RALEIGH – You’ve probably heard by now about the controversy at UNC-Chapel Hill over a reading assignment for incoming freshmen. The school’s selection of the book, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, has raised the ire of many critics who have variously charged university leaders with promoting a religion, with expunging negative characteristics of Islam in favor of a whitewashed version, and with hypocrisy. The best line I’ve heard, in several different contexts, is that the academic establishment would blow its top if a university leader had proposed that all incoming freshmen read a commentary on selected Christian gospels by Pat Robertson. That is undeniably true.
Let me get a couple of things straight right off the bat. I am not one who believes that a mandatory summer reading for incoming freshmen is inherently a bad idea. For decades, the American university has moved further and further away from the ideal of a core curriculum, and has let student satisfy their various subject-area requirements with narrow esoterica rather than meaty coursework. Also, I strongly approve of UNC-Chapel Hill’s intention to expose its students to the Islamic world given what is going on in the world right now.
The problem lies in the selection of the book. I have glanced at it at the bookstore, but in truth I have not read it cover-to-cover. Unlike many on both sides of the debate, however, I have read extensively in the Qur’an itself. More properly, I should say that I have read about the Qur’an in English, because pious Muslims believe that the Word of God was written in Arabic and can be truly comprehended only in that language. Any translation is necessarily less than the original, and indeed does not convey its full meaning.
In any event, I have taking the liberty of drawing some quick conclusions about Approaching the Qur’an. First, it is probably a stretch to compare its author, Michael Sells, to Pat Robertson. Sells does not appear to be trying to convert readers to Islam, much less to a particular version of it. On the other hand, Sells does select the passages, or suras, of the Qur’an that are the most palatable to Western audiences. His defense (see http://www.herald-sun.com/orange/10-251647.html) is that he wanted to focus on the early revelations to the Prophet rather than the later ones, after Muhammad becomes head of an Islamic proto-state. It was during the latter period that God “revealed” to the Prophet some of the more distasteful observations about Jews (with whom Muhammad had had a falling out about the governance of Yathrib, or Madinah, which had begun as a city largely run by Jewish merchants). Some of these less-than-PC passages come early in the Qur’an, though it should be remembered that unlike (roughly) the books of the Christian Bible, the suras of the Islamic text are not in chronological order.
I don’t believe Sells about his motivation. I think he really wants people to see that, understood correctly, Islam is about much more than hate-filled violence, and indeed isn’t really about that, at all. Okay, I get it, but this purpose doesn’t mesh with what UNC leaders say they want to do. You see, what Sells believes isn’t tremendously important, no disrespect intended. What matters is what Muslims themselves believe and profess. That’s what has a bearing on the current international crisis.
My basic point is that the choice of Sells’ book was a boneheaded decision. If the goal was to exposure UNC students to the Islamic world, radical portions of which our nation is currently battling, there were many better choices to make. Books that compare Western and Islamic religious precepts, cultural and political traditions, economies, militaries, etc. Books that focus on Islamic fundamentalism, the current foe. Books that delve into the history of Islamic polities and explain how they got in their present condition. And books that explain how Muslim believers today think and act, instead of what a particular scholar thinks about the Prophet’s early revelations.
To this sort-of-ignorant layman, it does look like UNC leaders either wanted to present a sanitized picture of Islam or, perhaps more likely, just didn’t know what they were doing. Their behavior since the story broke has been worse, with Chancellor James Moeser sputtering more nonsense about academic freedom and the need to combat ignorance with knowledge. Look, oh clueless one, the Un-American Affairs Committee isn’t about to knock on your door. The issue is whether you have made a good decision here, and that is very much the business of the taxpayers of the state who pay the vast majority of the bills for each undergraduate student whose time you are wasting on this.
There were two bad decisions here: the choice of the book (not, I repeat, the subject matter) and the way it was later defended.