Hamline University in Minnesota is under fire this week for reportedly declining to renew the contract of an art history professor who showed two ancient art images of the Prophet Muhammad. The unnamed professor reportedly warned about the imagery before advancing the slides to allow any offended students to leave. However, the professor was publicly rebuked by Hamline President Fayneese Miller and Associate Vice President for Inclusive Excellence David Everett before being effectively fired. We have previously discussed how such contractual or “contingent” faculty often face such non-renewal decisions when they are targeted in cancel campaigns.
Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, wrote about the incident in a December 22 essay for New Lines Magazine.
Muslims object to showing the image of Muhammad as deeply offensive to their religion. One of the paintings is a depiction of Muhammad with a veil and halo from a 15th century manuscript and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The other is a depiction of Muhammad receiving a divine revelation from the angel Gabriel. That work appeared in an early 14th century manuscript by the statesman and scholar Rashid-al-Din. Gruber wrote that the second image “is considered by scholars, curators and art collectors a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting … often taught in Islamic art history classes at universities across the world, including in the U.S., Europe, the Arab world, Turkey and Iran.”
According to the student newspaper, The Oracle, the incident occurred on October 6 and drew an objection from a Muslim student. Dr. Everett sent an email to all university employees that the use of the works in class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
Professor Gruber raises a deeply disturbing lack of due process by the university. Neither Miller nor Everett evidence the slightest concern for due process or academic freedom as they denounced this professor:
“Neither before nor after these declarations was the faculty member given a public platform or forum to explain the classroom lecture and activity. To fill in the gap, on Dec. 6, an essay written by a Hamline professor of religion who teaches Islam explaining the incident along with the historical context and aesthetic value of Islamic images of Muhammad was published on The Oracle’s website. The essay was taken down two days later. One day after that, Hamline’s president and AVPIE sent a message to all employees stating that ‘respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.'”
Professor Eugene Volokh has posted some of the correspondence. There is also a petition to support this professor. PEN America has condemned Hamline’s actions.
The now removed defense from the student newspaper was written by Prof. Mark Berkson, Chair of Hamline’s Religion department. Professor Berkson acknowledges that such works must be shown with great sensitivity toward Muslim students:
“First, a majority of the world’s Muslims today believe that visually representing the prophet Muhammad is forbidden. Many observant Muslims would never create an image of Muhammad and will strive to avoid seeing one. So professors must not require Muslim students who believe that representation is forbidden to look at these images, and they must give students fair warning if such images are going to appear anywhere in class—in a book, a slide show, a video, etc. It is my understanding that, in the Hamline class, the professor gave students advance notice that the image would be shown (both in the syllabus and verbally), allowed students to turn off the screen if they wished, and did not require them to visually engage with the painting. The intent was to educate, not to offend or show disrespect.”
However, he insisted that the work was germane and valuable from a pedagogical standpoint. His insightful and respectful letter should be read by everyone before reaching any conclusions in this controversy. The fact that it was removed only adds to the chilling environment of intolerance by Hamline.
The student editors of The Oracle have much to explain in removing the letter. The fact that they will not even allow a reasoned, alternative view to be read is an indictment of their newspaper and journalistic values, though it is hardly unique today. Indeed, it is the same intolerance shown increasingly by mainstream media.
In this now deleted letter, Professor Berkson noted:
“Since some Hamline administrators labeled the showing of the painting “Islamophobic” (in one case, the phrase “undeniably Islamophobic” was used), my question for those who use that word is – Exactly where does the Islamophobia lie? Islamophobia is often defined as fear, hatred, hostility, or prejudice against Muslims. The intention or motivation behind the act would seem to be essential here. In this case, the professor was motivated only to educate students about the history of Islamic art. The professor tried to ensure that Muslim students who have objections would be able to avoid seeing the images. So, when we look at intention, we can conclude that this was not Islamophobic.
Another possibility is that the very act of displaying an image of Muhammad is itself Islamophobic. But if this were the case, there are a number of very disturbing implications. First, it would mean that anybody who showed these images in a classroom, a book, or on their wall, would be an Islamophobe. Any scholar who wrote a book about Islamic art and included these images for discussion or analysis would be an Islamophobe. Even Muslims (and, as we will see, many Muslims throughout history have created and enjoyed these images) would be Islamophobic if they did this. Second, it would mean that these images could never be seen by, or shown to, anybody. In effect, it would require an erasure of an entire genre of Islamic art.
Should no student be able to see this art? And what would it mean for a liberal arts institution to deem an entire subject of study prohibited?
Finally, it seems that the interpretation of the administrators means that if an act is prohibited to members of a particular religion, then everyone has to incorporate that prohibition into their own lives. Let’s quickly consider an analogy. Eating pork is forbidden to observant Muslims and Jews. Clearly, it would be an act of Islamophobia or antisemitism if someone were to intentionally sneak pork into a dish that was going to be eaten by someone for whom it is forbidden. But does this mean that Aramark can no longer serve any dish with pork? Must everyone consider pork forbidden? Most of us would agree that as long as there are plenty of alternatives for Muslims and Jews, then the mere offering of a pork dish is not Islamophobic or antisemitic. In the case of images, does the fact that many (not all) Muslims consider images forbidden mean that all of us have to incorporate this prohibition into our lives? Giving students the opportunity to see the images as part of an education in Islamic art (since using images is an essential part of the pedagogy of art historians) is not Islamophobic as long as Muslim students are not required to see them and steps are taken to ensure that no student sees them unintentionally.”
Professor Berkson is trying to balance interests while striving to preserve the essential academic freedom needed in higher education.
“This incident is about balancing academic freedom and religious commitments, not about Islamophobia. The situation is not helped by making accusations against a faculty member who is simply trying to share and teach the history of Islamic art with students. It is especially disturbing that some administrators who used the word ‘Islamophobia’ never even spoke with the faculty member to get their perspective. When, as in the case here at Hamline, everyone involved has good intentions (intention is a key concept in Islam, and the Prophet Muhammad himself said that people will receive consequences for actions depending on their intentions) and is doing their best to honor principles (religious and academic) that are important to them, we can find our way forward in open conversation and mutual respect.”
In contrast, President Miller and Vice President Everett show utter disregard for countervailing values, particularly free speech and academic freedom. Indeed, they declare that “when we harm, we should listen rather than debate the merits of or extent of that harm.” So, as an academic institution, you do not debate “the merits” of such controversies?
Instead, they insist that “it is not our intent to place blame; rather, it is our intent to note that in the classroom incident…respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom…Academic freedom is very important, but it does not have to come at the expense of care and decency toward others.”
So academics have academic freedom only to the extent that it is not considered by some to be a denial of care or decency? Notably, that standard is based on how a lecture is received by any student rather than how it was intended.
The Hamline incident is currently being investigated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
While key facts in this controversy must still be confirmed, the public condemnation and the denial of basic due process are entirely incompatible with the conditions needed for higher education.
We have often discussed the rising ideological orthodoxy that has taken hold of our campuses with growing intolerance for opposing views. In this case, the intolerance was expressed in support of a religiously orthodox view over academic freedom. This was not some random incident of an academic spontaneously and gratuitously insulting a religion. It was directly related to the course and its underlying subject matter. Miller and Everett show little patience or support for such academic interests in publicly disavowing the professor.
The question now is whether other Hamline faculty will stand up to defend their colleague and academic freedom. The non-renewal of this contingent professor’s contract will send a chilling message to all “contingent faculty.” The burden, therefore, must be shouldered by tenured faculty in defending the essential values needed to sustain a vibrant intellectual community.
What was the school’s attitude towards those declaring a religious exemption from mRNA shots? Was the school as accommodating to those views?
Where is the mohammed picture? I need a good laugh.
Go to Newlinemag dot com, An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad.
It’s not very interesting.
Actually, images of Muhammad are easily seen in book copies of Dante’s Inferno (canto 28) and there’s a sculptured relief of Muhammad in our Supreme Court Bldg.
It’s unfortunate the academic lesson plan delivered by a benign, well-intentioned teacher, could not have been used by the “offended” student(s) to use to respectfully emphasize to the entire class that malicious uses of the Mohammed images would be offensive to many. It’s not clear what the intention of the “offended” student(s) is. And, as we’ve seen many times before, the political administrators sacrificed the educator in hopes the “offended” student(s) would not come for them. Alas, as we’ve also seen many times before, they will, let’s just wait and watch.
Hasn’t been that long since they just assassinated you for that.
Everyone knows Elijah Mohammed of the nation of Islam is the real profit of izlam anyway , so who cares?? Show his picture with Malcom x. They’re the real mozlimz. Then we can talk.
Buncha low-end “Dunning-Kruger” brand midwits…
Higher education is under the influence of meatheads.
At least the unfortunate art historian that was fired at Hamline University recently was not tried & found guilty of defaming Islam as in the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria. She had suggested that Muhammad was a pedophile because he had s𝜉x with 9 year old Aisha. The so called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) incredibly upheld her conviction.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/european-court-upholds-conviction-of-woman-who-condemned-muhammads-marriage-to-6-year-old/
In her book about it “The Truth is No Defense” she points out that
” It has been well-established in a number of jurisdictions—including several in the West—that a non-Muslim who quotes the Qur’an accurately can still be convicted of “hate speech.” This aligned with the definition of Islamic slander (also to be found in Reliance [Reliance of the Traveller]), which considers anything that insults Islam, whether true or false, to be defamation.”
That’s shocking & insane.
I point all this out to warn that this kind of insanity might be the future here if Muslim demographics (which evidently has had a shameful cowering effect on Europe) and Islamic influence continue.
Someone needs to construct a complete list of colleges and universities which fall into this ‘woke’ ‘diversity/equity/inclusion’ mold and enforce it without normal common sense or worse than that, enforce as if they were the gestapo….no following the fules of justice —
In the article, it is stated that “many of the images of Muhammad are made by Muslims.” In fact, ALL pre-modern images of Muhammad (peace!) are done by pious Muslims. Only the Arab lands had a consistent aversion to pictures of the Prophet (SAS). Persian, Turkish, Asian, African artistic and respectful images of Muhammad are quite common. Only in the last 200 years with the growth of puritanical Salafi Islam, which can be correctly compared to Protestantism in the matter of icons and art, has iconoclasm been a norm in the Muslim world. The rejection of figural representation by Muslims should be respected of course, just as is the case for Orthodox Jews. The student who was offended (because they ignored the instructor’s advice) and Dr. Everett (who has taught World Religions!) are sadly ignorant. As an observant Muslim for over 40 years and a scholar of Islam, I am ashamed of this whole sorry tale.
Correction: My sentence with “The rejection of figural representation by Muslims should be respected” should be “The rejection of figural representation by SOME Muslims should be respected”
The ridiculous rejection of figural representation by any human should receive no respect. It is forbidden in Islamic law – see Sharia manual “Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller) – because Muhammad had an absurd fear of pictures. From the manual:
“w50.2 Pictures imitate the creative act of Allah.
[Bukhari 4,54,447] One time I [Aisha] created a stuffed pillow for Mohammed and decorated it with pictures of animals. He came in with some other people one day, and I noticed a look of excitement on his face. I asked, “What is wrong?” He replied, “What is that pillow doing here?” I answered, “I made that for you so that you could lie on it.” He said, “Are you not aware that angels will not enter a house with pictures in it and that the person that makes such pictures will be punished on Judgment Day until he gives life to that which he has made?”
P44.0 MAKING PICTURES
p44.1 Those who make pictures will burn in Hell. [Bukhari 8,73,130] There was once a curtain with pictures of animals on it in my [Aisha’s] house. When Mohammed saw it, his face became flushed with anger. He tore it to bits and said, “People that paint such pictures will receive Hell’s most terrible punishment on Judgment Day.”
I read recently that at many, perhaps most, institutions of higher education, administrators now outnumber faculty. Given that the typical college administrator couldn’t get hired to clean streets in the real world, this goes a long way toward explaining the decline in higher education generally. These two (Miller and Everett), on the other hand, couldn’t get hired to wash the street cleaners’ toilets.
The American Founders established freedom of religion.
The American Founders restricted immigration/naturalization to “…free white person(s)….”
How did Islam ever enter America?
You are an extreme bigot.
Show me the law that Founders passed as such
Islam unfortunately was able to enter simply by boat with migrants. The really interesting question is why the framers didn’t make an exception of Islam in the First Amendment given that it is so blatantly antithetical to our Constitutional freedoms & values, and indeed to Western Civilization that it endeavored to destroy. This is a question, IMHO, that historians are afraid to look into if they like peace and wish to keep their postilions. A reasonable guess might be that Islam & Muslims were just not on their minds at the time, yet it was barely more than a century before the Constitution was adopted that Islam’s armies under the Ottomans, after conquering, plundering & subjugating much of the Balkans, met with crucial defeat by Christian forces (actually Catholic) at the Battle of Vienna 1683. Such a rich prize & strategic location on the Danube would certainly have been a point of departure for eventual conquest of all of Europe & Britain. Wish some brave historian would look into this, but alas I much doubt it.
I entered the hallowed halls of Academe in the 1970s, after working a variety of jobs, from construction to government bureaucrat. Over the next thirty years or so I met hundreds of academics, and there is one generalization I am comfortable making — they were no different from my colleagues and co-workers in the other jobs I had except for their degrees and their extremely flexible working hours.
Most were doing the best they could, some were downright nasty, not a few were without any scruples. Some were generous, others were self-centered and selfish, some were politicians who worked the system, others were hard workers who did their best to be good teachers, good scholars, and good colleagues. Few were really exceptional, and some were incompetent and made up their lack of scholarly qualities and ability to teach by playing politics and seeking out administrative jobs. I cannot remember meeting many who conformed to the stereotype most of us have of academics, and I can only recall a handful courageous enough (and tenured enough) to go against the crowd or the administration.
With rare exceptions they went along to get along, they did their best not to rock the boat (and apologized if they did so by accident), they were careful to choose their fights wisely (and so, like Plotonius, rarely were involved in a fight, except as a member of the mob), and they almost never found a hill they would die on. Even so, the system worked because there were few instruments that the unscrupulous could use to advance their careers and cut short those of colleagues who were better at scholarship and teaching, and usually those in positions of power limited efforts by the unscrupulous to undermine their more honest colleagues.
The Academy is not that much different from “real” life, with one glaring exception — at the university, the job of the professor is simultaneously to instruct, guide, challenge, and evaluate the student, a difficult task at best. That is why tenure is required — to protect the teacher/evaluator from both the student and the administrator (who can be coerced by parents, faculty, and students) when they challenge students in class, challenges which can, and do, echo beyond the classroom. That is why each professor needs to be free to teach as he or she sees fit — they cannot evaluate what they cannot teach, and they are the experts on the subjects they are teaching. Students and administrators are not more qualified to critique the course of a given professor than Twitter censors epidemiologists from Stanford and Oxford. The professor here was merely doing what professors are supposed to do — teach, guide, and challenge his students. If the students do not agree, they can drop the class or choose another when enrolling (students are amazingly well-informed regarding the subject matter, style, leniency, and other characteristics of individual professors) or go along to get along, like most of the faculty.
There is no reason to hold academics in awe, and there is no reason whatsoever to assume that administrators and students should have a role in deciding what any given professor teaches. The true scholars among university and college faculty are few and far between, and the true geniuses as rare as in any other walk of life. The problem at Hamline appears to be that the fish is rotting from the head, and the body will inevitably follow because it is the body.
What’s dumbfounding to me is the near total silence from the parents paying thousands of dollars for their children to get indoctrinated by these woke universities. Are they simply exhausted from dealing with these teenagers during their woke secondary education indoctrination that they will accept anything to be free of the drama?
A whining student rules! Administrators intolerant of legitimate non-discriminatory action by a qualified teacher deploy the weapon of the progressive lefties – and rule! What a sorry state is so-called “higher education.
The evidence continues to be gathered. Universities no longer provide a broad liberal Arts base of knowledge. Lots of topics are barred from examination. Wide swaths of History are ignored or just re- written. Unfortunately, the stink on this is attaching itself to real education in STEM. The same frame work ties the hands of Professors, and limits the educational opportunities of students. Yet if there is a controversey, these same self claimed ‘experts’ will tell the commoners what is true and what is false. Profs in the hard sciences have sullied there reputations, so the would be allowed to suck up the good booze, and the “right” cocktail parties.
Recent study of meta-analysis of 63 studies of ivermectin versus COVID-19 in humans, 100% of these have shown positive results.
Where were the professors and researchers at the Universities? keeping their mouth shut, less the mean girls say mean things.
It is all quite disgusting.
The astrologers – er, consensus astrophysicists have responded to the challenges posed to the Big Bang theory by the James Webb Space Telescope by 1) saying the JWST needs to be calibrated when the images are quire clear, 2) attacking the people pointing out those challenges, 3) attempting to “tweak” the theory to conform to the JWST images instead of acknowledging the theory is in serious trouble, and 4) throwing up a cloud of defensive argle-bargle and obfuscation. With the sizable revenue streams and grant moneys at stake, they have not only abandoned the scientific method, they have thrown it down and danced upon it.
There is not a word aout this in the Koran.
Right. Actually, Sharia forbids any artistic representation of any animal, esp humans, and BTW even calls for doing away with musical instruments. What’s scary is that Islam cannot reform.
On the bright side, in Iran he would have left with his head in his lunch box. So there is that…
On the contrary, most of the images of the Prophet Muhammad (peace!) and his family are from Persian-speaking lands: Iran, Afghanistan, Mughal India. In Iranian museums and textbooks there are multiple images of Muhammad and his family; women wear pendants with his face on one side and ‘Ali’s on the other.
and Associate Vice President for Inclusive Excellence David Everett before being
Keep it simple. Fire this boy wonder or change his position to. Associate Vice President for Academic Excellence .
There’s a reason cancel culture is growing, especially within the education system. JT is the right person, with the right credentials, to be in this fight. I believe he needs to shift his attention to the root cause, instead of the symptoms. Think Klaus Schwab and the WEF.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1607929430164516864
The university president and the ‘inclusive excellence’ character are representatives of the new Dark Age in academe, an age that favors and enforces ignorance over knowledge, passion over intelligence, and virtue-signaling over achievement. No doubt they are paid quite well to corrupt higher education.