaper, “This [incident is] much deeper and it’s something that in a million years, I never expected that it would happen here at Hamline. I hope this is the last time I see something similar to this.”
I’m again quoting Filopovic, “This isn’t a right-wing “fuck your feelings” argument. It is instead an argument that feelings are not the sum total of reality, nor worthy of universal deference.”
These administrators get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars off the backs of professors, graduate students, undergraduate students, and school staff to essentially be the respectability police.
This identitarian identity politics allows establishment institutions like corporations & the administrations of universities to have the veneer they are being inclusive, but in reality they use it as a weapon to reinforce their own power and support reactionary positions. All the while they can say how diverse they are to neo-liberal “woke” wealthy libs that the university simps to for donations (and likely the wealthy, conservative members of the Muslim community that support this).
A., Abdel Haleem M, translator. The Qur’an: English Translation and Parallel Arabic Text. Oxford University Press, 2016. Buy here!
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This article was originally published on Strangecornersofthought.com.
