I know that we were discussing this in WA but I think it is relevant in religion as well.
Thomas Friedman wrote a great piece in today’s times about this issue. THe issue is sheer lunacy. What would be interesting is that if in places like Saudi, Iran and other islamic nations if the incoming freshmen were to be mandated to read the New testament, maybe the understanding between the cultures would increase.
Cuckoo in Carolina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
he ruckus being raised by conservative Christians over the University of North Carolina’s decision to ask incoming students to read a book about the Koran — to stimulate a campus debate — surely has to be one of the most embarrassing moments for America since Sept. 11.
Why? Because it exhibits such profound lack of understanding of what America is about, and it exhibits such a chilling mimicry of what the most repressive Arab Muslim states are about. Ask yourself this question: What would Osama bin Laden do if he found out that the University of Riyadh had asked incoming freshmen to read the New and Old Testaments?
He would do exactly what the book-burning opponents of this U.N.C. directive are doing right now — try to shut it down, only bin Laden wouldn’t bother with the courts. It’s against the law to build a church or synagogue or Buddhist temple or Hindu shrine in public in Saudi Arabia. Is that what we’re trying to mimic?
As a recent letter to The Times observed, the problem with the world today is not that American students are being asked to read the Koran, it is that students in Saudi Arabia and many other Muslim lands are still not being asked to read the sacred texts of other civilizations — let alone the foundational texts of American democracy, like the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Federalist Papers.
The fact that they ignore such diverse texts is the source of their weakness, and the fact that we embrace them is the source of our strength. What we should be doing is driving that point home, not copying their obscurantism.
The notion that U.N.C. violated constitutional prohibitions against state-sponsored religion — by asking freshmen to simply read a book, “Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations” — has been rightly dismissed by the courts as nonsense.
I discovered the other day that my 17-year-old daughter, who is a 12th grader at a Washington-area public high school, was reading Genesis, Luke, Psalms and Job as part of a summer assignment for her A.P. English class. I’m glad. I wish she had also been assigned the Koran.
I understand that some people feel it’s not right that terrorists kill 3,000 Americans — in the name of Islam — and then we go out and make the Koran a best seller to try to figure out who they are. But that doesn’t bother me as an American. It would bother me, though, if I were Muslim. It would bother me that people have been awakened to my faith by an outrageously destructive act perpetrated in its name — rather than by some compelling attractiveness of countries that claim to reflect Islam’s vision of a just society.
The freedom of thought and the multiple cultural and political perspectives we offer in our public schools are what nurture a critical mind. And it is a critical mind that is the root of innovation, scientific inquiry and entrepreneurship.
Right after 9/11, the majority of books on Amazon.com’s top 100 best-seller list were about the Middle East and Islam. But there has been no parallel upsurge in interest in American studies, no new intellectual ferment in the blinkered, monochromatic universities and madrasas of the Arab and Muslim worlds since 9/11. One is reminded of Harry Lime’s famous quip in the movie “The Third Man” — that 30 years of noisy, violent churning under the Borgias in Italy produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance, while 500 years of peace, quiet and harmony in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock.
“A monolithic framework does not create a critical mind,” remarked the religious philosopher David Hartman. “Where there is only one self-evident truth, nothing ever gets challenged and no sparks of creativity ever get generated. The strength of America has always been its ability to challenge its own truths by presenting alternative possibilities. That forces you to justify your own ideas, and that competition of ideas is what creates excellence.”
I would bet that Islam is taught in virtually every state university in America — and was before 9/11. I first studied Islam and Arabic at the University of Minnesota in 1971.
America will always be a strong model for how a nation thrives in the modern age, as long as our culture of curiosity, free inquiry and openness endures. And the Arab Muslim world will continue to struggle with modernity as long as 12th graders in public schools there are never challenged to read Genesis, Luke, Job and Psalms over their summer vacations.
