When the Dogma of Diversity Leads to a Muslim Veto in Culture and Politics
(The Recent Firing of a Midwestern Professor for Showing a Painting of Muhammed -- and an application of Max Weber’s thesis on religion and individuality)
By
David Gottfried
Today’s New York Times reported that a small, private university in Minnesota, known as Hamline, fired an adjunct professor of Art, Erika López Prater, because she showed her students a painting of the “prophet” Muhammed.
She was very sensitive to arguments, made by some Muslims, that visual portrayals of Muhammed are always sinful and must be prohibited. Therefore, she stated, in the course syllabus, that images of religious figures would be displayed in class and that students who frowned on such displays were welcome to voice their protests. Also, on the fateful day when she displayed the image of Muhammed, she obsequiously told her students that she would be showing the painting in a few minutes and advised students that if the display of the painting would offend their religious sensibilities, they should, perhaps, leave the room.
But her warnings were to no avail. That the university was situated in Minnesota and not Islamabad was of no moment. That the university never purported to be devoted to kowtowing to Muslim dogma was immaterial. That she advised her students that she would show such a painting was inconsequential. That she was teaching art and that understanding art might depend on looking at art was beside the point. That the university was located in the United States of America, whose very first amendment to the constitution grants us religious freedom and freedom of speech, was of little concern.
The heretic had to punished, and to appease Muslims eager for revenge, the professor was fired. As one Islamic critic severely concluded, academic freedom was not as important as the “sacred” obligation to refrain from offending Muslim sensibilities.
I never knew Muslims were so extraordinarily sensitive. They did not seem very sensitive when Shiite Muslims often found it necessary to kill Sunni Muslims by drilling holes in their heads because, in their sacred view, plain old gunshot wounds were not sufficiently terrible. They did not seem very sensitive when Sunni Muslims killed hundreds of Shiite Muslims by massacring them in their mosques. They did not seem very sensitive when they flogged eighty-year-old women because their ankles were showing in public.
Of course, we have seen this many times before. Western “progressives” (I am very left wing, but much of the current left has a perverse idea of the progressive) have told us that the West was essentially cruel and harsh (And what of the Chinese penchant for binding the feet of little girls, stopping the growth of their feet, and sometimes stopping blood flow necessitating amputation of the feet, all in the name of sadistic Chinese conceptions of female beauty), barbaric (In the 1990’s, when African Hutus killed African Tutsis in Rwanda, they were not content to merely end their lives; they found it necessary to disembowel them and use their bloody intestines as necklaces), and sought to impose their will on non-western lands (What about the Egyptian Mamelukes who routinely sent ships through the Bosphorus, into the Black Sea, and kidnapped Europeans from what is now Rumania, Ukraine and Russia to serve as slaves in the Levant, where the only moisture in the ground seemed to come from the blood of captured peoples -- Actually, the Barbery pirates, and their antecedents, sailed as far North as Ireland, where they routinely conducted midnight raids, captured people from coastal communities, and dragged them back to the Sahara to slave and die of thirst, hunger and infinitely inventive and intricate methods of Oriental torture.)
And these bogus progressives of the West have told us that because of Western imperialism (Actually, the biggest imperialist overlord of the Muslim world was Muslim, Ottoman Turkey which ruled most of the Arab world from the 15th century until World War One.) we should defer and yield to the unquenchable Muslim will to mar and to mangle and to let them trample upon our civil liberties.
Of course, many readers will say that I am making generalizations that are unfair. They will contend that it is unfair of me to assert that Muslims tend to be dictatorial and to show little respect for individuality.
My critics will say something like this:
“People are the same wherever you go. There are good apples and bad apples in every bunch. All differences between different ethnic, racial or religious groups are imagined and contrived and must be rejected as patent and unrepentant racism.”
People may start off the same (but I doubt it as genetic inheritances are very variable), but their cultures can make them very different.
Max Weber, the father of modern sociology, explained that Protestants generally had a higher measure of individuality than Catholics because while Catholics held that one could only attain salvation through one’s priest, Protestants held that one had to come face to face with G-d and confront one’s sins. This made Protestants more independent, contemplative, and cerebral, and the Protestant reformation made England and Protestant sections of Germany surge with technological, industrial and capital development. Spain’s power surpassed that of Great Britain in the beginning of the 16th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, Britania ruled about a third of the world, her Navy strode the earth like an aquatic Goliath, and Spain was a dusty, insignificant afterthought.
I will now extend Max Weber’s theory, regarding Catholicism and Protestantism and divergent levels of individuality, by bringing Muslims into the mix.
I submit to you that while Protestants, according to Weber, have a higher measure of individuality than Catholics, Muslims have the lowest level of individuality of the Abrahamic faiths (Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and Islam).
My thesis is based on the teachings of the medieval Muslim theologian and scholar Averroes, which have infused Islamic thought.
Averroes contended that we should strive toward the annihilation of our selfhood. He said that while we appeared to have individual souls, our souls should merge with the souls of others in what he called the “ECSTATIC CONJUNTION.” In the ecstatic conjunction, David’s soul merges with Lucy’s soul which merges with Benny’s soul, and we are all so damn maniacally overjoyed to be one huge, triumphant horde of monumental dingbats waving the banners of a glorious, triumphant holy war.
I think many of us witnessed what might be examples of the ecstatic conjunction. During the Iranian revolution, and while Americans were being held hostage in Iran, we saw ecstatic conjunctions of a sort on our TV screens, demonstrations in which throngs of people were seized by one monopolistic emotion of all-consuming hatred that brooked no dissent, no individual thought, no divergence from the frenzied yen for apocalypse.
Averroes was quite popular in his day. When he preached, Spain was under Islamic control, and Islam was poised to pierce the Pyrenees and invade Catholic France. Indeed, some of the young brothers and monks in Paris were being seduced by Averroist thought.
Enter St. Thomas Acquinas. Acquinas castigated the Averroist fallacy that we all have one soul or that we should all merge into one soul. He adamantly held that we all have individual souls. Accordingly, I would contend that there is a hierarchy of individuality among the leading Western religions: The Muslims profess the least respect for individuality. The Catholics have a greater respect for individuality, and the Protestants have a still higher measure of respect for individuality.
(Protestants held that to be saved, one had to understand the story of Jesus because bowing to the whims of Priests would not do. To truly understand it, one needed to read the Bible. Ergo, one needed to be able to read, and by the 19th century, the overwhelming majority of middle class people in England and Prussia were literate. Catholicism, up until two or three hundred years ago, held that laymen should not read the bible lest they develop independent ideas regarding the meaning of the Bible. At the advent of World War One, 90 percent of Southern Italy and Naples was illiterate)
Finally, I suggest that Judaism has the highest measure of respect for individuality. Many people say that Jews respect learning, but it is so much more than that. In good Jewish schools, five-year-olds are told, at the start of school, a story relayed by a great Rabbi. Then, the students are told to find the “kasha” or inconsistency in the story. In other words, they are instructed to criticize the great Rabbi’s thoughts and to improve upon them. Judaism primes people for engaged, rigorous and downright aggressive thought and scholarship.
This Jewish intellectual aggressiveness gave the world its most provocative and arguably destabilizing theories through the persons of Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Marx and Jesus. We Jews are an infinitesimal fraction of the world’s population and look at what a spell we have wrought.
While I find your argument equal parts contentious and disturbing (which I like), I would suggest that the Great Awakening the Anglo-Protestant cultures are currently experiencing will give any number of zealous, ego-erasing religions a run for their money. Not definitive, merely today's example : USC Dworak-Peck School of Social Work's banning of the use of the word 'field'. (Sorry cannot make the graphic register here. See @ContinentalRif1 for details.) Minor peccadillo ? If it weren't part of an unending wave of such actions, I might agree. But in any case, while I don't care for most Organized Religions, it's time for you to lay off the Muslims as a specific object of your wrath, if only so you can sharpen your knife on subjects closer to home.