Dave Neese: Academia’s odd affinity for Islam
The high-minded progressives of academia typically can barely conceal their scorn for religion. But there’s an obvious exception. Islam.
The university professorate seems to exercise special care not to rile the sensitivities of that faith’s touchy adherents.
Catholics and Evangelical Protestants, though — well, they’re fair game. The rule is, have at ‘em.
Mind your p’s and q’s with the Muslims, however.
Maybe the professors are just playing it smart. Why embroil yourself in nasty brouhahas?
Or maybe the professors’ strange tendency to align with Islam’s adherents when any controversy involving them flares up stems from a perception that the two are allies in their readiness to be critical of America.
But who really knows? That’s just speculation.
There seems to be an impulse in academia not just to defend Muslims’ constitutional rights — which there should be, of course — but to defend their faith as a faith.
Thus you hear the defensive mantra that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, despite mixed evidence regarding the proposition, to say the least.
The word “Islam” means literally “submission.” And unquestioning submission is what the Koran demands of the faithful. All faiths make such demands, to one degree or another. But arguably few, if any, do so with the emphasis that Islam does.
In any event, submission to a theological doctrine doesn’t sound like the sort of mindset that you’d expect would arouse much sympathy among the university faculties. Yet it seems never to fail to do so.
Universities proclaim tolerance to be their watchword.
But that’s hardly the watchword of the Koran. The sacred book goes to great, repetitive lengths to denigrate “unbelievers,” the Koran’s pejorative word for followers of other faiths.
Some of the Koran’s rhetoric, if used on campus by other faiths against, say, Islam itself would surely be condemned as “hate speech” by mobs of protesters.
One Koranic passage declares, for example, that most Jews and Christians are “perverted transgressors.”
And that’s one of the milder passages.
Academia’s sympathetic and solicitous inclinations regarding Islam might be written off as admirable were they the outgrowth of cosmopolitanism or a soft heart for the disadvantaged underdog. That, however, looks to be much less than the whole story.
Academia may share with some of Islam’s more vocal faithful an obsessive hostility for Israel.
There’s a strong case to be made that the rigid and restrictive doctrines of Islam, where they are incorporated into countries’ legal systems, hold back life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and incite political turmoil.
A few academics make the case. But damn few. Most are averse to doing so. They assume, instead, an apologetic (and patronizing) posture regarding the faith.
They seem to suggest that the faith, due to discrimination against it, must be measured by a sort of affirmative-action standard that gives it a leg up.
It has long been the habit of the progressive left, especially at universities, to subject democratic Israel to rigorous scrutiny while glossing over the monarchical, theocratic and authoritarian blemishes of the Islamic world.
The professorate at Duke and the University of North Carolina currently have their undies in a twist over U.S. Dept. of Education threats to cut off grants for the two universities’ Consortium for Middle East Studies.
The department is pressuring the consortium to revise its curriculum to make it more ecumenical and less a tubthumper for an Islamic, anti-Israel agenda.
What reportedly set the Dept. of Education off was a consortium conference that degenerated into an orgy of Israel-bashing. Israel is, of course, often anti-Semitism’s whipping boy substitute for Judaism.
Please note that the Dept. of Education is not — not — threatening to stifle the free-speech rights of the consortium. It’s threatening to cut off its public funds. If the consortium is bent on castigating Israel in behalf of Israel’s Islamic detractors, it is free to go on doing so, with its own dime instead of the taxpayer’s.
Whether the Dept. of Education is being overwrought and ham-handed is a criticism loudly voiced but yet to be proved. The Association of University Professors has weighed in, declaring the matter redolent of “rightwing political correctness.”
This is just the latest evidence of academia’s off-key tendency to sympathize with the Islamic agenda in just about any controversy that erupts touching on the faith.
If religious faith in general has waged a rear-guard resistance against women’s and gay rights — as many academics will tell you it has — Islam in particular surely has been, and continues to be, a powerful retrograde force in those areas. Also a powerful retrograde force against freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Academia never ceases yammering about the perils of “hate speech” with its supposed myriad and ubiquitous manifestations. Campus secular humanists and atheists are especially vocal on the topic. And they don’t hesitate to point out the role in this hatred played by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants.
In this mode, the academic progressives are not entirely unlike the mutawa, the bullying Saudi religion police who patrol the streets, taking a stick to immodestly dressed females and others deemed not sufficiently attentive to the pieties required by Islam’s strictures.
But any similar critical analysis of Islamic militancy is seized upon and decried as Islamophobia.
Many of the difficulties Islamic countries have with the world beyond, and even within their own borders, surely are not entirely disconnected from the hostile, us-against-them rhetoric of the Koran. You don’t have to scour the text to find examples. They leap right out at you.
Non-Muslims are, says the Koran, “accursed of Allah” (2:159).
They not only reject the one true faith, they add injury to insult by selling out “the faith they owe to Allah” and by doing so “for a small price” (3:77).
There’s no end to the nonMuslims’ iniquity, according to the Koran. Their goal (2:205) “is to spread mischief throughout the earth .... ”
Also, the rhetoric of Islam sounds out of tune with the pacifism commonly voiced on campuses.
It should go without saying but perhaps had better be said anyway at this point: Certainly not all Muslims are terrorists. Not even the militantly vocal among them.
Yet is it a coincidence that literally scores of terrorist organizations the world over find their ideological guidance in the many, many belicose, exclusionary and triumphalist passages of the Koran?
Progressives have never been big on draconian punishment or divine retribution. But the Koran definitely is. Non-Muslims will get their comeuppance when Allah arranges for them an eternal “abode of the Fire” (3:15), the Koran promises.
Yes, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament also sets forth its ugly day of reckoning for those who fail to adhere to the word of the Lord. But the Koran does so in graphically gory, gleeful detail — in terms that, it can be said, betray an obsessive enmity for “unbelievers.”
The Koran depicts multitudes of non-Muslims “bound together in fetters, made to wear garments of liquid pitch” (14:49-50).
They’re fed food that makes them gag (93:13) and “boiling water” to drink.” (58:54).
And when they beg for mercy, they’re given “melted brass” instead of boiling water (18:29). And so on and so on. Jewish and Christian scriptures contain their own examples of “old-time religion,” of belligerent and truculent sentiment. But Judaism developed the tradition of Mishnah, of subjecting doctrines of faith to reexamination in an effort to adapt them to the times. Christianity followed the example.
Islam, however, encounters obstacles of its own creation
that deter if from doing likewise.
History is litered with the headless corpses of reformers of all faiths who were condemned as heretics. And this is so of Islam in spades. In all faiths, reform is an activity that can prove harmful to one’s health, Islam not least.
There are, though — bless them — brave Muslims who nevertheless strive for the reform of their faith, even in the face of dangerous, reactionary opposition.
Scattered throughout the Koran are dire warnings to would-be reformers who attempt to “dispute” the meaning of the book or engage in “conjecture” about its message.
By Islam’s lights, the book is the direct, literal word of Allah, and any who tinker with it are messing with Allah himself. The Koran says so again and again.
To discourage reformers from fiddling with the message, Allah is said to keep the original, eternal copy at his side.
“Woe to those who write with their hands and then say this is from Allah,” the Koran warns (2:78-79).
The book at 16:104 adds: “Those who do not believe in Allah’s communications, surely Allah will not guide them, and they shall have a painful punishment.”
The Koran fairly belabors this point.
In rushing to the kneejerk defense of Islam whenever any criticism of it is voiced, progressives defy their own label, “progressive,” which implies support for progress.
They do Islam no favor by, in effect, supporting — whether wittingly or unwittingly — the faith’s ossified status quo, thereby enabling stick-in-the-mud clerics to go on resisting reform and renewal.