I just read a distressing item by Christiane Gruber in New Lines about an adjunct instructor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose spring courses were cancelled after a student objected to the display of a medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) on the grounds that such images were Islamophobic. To be clear, this was in an Islamic art class, and the image in question was produced by a Muslim. In other words, it was a far cry from, for example, the cartoon in Charlie Hebdo.
Gruber, who is a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, points out very clearly that despite public perceptions to the contrary, there is a long history of depicting Muhammad in Islamic art.
Simply put, this is part of devout Islamic art. But neither the student nor the university was interested in learning this. Instead, the university effectively fired the instructor in question.
Initially I had simply chalked this up to the stupidity of the Hamline administration. After all, they clearly need an expert on Islamic art on the faculty, since they don’t know any about Islamic art. Then I suspected this decision was made by a PR person desperate to avoid even a whiff of racism. But then I realized the simple truth of the matter: the customer is always right. Sadly, in this case one customer got what he or she wanted, but many other customers have been negatively affected by the loss of the courses this instructor could teach and by the fact that this action by the university has demonstrated very publicly that Hamline degrees are worthless, since the university is more concerned with customer satisfaction than with education.
