In the summer of 2002, a year after the WTC twin towers had ceased to exist, a book reading assignment for the freshers at America’s oldest University invited a lawsuit against the institution, and created a flutter that shocked many.
The students had been asked to read Michael Sells’ translation of the short suras of the Quran as part of a summer-reading programme, but this did not go down well with a section of Americans who were outraged that the students were being made to read the holy book of Muslims.
The lawsuit against University of North Carolina was dismissed and the freshers did discuss the book ‘Approaching the Quran’ under quite a media glare after the issues also featured at the state legislature, but the episode uncovered the underlying tensions in the American society vis a vis Islam, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Carl W Ernst, author, and specialist of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies at the varsity, who had suggested Sells’ translation when asked by the summer reading programme committee, says the developments brought to surface a strong current of anti-Muslim prejudice in America.
Ten years after the events at the University, the author of books like How to Read Quran and Following Muhammad, is alarmed to see what he calls is an “organised promotion of bigotry”.
In India recently, the author told PTI in an interview that while such trends were rampant in the US and beyond, he believes strongly in the counter-current of efforts that are trying to promote debate and dialogue in the public sphere.
“It was not about propagating Islam or certainly not about converting people to Islam. If it was, we failed miserably,” he said while recalling the events of 2002.
The practice of summer reading programme, he said, was designed to introduce students to universal life by having a common reading experience through a book on any subject.
Make people read books — this is what Professors do.
“I think (over the past decade) we have seen two trends going on. One is an organised promotion of anti-Islamic prejudice and there have been heavily funded efforts in the US and Europe and similar forces in India as well, who would like to use anti-Islamic prejudice as a kind of political lever.
“At the same time we also see, there are significant groups that are trying to support open dialogue and recognise pluralism as part of modern society,” he said.
“We have to combat this with tools of unilateral debate and many of us are trying to do that,” he added.
A strong proponent of dialogue, Ernst saw the debate around the reading programme and the University’s strong stand in its aftermath as an affirmation of academic freedom in the face of attempts by outside religious and political forces to control what books are read.
The author says the current Islamophobia discourse draws upon similar tools found in anti-Semitic rhetoric as well as in racial prejudices of the past.
“It also draws from the vocabulary of rhetoric of Zionism, and attempts to equate Islam with Nazis constitute very crude propaganda,” he said.
But, efforts were also being made to counter such propaganda and prejudice by people in America including by academic institutions, he said.
“We have a huge colossal involvement in the study of Arabic. I have a huge class of studies of Islamic civilisation, and so publication is proceeding with a lot of scholarship reaching out to the public sphere,” he said.
Freedom of expression, he said, was a deeply desired, yet a tricky proposition but nothing should be allowed to control public discourse.
While freedom of speech does also allow people to spew hate speeches, yet the very tool could be intelligently used to counter argue what is wrong.
“Lets also make use of freedom of speech to contest these ideas. At a conference in Washington in December last, I chaired a plenary panel on Islamophobia, and we are putting together a volume of essays about it because we are very much expecting that it will be used as a political tool, something we have already seen by some of the Republican candidates,” he said.
Ernst through his numerous works on Islam and its history has tried to interpret the faith to people who knew nothing about it, and tackle misconceptions in the process.
He has also written extensively on the mystical tradition of Sufism in books like Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond and Teachings of Sufis.
“We have conservative interests in US who would also like to control public discourse and we do have people trying to ban books in US as well… We had people trying to control the teaching of theory of evolution (of Charles Darwin) and bringing in their theories of creationism… And there were protests against movies like the Last Temptation of Christ as people said this was hurting their feelings.”
“However, we have to be prepared for a few bruises sometimes for an open debate,” he said.
–PTI