The University of North Carolina has finally found a core
curriculum. Usually it lets students bypass the “Great Books.” No
required Shakespeare for them. Not so, however, with the Koran, or
rather a politically correct introduction to the Koran called
Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations by Michael
Sells. UNC required all entering freshmen to read his book this
summer in preparation for group seminars at the beginning of the
year.
The assignment was part of “The Carolina Summer Reading
Program,” which “is designed to introduce you to the intellectual
life of Carolina,” the UNC website tells
students.
It certainly served that end, for the intellectual life of UNC,
like the majority of colleges today, is defined by an eagerness to
study sympathetically every tradition except America’s own. Deeply
skeptical and relativistic, most colleges don’t even bother to
mention “truth” in their mission statements. They can’t pass on any
coherent body of wisdom, because, as far as their professors are
concerned, no such body of wisdom exists. What colleges consider
within their competence to do, though, is be “relevant” and form
students in the attitudes, fashions, and ideas of the hour, one of
the chief ones being that Islam is indisputably a religion of
peace.
It is a good thing UNC required students to read a PC primer on
the Koran rather than the actual text. If they read the Koran from
beginning to end, they might not develop the proper attitude toward
Islam. Passages which justify violent jihad could lead them to the
wrong conclusion, namely, that Muslims who oppose the West aren’t
ignoring their religion’s teachings, but practicing them.
Apparently Muhammad held the same views and values as the staff of
the New Yorker.
Would that the liberal professors at UNC interpreted the tenets
of Christianity so benignly. Normally the Religious Right scares
them. But Islam, which makes the most intense forms of Christianity
look like backsliding, receives their warm embrace.
As long as a culture isn’t Western, it can get away with pretty
much anything in the eyes of many academics. As they see it,
non-Western cultures are not to be condemned under any
circumstances; they are to be understood or explained. Hence,
American slavery, for example, makes some academics shouting mad,
while African slavery just leaves them perplexed.
If Ho Chi Minh won his war on the streets of America, maybe
America’s Islamic enemies hope to win theirs in America’s college
classrooms. They must chuckle over the tolerance extended to their
intolerant culture. And how self-destructively vain academics must
be to assume that anti-Western Muslims think like them.
People who reduce Islam to liberal humanism are sitting ducks
for its more fervent practitioners. This is what students at UNC
need to know. But the Western intellectual culture that taught
students to think critically is long gone. The West’s intellectual
culture contains no objective measure of truth, and so it is
powerless to judge anything intelligently. If American academics
can’t see any harm in doctrinal Islam, it is because they can’t see
harm in anything — save the conservative embers in their own
country.
Michael Sells says that behind some of the criticism of UNC’s
use of his book “is an old missionary claim that Islam is a
religion of violence in contrast to Christianity, a religion of
peace.” Old missionaries weren’t the only ones who made that claim.
Centuries ago, before the Western intellectual culture traded
Christianity for secular humanism, professors, such as Thomas
Aquinas, at schools like the University of Salamanca and Paris,
made that claim too. And if they hadn’t, those schools would
probably be mosques today.
