Post by sputnik on Jan 19, 2023 19:33:02 GMT
i've been following this story since i first saw it in the NYT. it's pretty wild.
she’s now suing the university
Hamline University professor who lost job over Muhammad art sues
Hamline University in St Paul, the capital city of Minnesota, was the scene of a fight over free speech and religion
By Mike Wendling
BBC News
A professor who was let go from her job after showing a class an artwork depicting the Prophet Muhammad has sued her former university, alleging religious discrimination and defamation.
The case has raised issues of religious tolerance and academic freedom.
The basic facts are not being disputed.
Erika Lopez Prater showed a classical work depicting the Prophet in an art history class at Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota.
One of her students complained, and Prof Lopez Prater's contract was subsequently not renewed at the end of the term.
But the details of the case and the university's response have prompted a wave of debate, media attention and conflicting public statements, culminating in a lawsuit announced Tuesday.
The picture that was shown was an illustration of Muhammad receiving a revelation from the angel Gabriel - part of A Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid-al-Din, a 14th Century Islamic scholar.
Before presenting it, she warned students that they could choose to opt out of the lesson, as many Muslims consider images of Muhammad to be un-Islamic, although there is a variety of views within Islam on the subject.
Despite the warnings, Aram Wedatalla, a student and president of Hamline's Muslim student association, was upset by the class and after a conversation with the professor, complained to university authorities.
"I'm like, 'This can't be real,'" Ms Wedatalla later told the university's student newspaper. "As a Muslim, and a black person, I don't feel like I belong, and I don't think I'll ever belong in a community where they don't value me as a member, and they don't show the same respect that I show them."
An administrator then called the professor's actions "Islamophobic" - a label that the university later recanted - and her adjunct contract was not renewed.
The controversy grows
The controversy was mostly confined to academia until the New York Times published a story about the incident earlier this month.
A number of academics and groups including PEN America, an organisation that supports free expression, came out in support of Prof Lopez Prater.
Amna Khalid, a history professor at nearby Carleton College, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that she was "appalled" by the university's decision and that "it is the students who pay the highest price for such limits on academic freedom."
Prof Khalid, who is Muslim, told the BBC that a number of junior academics in the area have been in touch with her, expressing fear about what they can or can't say in the classroom.
"I don't want to vilify the student," she said. "The problem is the institution."
Depicting the Prophet
Muslim groups were divided. While many civil rights groups came down on the side of the professor, Ms Wedatalla, the student, was initially supported by the Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair).
But the group's national leaders took a different view. The national Cair organisation has said there was no evidence Prof Lopez Prater was acting with "Islamophobic intent."
Another advocacy group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, came out with a full-throated defence of the professor.
"Dr Prater was trying to emphasise a key principle of religious literacy: religions are not monolithic in nature, but rather, internally diverse," the group said.
The range of opinion highlights longstanding disagreements among Muslims over the sensitivity of depicting images of the Prophet.
There is no explicit rule against such depictions in the Koran, instead the idea arises in the Hadiths - stories about the life and sayings of Muhammad gathered in the years after his death.
The prohibition is aimed at preventing idolatry - the worship of images in place of a god - and it is thought that classical depictions of Muhammad were only viewed by a select elite.
Sunni Muslims tend to be more strict in their interpretation of a ban than Shia Muslims. For instance, images of the Prophet are more common in Shia-majority Iran.
Prof Lopez Prater said she attempted to address the issue of divergent ideas about representation in religious art during the class.
Controversies of this nature have tended to flare up not in art classes but around displays of cartoons or other drawings by people attempting to make political points or promote specific ideas about freedom of speech.
The debate over the Hamline University incident has been mostly confined to the campus and media debates. But on occasion depictions have led to anger and even violence by Islamist extremists - perhaps most notably the attack against the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015.
University response
Having initially defended its decision and its criticism of the professor, the university backtracked on Tuesday, saying that its use of the word Islamophobic was "flawed" and pledging to hold discussions in the coming months about academic freedom, student care and religion.
"We strongly support academic freedom for all members of the Hamline community. We also believe that academic freedom and support for students can and should co-exist," officials said.
www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64243344
---------------------------
This is the original NYT article:
A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.
After an outcry over the art history class by Muslim students, Hamline University officials said the incident was Islamophobic. But many scholars say the work is a masterpiece.
By Vimal Patel
Published Jan. 8, 2023
Updated Jan. 10, 2023
Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.
In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.
In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.
Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.
Officials at Hamline, a small, private university in St. Paul, Minn., with about 1,800 undergraduates, had tried to douse what they feared would become a runaway fire. Instead they ended up with what they had tried to avoid: a national controversy, which pitted advocates of academic liberty and free speech against Muslims who believe that showing the image of Prophet Muhammad is always sacrilegious.
After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.
Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.
Free speech supporters started their own campaign. An Islamic art historian wrote an essay defending Dr. López Prater and started a petition demanding the university’s board investigate the matter. It had more than 2,800 signatures. Free speech groups and publications issued blistering critiques; PEN America called it “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.” And Muslims themselves debated whether the action was Islamophobic.
Arguments over academic freedom have been fought on campuses for years, but they can be especially fraught at small private colleges like Hamline, which are facing shrinking enrollment and growing financial pressures. To attract applicants, many of these colleges have diversified their curriculums and tried to be more welcoming to students who have been historically shut out of higher education.
Meanwhile, professors everywhere often face pushback for their academic decisions from activist students or conservative lawmakers.
Dr. López Prater’s situation was especially precarious. She is an adjunct, one of higher education’s underclass of teachers, working for little pay and receiving few of the workplace protections enjoyed by tenured faculty members.
University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.
“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
“I’m like, ‘This can’t be real,’” said Ms. Wedatalla, who in a public forum described herself as Sudanese. “As a Muslim and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
Todd H. Green, who has written books about Islamophobia, said the conflict at Hamline was “tragic” because administrators pitted natural allies — those concerned about stereotypes of Muslims and Islam — against one another.
The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”
The Image
The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).
Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.
The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.
Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.
Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”
Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.
There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.
Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.
“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
A Warning, and Then the Image
Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.
She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.
“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.
Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.
After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.
Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.
Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.
“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”
As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”
Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.
Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.
“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.
A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.
Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
The administration, after meeting with the school’s Muslim Student Association, would host an open forum “on the subject of Islamophobia,” he wrote.
Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.
An Emotional Forum
At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.
“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”
Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.
The main speaker was Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group.
The instructor’s actions, he said, hurt Muslim students and students of color and had “absolutely no benefit.”
“If this institution wants to value those students,” he added, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.”
Mark Berkson, a religion professor at Hamline, raised his hand.
“When you say ‘trust Muslims on Islamophobia,’” Dr. Berkson asked, “what does one do when the Islamic community itself is divided on an issue? Because there are many Muslim scholars and experts and art historians who do not believe that this was Islamophobic.”
Mr. Hussein responded that there were marginal and extremist voices on any issue. “You can teach a whole class about why Hitler was good,” Mr. Hussein said.
During the exchange, Ms. Baker, the department head, and Dr. Everett, the administrator, separately walked up to the religion professor, put their hands on his shoulders and said this was not the time to raise these concerns, Dr. Berkson said in an interview.
But Dr. Berkson, who said he strongly supported campus diversity, said that he felt compelled to speak up.
“We were being asked to accept, without questioning, that what our colleague did — teaching an Islamic art masterpiece in a class on art history after having given multiple warnings — was somehow equivalent to mosque vandalism and violence against Muslims and hate speech,” Dr. Berkson said. “That is what I could not stand.”
In interviews, several Islamic art scholars took issue with the idea that Dr. López Prater’s intent was to disrespect the prophet, and said that it was nothing like the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that had reprinted mocking cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. That led to the deadly 2015 attack at the magazine’s offices, which the scholars also denounced.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy executive director of the national chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that he did not have enough information to comment on the Hamline dispute. But while his group discourages visual depictions of the prophet, he said that there was a difference between an act that was un-Islamic and one that was Islamophobic.
“If you drink a beer in front of me, you’re doing something that is un-Islamic, but it’s not Islamophobic,” he said. “If you drink a beer in front of me because you’re deliberately trying to offend me, well then, maybe that has an intent factor.”
“Intent and circumstances matter,” he said, “especially in a university setting, where academic freedom is critical and professors often address sensitive and controversial topics.”
Dr. Safi, the Duke professor, said Hamline had effectively taken sides in a debate among Muslims. Students “don’t have to give up their values,” he added. “But some part of the educational process does call for stepping beyond each one of our vantage points enough to know that none of us have the monopoly on truth.”
Dr. Safi has his own personal image of the prophet. When he was 14, his family fled to the United States from Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. He packed an image of Muhammad holding a Quran into one of the family’s few suitcases.
That image now hangs on his wall at home.
Graham Bowley and Mable Chan contributed reporting.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Vimal Patel is a higher education reporter for The Times, focusing on speech and campus culture. He was previously a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. @vimalnyt
www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html
she’s now suing the university
Hamline University professor who lost job over Muhammad art sues
Hamline University in St Paul, the capital city of Minnesota, was the scene of a fight over free speech and religion
By Mike Wendling
BBC News
A professor who was let go from her job after showing a class an artwork depicting the Prophet Muhammad has sued her former university, alleging religious discrimination and defamation.
The case has raised issues of religious tolerance and academic freedom.
The basic facts are not being disputed.
Erika Lopez Prater showed a classical work depicting the Prophet in an art history class at Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota.
One of her students complained, and Prof Lopez Prater's contract was subsequently not renewed at the end of the term.
But the details of the case and the university's response have prompted a wave of debate, media attention and conflicting public statements, culminating in a lawsuit announced Tuesday.
The picture that was shown was an illustration of Muhammad receiving a revelation from the angel Gabriel - part of A Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid-al-Din, a 14th Century Islamic scholar.
Before presenting it, she warned students that they could choose to opt out of the lesson, as many Muslims consider images of Muhammad to be un-Islamic, although there is a variety of views within Islam on the subject.
Despite the warnings, Aram Wedatalla, a student and president of Hamline's Muslim student association, was upset by the class and after a conversation with the professor, complained to university authorities.
"I'm like, 'This can't be real,'" Ms Wedatalla later told the university's student newspaper. "As a Muslim, and a black person, I don't feel like I belong, and I don't think I'll ever belong in a community where they don't value me as a member, and they don't show the same respect that I show them."
An administrator then called the professor's actions "Islamophobic" - a label that the university later recanted - and her adjunct contract was not renewed.
The controversy grows
The controversy was mostly confined to academia until the New York Times published a story about the incident earlier this month.
A number of academics and groups including PEN America, an organisation that supports free expression, came out in support of Prof Lopez Prater.
Amna Khalid, a history professor at nearby Carleton College, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that she was "appalled" by the university's decision and that "it is the students who pay the highest price for such limits on academic freedom."
Prof Khalid, who is Muslim, told the BBC that a number of junior academics in the area have been in touch with her, expressing fear about what they can or can't say in the classroom.
"I don't want to vilify the student," she said. "The problem is the institution."
Depicting the Prophet
Muslim groups were divided. While many civil rights groups came down on the side of the professor, Ms Wedatalla, the student, was initially supported by the Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair).
But the group's national leaders took a different view. The national Cair organisation has said there was no evidence Prof Lopez Prater was acting with "Islamophobic intent."
Another advocacy group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, came out with a full-throated defence of the professor.
"Dr Prater was trying to emphasise a key principle of religious literacy: religions are not monolithic in nature, but rather, internally diverse," the group said.
The range of opinion highlights longstanding disagreements among Muslims over the sensitivity of depicting images of the Prophet.
There is no explicit rule against such depictions in the Koran, instead the idea arises in the Hadiths - stories about the life and sayings of Muhammad gathered in the years after his death.
The prohibition is aimed at preventing idolatry - the worship of images in place of a god - and it is thought that classical depictions of Muhammad were only viewed by a select elite.
Sunni Muslims tend to be more strict in their interpretation of a ban than Shia Muslims. For instance, images of the Prophet are more common in Shia-majority Iran.
Prof Lopez Prater said she attempted to address the issue of divergent ideas about representation in religious art during the class.
Controversies of this nature have tended to flare up not in art classes but around displays of cartoons or other drawings by people attempting to make political points or promote specific ideas about freedom of speech.
The debate over the Hamline University incident has been mostly confined to the campus and media debates. But on occasion depictions have led to anger and even violence by Islamist extremists - perhaps most notably the attack against the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015.
University response
Having initially defended its decision and its criticism of the professor, the university backtracked on Tuesday, saying that its use of the word Islamophobic was "flawed" and pledging to hold discussions in the coming months about academic freedom, student care and religion.
"We strongly support academic freedom for all members of the Hamline community. We also believe that academic freedom and support for students can and should co-exist," officials said.
www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64243344
---------------------------
This is the original NYT article:
A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.
After an outcry over the art history class by Muslim students, Hamline University officials said the incident was Islamophobic. But many scholars say the work is a masterpiece.
By Vimal Patel
Published Jan. 8, 2023
Updated Jan. 10, 2023
Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.
In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.
In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.
Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.
Officials at Hamline, a small, private university in St. Paul, Minn., with about 1,800 undergraduates, had tried to douse what they feared would become a runaway fire. Instead they ended up with what they had tried to avoid: a national controversy, which pitted advocates of academic liberty and free speech against Muslims who believe that showing the image of Prophet Muhammad is always sacrilegious.
After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.
Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.
Free speech supporters started their own campaign. An Islamic art historian wrote an essay defending Dr. López Prater and started a petition demanding the university’s board investigate the matter. It had more than 2,800 signatures. Free speech groups and publications issued blistering critiques; PEN America called it “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.” And Muslims themselves debated whether the action was Islamophobic.
Arguments over academic freedom have been fought on campuses for years, but they can be especially fraught at small private colleges like Hamline, which are facing shrinking enrollment and growing financial pressures. To attract applicants, many of these colleges have diversified their curriculums and tried to be more welcoming to students who have been historically shut out of higher education.
Meanwhile, professors everywhere often face pushback for their academic decisions from activist students or conservative lawmakers.
Dr. López Prater’s situation was especially precarious. She is an adjunct, one of higher education’s underclass of teachers, working for little pay and receiving few of the workplace protections enjoyed by tenured faculty members.
University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.
“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
“I’m like, ‘This can’t be real,’” said Ms. Wedatalla, who in a public forum described herself as Sudanese. “As a Muslim and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”
Todd H. Green, who has written books about Islamophobia, said the conflict at Hamline was “tragic” because administrators pitted natural allies — those concerned about stereotypes of Muslims and Islam — against one another.
The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”
The Image
The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).
Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.
The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.
Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.
Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”
Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.
There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.
Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.
“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
A Warning, and Then the Image
Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.
She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.
“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.
Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.
After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.
Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.
Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.
“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”
As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”
Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.
Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.
“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.
A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.
Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
The administration, after meeting with the school’s Muslim Student Association, would host an open forum “on the subject of Islamophobia,” he wrote.
Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.
An Emotional Forum
At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.
“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”
Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.
The main speaker was Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group.
The instructor’s actions, he said, hurt Muslim students and students of color and had “absolutely no benefit.”
“If this institution wants to value those students,” he added, “it cannot have incidents like this happen. If somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.”
Mark Berkson, a religion professor at Hamline, raised his hand.
“When you say ‘trust Muslims on Islamophobia,’” Dr. Berkson asked, “what does one do when the Islamic community itself is divided on an issue? Because there are many Muslim scholars and experts and art historians who do not believe that this was Islamophobic.”
Mr. Hussein responded that there were marginal and extremist voices on any issue. “You can teach a whole class about why Hitler was good,” Mr. Hussein said.
During the exchange, Ms. Baker, the department head, and Dr. Everett, the administrator, separately walked up to the religion professor, put their hands on his shoulders and said this was not the time to raise these concerns, Dr. Berkson said in an interview.
But Dr. Berkson, who said he strongly supported campus diversity, said that he felt compelled to speak up.
“We were being asked to accept, without questioning, that what our colleague did — teaching an Islamic art masterpiece in a class on art history after having given multiple warnings — was somehow equivalent to mosque vandalism and violence against Muslims and hate speech,” Dr. Berkson said. “That is what I could not stand.”
In interviews, several Islamic art scholars took issue with the idea that Dr. López Prater’s intent was to disrespect the prophet, and said that it was nothing like the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that had reprinted mocking cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. That led to the deadly 2015 attack at the magazine’s offices, which the scholars also denounced.
Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy executive director of the national chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that he did not have enough information to comment on the Hamline dispute. But while his group discourages visual depictions of the prophet, he said that there was a difference between an act that was un-Islamic and one that was Islamophobic.
“If you drink a beer in front of me, you’re doing something that is un-Islamic, but it’s not Islamophobic,” he said. “If you drink a beer in front of me because you’re deliberately trying to offend me, well then, maybe that has an intent factor.”
“Intent and circumstances matter,” he said, “especially in a university setting, where academic freedom is critical and professors often address sensitive and controversial topics.”
Dr. Safi, the Duke professor, said Hamline had effectively taken sides in a debate among Muslims. Students “don’t have to give up their values,” he added. “But some part of the educational process does call for stepping beyond each one of our vantage points enough to know that none of us have the monopoly on truth.”
Dr. Safi has his own personal image of the prophet. When he was 14, his family fled to the United States from Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. He packed an image of Muhammad holding a Quran into one of the family’s few suitcases.
That image now hangs on his wall at home.
Graham Bowley and Mable Chan contributed reporting.
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Vimal Patel is a higher education reporter for The Times, focusing on speech and campus culture. He was previously a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. @vimalnyt
www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html
