Professor fired for ‘hate and discrimination’ for sharing Muslim image of Muhammad in Islamic Arts class

Professor fired for ‘hate and discrimination’ for sharing Muslim image of Muhammad in Islamic Arts class
Imam Ali Mosque in Hamburg, Germany. YouTube video

In an illogical punishment, “A professor was fired for Islamophobia after he shared a Muslim image of Islam’s most important religious figure in a class on Islamic art. If that doesn’t make sense to you, a Minnesota university would like to reeducate you,” notes PJ Media.

Hamline University in Minnesota, fired the professor who featured a painting of the prophet Muhammad in a course on Islamic arts. The action was taken after a student newspaper ‘The Oracle’ highlighted it, reports The Siasat Daily. “After an article in the newspaper’s November 18 edition included the incident under ‘incidents of hate and discrimination’, the associate vice president of inclusive excellence of the university declared the classroom exercise ‘undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.’”

New Lines Magazine reported that “Hamline’s president and AVPIE sent a message to all employees stating that ‘respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.’ The essay’s censorship and the subsequent email by two top university administrators raise serious concerns about freedom of speech and academic freedom at the university. The instructor was released from their spring term teaching at Hamline, and its AVPIE went on the record as stating: ‘It was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.’ In other words, an instructor who showed an Islamic painting during a visual analysis — a basic exercise for art history training — was publicly impugned for hate speech and dismissed thereafter, without access to due process.”

As PJ Media observes,

The artwork that landed the instructor into trouble depicts Prophet Muhammad receiving his first Quranic revelation. It is alleged that the painting of Prophet Muhammad is usually part of the Islamic art history classes in many universities across the world.

In the earlier days of Islam, depictions of humans, including the Prophet Muhammad, were not taboo. Later, Islam turned iconoclastic and images of Muhammad — particularly his face — were condemned. This would not seem to have any application to a professor teaching American students about Islam and using a medieval image of the Muslim prophet to do so. But St. Paul, Minnesota’s Hamline University fired its Islamic arts instructor for showing his students an image of Muhammad from pre-iconoclast times, according to bothThe Siasat Daily and Jihad Watch.

For daring to show Islamic art in his Islamic art class, the unnamed instructor was reportedly accused by Hamline administrators of being “hateful, intolerant and Islamophobic” and hurting “the feeling of the Muslims” because of the ban on representations of Muhammad within modern Islam.

When I took a college class on Islamic art, my instructor showed us more than one depiction of Muhammad. To leave them out would be to erase an entire era of Islamic art — and not being Muslims, we were not required to rewrite (or re-paint) history. But Hamline’s student newspaper The Oracle called out the university’s instructor in a November issue, Siasat said, reporting the episode under “incidents of hate and discrimination.” The university’s “associate vice president of inclusive excellence” — whatever that means — called sharing the image in class “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Siasat explained, “The artwork that landed the instructor into trouble depicts Prophet Muhammad receiving his first Quranic revelation. It is alleged that the painting of Prophet Muhammad is usually part of the Islamic art history classes in many universities across the world.” I can testify to that from my own experience.

I guess Hamline, a private liberal arts institution founded in 1824, is more interested in woke pandering to authoritarian Sharia law than in educating their students.

As Wikipedia notes, there are sectarian divisions among Muslims about whether it is acceptable to depict Muhammad: “Most Sunni Muslims believe that visual depictions of all the prophets of Islam should be prohibited and are particularly averse to visual representations of Muhammad….In Shia Islam, however, images of Muhammad are quite common nowadays, even though Shia scholars historically were against such depictions.” Although objections to illustrations of Muhammad rose over the centuries, one can find depictions of Muhammad by Muslims even in 16th Century Iran.

Images of Mohammed are forbidden in various nations in the Middle East and Asia. For example, in 1963 an account by a Turkish author of a pilgrimage to Mecca was banned in Pakistan because it contained reproductions of miniatures showing Mohammed unveiled.

LU Staff

LU Staff

Promoting and defending liberty, as defined by the nation’s founders, requires both facts and philosophical thought, transcending all elements of our culture, from partisan politics to social issues, the workings of government, and entertainment and off-duty interests. Liberty Unyielding is committed to bringing together voices that will fuel the flame of liberty, with a dialogue that is lively and informative.

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