Fitzgerald: A tribute to Omid Safi

Oh, it's a closed circle of apologists, hiring and promoting each other and keeping out with care and cunning all those who might upset that MESA Nostra applecart.

In such cases, it is up to the Dean and the President to keep careful watch -- and for other departments, such as that of History, to be careful to mind the who's-teaching-about-Islam store. We can't let this MESA Nostra business continue too much longer; it is now almost impossible to teach, or be taught about, Islam in a sensible no-nonsense fashion, one that Schacht and Snouck Hurgronje and a hundred other great scholars of the past would recognize as the real thing.

So, if you are the kind of alumnus to whose phone calls the Development Office will urge the President to reply, or if you can organize a group of such unhappy alumni, do so. Force these Administrators hiding behind the idea of "faculty autonomy” to get out and get under, get out and get under the scandalous vehicle for misrepresentations of Islam all over academic America. For these misrepresentations prevail all over, not only where Saudi and other Arab money has set up "centers" and endowed well-upholstered chairs -- King Abdul Aziz This, Two Noble Sanctuaries That -- in order to keep young, ignorant, easily impressionable American students still ignorant, and impressed with the Received Version of Islam that the Omid Safis and Carl Ernsts (the man who fell in love with Sufism on his own Spiritual Search) present. They keep out the real version as best they can. And they are well-practiced at this, and have so many willing collaborators.

Omar Safi's schtick is the Nice Guy, the understanding professor, the one who is "genuinely" interested in his students (those innocents can be fooled by so little). But he will not do the one thing students most need: teach them the truth about the subject he purports to be teaching them. This, out of embarrassment, or ignorance, or filial piety, or defensiveness, he cannot do. His Colgate U course on, inter alia, “Islamophobia,” recalled the brainwashing that took place when you were a helpless POW in places like Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution one had to denounce one's own counter-revolutionary sins, don a dunce cap, and be publicly humiliated while expressing public remorse. Now, instead of Mao's Little Red Book, we have the little Blue Books of American exam-taking, in which dutiful, submissive, and grade-fearing students bow their heads, and regurgitate the pap their "professors of Islamic studies" demand of them.

This "professor's" ludicrous course featured some palpable pap about "Islam confronting modernity," with a breathless parroting of fashionable academic terms that carefully avoided the little matter of what Islam is actually all about. Omid Safi has shown himself to be completely uncomprehending of what free, skeptical, and disinterested inquiry can be. His task is to present assorted straw-men, knock them down, and make sure the students, just like those Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, are forced to denounce them (albeit in "papers" and "exams"). And, he devoutly hopes, once programmed they will go out into the world to pooh-pooh all those who have dared to criticize Islam. And students will fear to take issue with the sinisterly amiable lecturer, master of all he surveys, with the all-important power of the grade over his cowed students, and especially over any who dare to dissent.

This is a travesty of learning. This is lecture-hall thought-control. Grades are a way to reward the submissive regurgitators -- verily, Islam means "submission" -- and to punish those guilty of the "thought-crime" of, well, thought. Can the students, the faculty, the administration, the Trustees in Chapel Hill really have welcomed this?