Violent controversy rages in the United States, where a university teacher lost her teaching load after displaying medieval paintings of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class. An act described by the university as “Islamophobia”.
The controversy began last October at Hamline University, located in Minnesota, in the north of the United States. Art history lecturer Erica Lopez-Prater showed one of the world’s earliest illustrations of Islamic history in class. The New York Times. The image showing the Prophet Muhammad is found in a series of chronicles from the fourteenthH The horn was made by Rashid al-Din (1247-1318). Another painting from XVIH A horn showing the veiled prophet was also shown.
Knowledge of the sensitive subject – Islam, in its strict interpretation, prohibits any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad -, MI López-Prater had informed his students in advance, inviting them to leave the room if they preferred not to be exposed to it.
Nobody opposed it. Then, at the end of the course, a female student, the president of the university’s Muslim Students’ Association, told him of her discomfort, before filing a formal complaint.
“I was like, ‘This can’t be true,'” this student V. testifiedinspirationUniversity student newspaper. “As a Muslim and a black person, I do not feel I have a place, nor do I think I will ever find one in this community if its members do not respect me, if they do not show me the same respect that I show them.”
The contract has not been renewed
Erika Lopez-Prater’s course load was not renewed after the controversy, though she apologized.
University President Fiennes Miller said in an email The New York Times.
The university also described the event as “anti-Islamic”.
On January 4, controversy left the institution’s walls to find a national resonance when the civil liberties advocacy organization FIRE filed a complaint with the American Council on Higher Education.
“If a professor of art history cannot show university students a work of art that is vital for fear that the offended student or group may cause him to be expelled, there is no guarantee of freedom of education in this institution and no obligation to higher education,” part of the Alliance League reacted. Academic Freedom in a letter to the university calling for the immediate reinstatement of Erika Lopez-Prater.
Petition on the site of change. org in support of the researcher and advocacy for the investigation has collected more than 7,600 signatures since December 24.
A taboo that has not always existed
The controversy is reminiscent of the case of Professor Veruschka Duvall’s lieutenant at the University of Ottawa, in October 2020. This teacher was also suspended after he uttered the N-word in front of a class of feminist art, sparking a pan-Canadian discussion about academic freedom.
“The peculiarity with regard to the Ottawa case is that there is a religious dimension,” confirms Rashad Antonius, a sociologist specializing in Arab-Muslim societies at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM).
People who act in relation to their religion, for them, it is absolute, it is God. It makes their position non-negotiable.
Rashad Antonios, a sociologist specializing in Arab-Muslim societies at UQAM
In his view, the position of the student who filed the complaint echoes a more “conservative” and “alt-right” ideology of Islam – or Wahhabism – that has been very present in the Muslim world for fifty years. Mr. Anthony explains: “One aspect of this ideology is that we absolutely must not make a picture or sculpture of the Prophet, because it is idolatry. And that this belief should not be openly contradicted.”
However, the fact that the paintings of the Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace, have existed since the Middle Ages indicates that taboos were not always present in this way, as confirmed by the specialist, who co-published a new work in January entitled Islam and Islamism in the West.
A vision shared by Muriel Gomez Pérez, historian and specialist in the Islamic world at Laval University. These incidents indicate a lack of knowledge of the history of Islamic arts and the emergence and influence of Wahhabism since the nineteenth century.H century and even more during the XXH century,” she said via email.
Representation of the Prophet appears especially in Mughal and Ottoman art, from the mid-13th centuryH The century, from Andalusia to Persia, between the Elkanidids and the Mongols and between the Ottomans.
Muriel Gomez-Perez, historian and specialist in the Islamic world at Laval University
The problem, according to Antonius, is that followers of Wahhabi ideology not only want to impose this standard on themselves, but also on others. “This is why the university’s reaction is shameful,” he asserts.
With Agence France-Presse
Painful echo in France
In France, a history and geography teacher was stabbed and then beheaded near his college in 2020 by a radicalized 18-year-old who accused him of showing caricatures of Muhammad in class.
An already weakened country since the beginning of the decade has been rattled by a wave of jihadist attacks, and has revived spirited debates about freedom of expression, religion, secularism, and the right to blasphemy.