Meanwhile in Canada, no new news on the father of a child who was threatened with criminal hate speech by his son’s elementary school for saying Islam is a shit religion on his own Facebook page
"Objects in history may be closer than they appear" – Eeyore for Vlad
One teacher (?) Saying she didn’t care what the children were taught, “good, bad, or indifferent” as long as it came down from the School Board.
There’s your complacent dumbing down of Canada and living by the system. No care or concern for the school inmates. Nothing, just like the Church, to do with real life issues to get the students to think for themselves. In the local Mosque there’s a burkha with her fraction on it.
Well, he showed how not to do it.
He would have put himself in a much better position if he had backed up his statements with actual polls, verses and news stories.
Still, it was not within the bounds of his job to do what he did. That’s just the truth.
If he wants to change that, he needs to do it through the school board, and the Federal government who (wrongly) have gotten involved in curriculum here in the US.
Some excerpts from a recent exchange at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog that seem to confirm what one would expect would be happening to truth about Islam in Islamic Studies at Western universities as more Muslims enter the field:
A.H.: ‘I’ve never been called a racist before. Yet, if Omid Safi’s undocumented musings about the current state of Islamic Studies is to be believed, I am one of several non-Muslims who have the nerve to attack and critique “the prominence of Muslim scholars in the Study of Islam Section” of the AAR. It’s funny, but I never thought of myself as critiquing Muslims, only bad scholarship….
‘If scholarship is to be scholarship, as opposed to identity politics, it must take ideas seriously, and not engage in a “with us or against us” mentality. I am glad, pace Safi, that there are more Muslims (men and women) in the field of Islamic Studies. I also wish that there were more Muslims in Buddhist Studies, in Jewish Studies, and in Christian Studies….
‘So, Mr. Safi, if you want to engage my critique of the field, may I suggest you do what the Western tradition of scholarly discourse demands and respond to my ideas in print as opposed to engaging in innuendo and identity politics….
‘On this side are insiders; on that side, outsiders. I feel vindicated because I have been writing from some years now that this would be one possible future of Islamic Studies. I see that I was correct, but trust me I don’t gloat about it.’
Carl: ‘I agree wholeheartedly that scholarship on Muhammad should be rigorous, methodical, and, ultimately, devoid of apologetics/polemics, yet any of us who entered or completed a PhD program in this field in the past 20 years must surely be aware that the “Quest of the Historical Muhammad” is one of the two primary minefields of early 21st-century Religious Studies….
‘The theoretically-sloppy moniker of “Islamophobe” is tossed around with alarming ease in our field, invariably casting as “racist” an academic whose sole “mistake” is to approach Muhammad as Albert Schweitzer did of Jesus in 1910. The modern-day white, Western (often male) Islamicist—by virtue of his skin color and nationality rather than the merits of his scholarship—is inevitably burned at the stake of the “colonial invader.”’
Z.J.: ‘I am both bemused and saddened by Mr. Hughes’s reactionary and unbecoming response to Omid. Based on Omid’s reflection, it is unclear to me why Hughes would undignify himself with this sort of vitriol. Omid’s piece hardly warrants this.’
L.S.B.: ‘If Aaron Hughes had any intellectual credibility as an academic, he has lost (or should lose) that credibility because of these racist rants.’
M.M.: ‘I am watching now a 1986-documentary about Edward Said. He says in the beginning, “Right from the moment I arrived in the West in the early 50’s until the present, initially there was always a sense in which as an Arab, and obviously as a Palestinian, you feel in some way criminalized or delinquent. So powerful is the definition of ‘you’ as somebody who is outside the pale, whose purpose in life is to kill Jews.”
‘I think not much has changed since then…’
P.S.: ‘Omid Safi enjoys lying about people who disagree with him. In an email to me a number of years ago he accused Robert Spencer of trying to kill him. He’s a fruitloop of the first order. He reminds me of Tiny Tim.’
http://www.equinoxpub.com/blog/2014/02/when-bad-scholarship-is-just-bad-scholarship-a-response-to-omid-safi/
That’s a sad article by a scholar who came to the field before PC.
He’ll be feeling lonely these days. Poor thing, can you imagine working in the nightmare environment of Islamic Studies? Or even Comparative Religions 101?
It must be horrible. That Carl fellow in the comments actually says, ‘today, one writes about the “historical Muhammad” at one’s own professional peril (which is one reason I have not chosen that particular path).’
Safi praises the thoroughly unpleasant Ingrid Mattson, who has featured at vladtepesblog.
That is a scary thought.