Peace Be Upon Him
6 Years ago (Jan 18th, 2017), President University of Hamline, Dr Fayneese S. Miller met with the International Advisory Board of the University of Business & Technology in Al Yamamah Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Today, she must face a call of resignation about Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), prophet for Moslem / Muslim, the religion which is adhered by 99,9% Saudi population, and 24% inhabitant on earth. An estimated 200,000 Muslims live in Minnesota, from a total 5.7 million population in Minnesota.
Muslims are not a monolith. This intense and almost obsessive desire to appease Muslims is actually appeasement and capitulation to the most extreme Muslims.
It is evidence of the strange contemporary culture of higher education in the United States that a private university recently declared that the showing of an image of Prophet Mohammed, contained in a treasured Persian manuscript from the 14th century, painted by a Muslim scholar for a Muslim ruler and celebrating the birth of Islam, is “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, the oldest in Minnesota, who committed this alleged academic atrocity, was fired after Muslim students on campus made the dubious claim that the professor insulted their faith by violating a tenet in Islam that forbids showing images of religious and holy figures. But they were aided in their efforts by the university’s own administrators and an outside professional Muslim activist who cooperated to manufacture a narrative of Islamophobia while waging an outrageous assault on academic freedom.
López Prater informed the students in her art history class in the class syllabus that she would show images of religious figures such as the Prophet Mohammed and the Buddha and asked them to contact her if they had any reservations. None did. Before revealing the painting, she gave the students a last chance to opt out of class. More importantly, she told them, “I am showing you this image for a reason. And that is that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monolithic Islamic culture.” She then showed two images of Mohammed, one from the 16th-century Ottoman era showing Mohammed with his face veiled and a halo over his head, and the Persian painting, which caused the uproar.
The painting depicts a standing winged and crowned Archangel Gabriel delivering to a seated Mohammed God’s first revelation to be included in the Quran. Nothing could be more devotional to Mohammed than depicting him at the very moment of the birth of the religion of Islam. The understated colors, the juxtaposition of the two figures, and the streamlined strokes creating the surrounding mountains make the painting one of the most sublime expressions of high Persian art. One is hard-pressed to understand how students and academics in a U.S. institute of higher education—where learning, reason, academic freedom, open debates, and the questioning of dogmas and taboos are to be practiced and celebrated—could claim that they have been assaulted by the mere revelation of sublime art.
For centuries, Islam was seen by many Western scholars—and, unfortunately, by the overwhelming majority of Muslims themselves—as a static, immovable, undifferentiated, and immutable corpus. The Muslim world has always been as diverse politically and culturally—if not more so—than Christendom at any time. Let’s start with the bogus claim that Islam forbids the drawing or painting of religious or holy figures.
There is absolutely no such injunction in the Quran, and the Persian and Ottoman empires, as well as various Muslim realms in India, have left us a stunningly rich inheritance of drawings and paintings depicting the mundane of the terrestrial and the sublime of the celestial. In these drawings and paintings, we see Mohammed leading his men to battle; ascending to heaven on his horse, alone or with the Archangel Gabriel; talking to his companions in Medina; flying with Gabriel over the valleys of hell, observing immoral women hung by their tongues or breasts and being consumed by eternal fire; or in heaven, which is rendered a lush landscape packed with flowering trees, colorful birds, camels, and horses. In one painting of Mohammed in heaven, he is in the center, surrounded by believers while addressing a woman, probably one of his wives, since her head, like Mohammed’s, is surrounded by the sacred flaming aureole.
Political and religious strife in Islam are as old as the religion itself. From the dawn of Islam, religious sects claiming to exclusively own the keys to the essence of the faith flourished and clashed. Radical and violent political movements sprouted, along with various mystical schools such as Sufism and other forms of spiritual asceticism. Since the early division between the Sunnis and Shiites, Islam ceased to be a monolithic religion.
Islam developed and expanded in very different ways in the numerous geographical areas penetrated by Muslim armies and the civilians that accompanied them, and later on by traders with their caravans traversing known ancient trading routes while cutting new paths into unknown regions in the fast-expanding realm of Islam. The early Muslim Arabs were greatly influenced politically, culturally, and administratively by the more sophisticated Byzantine and Persian empires they fought during the reign of the Umayyads, the first dynasty in Islam. Muslims, whether in Spain or in India, adapted themselves to the local cultures and incorporated local artisans, bureaucrats, and elites into their own rising political structures.
Professor Erika Lopez Prater Sues Hamline University for Religious Discrimination and Defamation.
In an all-faculty meeting, 86 percent of full-time professors voted to ask Fayneese Miller, the first Black president of Hamline University, for her resignation. 92 of about 130 full-time faculty attended today's meeting; 86 percent of those present voted in support of this statement.
From the 1920s until the 1990s, Minnesota’s Muslim population reflected national trends. African Americans began converting to Islam in earnest in the 1920s with the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. A major shift in the US Muslim population occurred after the immigration reforms of 1965, which opened the door to greater immigration from around the world, including many Muslim-majority areas.
Especially significant is the immigration of Muslims from countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. With the new rules privileged those with certain education or skills, many of the immigrants of this wave were highly educated and faced less economic precarity than those immigrants who began coming in the 1990s.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, in the wake of civil wars in places like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ethiopia, Eiretrea, Somalia, and Sudan more Muslims have arrived in the US as refugees.
Minnesota has a long history of welcoming refugees, largely due to its robust social service and voluntary resettlement agencies (read“A Warmer Welcome in a Colder State”). Due to this, the composition of Minnesota’s Muslim population does not reflect national trends, with the Somali Muslim community making up a larger portion than in the country as a whole. Although the size of the Somali community in Minnesota is difficult to determine, estimates place it somewhere between forty and seventy thousand. Estimates vary on the size of the Somali community depending, for example, on whether Somali Americans born in the US are included. In 2017, it was estimated that there were close to 74,000 Somali speakers in Minnesota. The largest concentration of Somalis live in the Twin Cities area, although there are significant communities in smaller industrial cities, including St. Cloud, Rochester, and Faribault.
Hamline University classrooms opened for the spring semester on Monday. It marked the first time students returned to campus after a national media firestorm that broke out when the university chose not to renew the contract of an adjunct art history professor who had shown paintings of the Prophet Muhammad in class.
Many Muslim students, who had unexpectedly found themselves at the center of the storm, felt mixed emotions: Excited to be back. Overwhelmed by their new syllabi. Tired of the debate about academic vs. religious freedom.
Things took another turn Tuesday, when many of the university’s full-time professors voted to ask university President Fayneese Miller to resign. Faculty members called for her immediate resignation, saying they “no longer have faith in President Miller’s ability to lead.”
Miller did not immediately respond to a Sahan Journal request for comment on Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s obviously really hard,” said 18-year-old Edna, a freshman education major, at the campus’s Anderson Center on Monday. “I’m just trying to take it day by day.”
For Edna, the hardest part of the firestorm was the threats her classmates received in light of the incident’s international media attention. (Some students and staff received death threats from people outside the Hamline community; at least one email address was temporarily disabled in an effort to curb harassment.) Overall, she found the media reaction “extreme.” She wished people could understand how much the incident had affected Muslim students.
Still, she said, “I’m glad to be back.”
But for some students, the return to class prompted another painful question: can I trust my professors?
“It’s great to be back because it is my last semester,” said Ubah, a senior public health major from St. Paul. “But it’s also the worst-case scenario that you could ever walk into.” The worst part, she said, was fearing that professors would not understand or support her.
Here’s the back story: In an October world art class, Professor Erika López Prater showed two paintings of the Prophet Muhammad as part of an Islamic art unit. According to a civil lawsuit she filed January 18 in Ramsey County District Court, she had instructed students in her syllabus and in class that she would show “representational images” of the Prophet Muhammad, so that students who did not wish to see these images could opt out of viewing them. She had also sent the syllabus to her department chair and Hamline administrators, none of whom had voiced any concern.
Despite her warnings, the president of the Muslim Student Association, Aram Wedatalla, saw the image. She complained to administrators. One sent an email describing the classroom incident as “undeniably Islamophobic.” Hamline rescinded its invitation to López Prater to teach a course in the spring. (Wedatalla initially agreed to be interviewed for this story, but did not respond to multiple requests to meet Monday; a lawyer for López Prater referred a reporter to her civil complaint; and Hamline University did not respond to requests for comment.)
The incident sparked international media attention at the small St. Paul private university, from Fox News to the New York Times, as well as disagreement among national and local Muslim organizations. While many Muslims believe that visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are sacrilegious, that view is not universally held within Islam. The Minnesota chapter of the Council of American–Islamic Relations called the incident Islamophobic and praised Hamline for rebuking it; the national CAIR organization issued a rare public statement breaking with a local chapter, saying that showing the paintings in a proper educational context was not Islamophobic.
For some students, the incident had started with a professor misunderstanding their religion. And the combination of a media frenzy, vigorous defenses of academic freedom, and threats directed at Muslim students and staff had only made the chasm of misunderstanding wider.
Hamline’s students are increasingly diverse. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 31 percent of Hamline’s undergraduate students are people of color, up from 18 percent a decade ago. Hamline’s website reports that 44 percent of the 2022 incoming class are BIPOC.
But demographic change has come more slowly to the university’s faculty. Fourteen percent of full-time faculty are people of color, according to federal data compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education. That’s a smaller percentage than many peer institutions: At the University of St. Thomas, 20 percent of full-time faculty are people of color; at Augsburg University, 21 percent are.
During the school’s January term, when many students were off-campus, Hamline faculty penned a letter to students. “We want you to know that in the midst of the current media tempest, our thoughts are with you,” wrote a group of 66 professors. “We support students. We also support academic freedom. Our mission as educators demands both.”
The letter continued, “We want you to know that we are fully committed to listening to and working with you to keep refining and improving the educational experience for all students, even while our classrooms may sometimes be challenging — even uncomfortable — spaces.”
Faculty submitted it to the Hamline Oracle, the student newspaper, where it was printed on January 16.
In a separate January 10 letter to trustees, the Hamline faculty joined national academic and Muslim organizations in expressing concerns about academic freedom. The faculty also expressed concern for student wellbeing.
“We are concerned that an adjunct member of the faculty was labeled Islamophobic, and her Spring course was canceled without affording her due process,” wrote a group of 44 Hamline professors. “We are equally concerned that an important segment of our student population reports that they have experienced subtle and overt discrimination on our campus.”
The letter says that “despite the seeming ‘silence’ on campus,” Hamline faculty had been supporting students most affected by the situation and demanding answers from senior leadership. It concludes, “In the absence of effective, functional, and strategic leadership, we are gravely concerned about the future of Hamline University.”
For some students, that letter read as a threat to Fayneese Miller, the university’s first Black president. Miller initially took a strong stand in support of the Muslim students, though she backed down from labeling López Prater’s actions Islamophobic after the professor served the university with a lawsuit.
An overwhelming number of the 92 full-time professors at an all-faculty meeting Tuesday voted to adopt a statement asking President Fayneese S. Miller to resign, said Jim Scheibel, president of the Hamline University Faculty Council. Scheibel said turnout at the meeting was strong, with about 70 percent of the university’s 130 full-time professors in attendance.
“We are distressed that members of the administration have mishandled this issue and great harm has been done to the reputation of Minnesota’s oldest university,” the statement reads. “As we no longer have faith in President Miller’s ability to lead the university forward, we call upon her to immediately tender her resignation to the Hamline University Board of Trustees.”
The faculty vote does not bind Miller to any course of action, as only the board of trustees can remove her from her position.
In a Sunday email to faculty from Muslim Student Association members, students expressed disappointment that many professors had stood with López Prater. Since the letter was unsigned “because of concern of retaliations from faculty members or others who don’t support our cause,” it’s not clear how many students endorsed the letter.
“While we have been getting threats and targets on our backs, what hurts the most is knowing our faculty members don’t care much for us,” read the letter. “Additionally, they are willing to go to the extent of going after and blaming President Miller who has been supportive throughout this difficult time….Your silence shows us as students that Hamline is not a place for us, and in your classrooms, we don’t feel safe, welcomed, or belong.”
Although Hamline is a small school, Ubah said, few professors had taken the time to get to know her or understand her religion.
“You have to know who your students are in the class, more than just the name and the pronouns or what their major is,” she said. “Even asking little things like getting to know their religion. That will give you what they value as a person. Then incidents like that wouldn’t even take place, because then you know that a Muslim student values their Prophet so much, you understand that you should not be showing a picture.”
The statement professors adopted Tuesday also expresses support of both students and academic freedom.
“We need to look at how we improve on our teaching and relationships with students of color, particularly the Muslim community,” Scheibel said. “We need to do more; we need to have more exchange; we need to be much more conscious in the classroom, how we are addressing and engaging students of all backgrounds. I also would consider it a call to action to improve.”
Abdi, also 18, described a “sine graph” of emotions (if you haven’t taken a math class recently, that’s effectively a roller coaster). “The whole situation’s just a bit iffy,” he said. “A lot of things could have been done better.” In his view, López Prater “brushed aside” the concerns Wedatalla brought after class, and Hamline took too long to respond.
Edna and Ubah both said the broader public was failing to understand the significance of the Prophet Muhammad and the images to the students. And both pointed to López Prater’s trigger warnings as evidence that she knew she should not be showing the images.
“The Prophet is someone that’s very sacred to us,” Ubah said. “That picture itself isn’t going to justify who he was as a person and how loved he is in the community.”
“The term freedom does not mean that you can overstep boundaries and harm others,” added Entisar, a junior studying business analytics.
Ubah said that the Hamline administration had been consistently supportive of Muslim students, checking in throughout the crisis to make sure students were healthy and safe. “They’ve been reaching out one too many times actually,” she said with a laugh. She appreciated Miller’s support, she said, but feared that some faculty saw this controversy as an opportunity to push her out. That, she said, would be the “worst-case scenario.”
“It leaves people that look like us vulnerable,” she said.
“I think they’re doing the best that they can to ensure student safety is in place for everyone,” Ubah explained.
Ubah had not yet been to her first class of the semester, she said. But she was worried that her classmates and professors might have formed rigid opinions through media coverage. And she was worried about her own response. “How fully am I really going to be participating in my classes without having to feel like someone is going to look at me in a certain way or perceive me in a certain way?” she asked.
Entisar was mostly focused on her new classes, she said. But she reflected that the incident had made her less willing to reach out to professors. Some had made it clear they stood with López Prater and, in Entisar’s view, “this Islamophobic incident.”
“One of them happened to be a professor I had last semester,” she said.“So that didn’t feel great.”
So what should Hamline do now?
“Get to know the populations that they do bring in here,” Ubah said. “I feel like that can teach them a lot.”
“And listen to the students,” Entisar added.
The support Muslim students need now is simple, Ubah said. Professors and students should “go to your fellow Muslim student that you have in your class, ask them questions.” Ubah believes that “there is no stupid question,” as long as people ask with respect and curiosity.
“‘Why do you wear a hijab?’ or ‘Why are you Muslim?’ I know that there are people who ask those questions, but I can give you an answer,” she said. “You have to be willing to learn.”