It may be a sign of a weak America, but it does need to be said. Talk radio is ablaze (is it ever not ablaze?) on this issue, with people knocking each other over to knock reading the Koran. The NEA episode this week is a case in point (http://www.nea.org/nr/nr020819.html).

I don't agree with Friedman. No, not about whether or not it's right to assign students readings on Islam. My undergrad polisci prof made us read selections from Mein Kampf. (And a selection from Das Kapital, along with some other European and Asian revolutionaries, mostly leftists, many communists. I should note for accuracy's sake that my polisci prof was the only African American I have ever met who was a registered Republican, or at least who would admit to it.) Last I checked, radical Islam still hasn't killed as many Americans as WWII. At any rate, if you're not grown up enough to bring critical skills to reading, you don't belong in college. (Another good reason not to encourage more people to go to college.)

No, where I disagree is Friedman's belief that this silliness "exhibits such profound lack of understanding of what America is about." Recent press coverage of the Texas school book review process - much of it in the New York Times - along with the recent attacks on the NEA by George Will and some obscure hack at the Washington TImes (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55511-2002Aug23.html and http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020819-34549100.htm along with discussion at http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082602.shtml) leads me to think that the kind of behaviour Friedman so rightly decries is still pretty normal in America. It certainly has been in my experience. I'm afraid this is all too much what American is about. When I was in the 8th grade, the local chapter of the Moral Majority had a teacher canned for assigning "Of Mice and Men." My freshman biology prof spent his first lecture explaining why he was going to teach evolution so that the more religious students could make their fuss before the class got underway. I don't know how many times I've been told America's colleges are full of Marxists. Five different American colleges and I have yet to meet one Marxist on staff, including my Chinese teacher who was at the time a member of the Chinese Communist Party. I've never attended an American college that required more than the most superficial overview of foreign literature or philosophy, and very little of that outside of the western tradition. I have, however, had to take a class where Ayn Rand was taken seriously, and several classes on topics in Christianity.

American political life, for at least the last 20 years, has been about disinformation campaigns telling people what they ought to think and making it sound like the only thing good, decent people could ever think. The most effective way to accomplish this is by discouraging them from ever encountering alternative ideas. I only know it's been going on for the last 20 years because that's how far back I can remember. The red hunts of the 50's and the 20's, some reading of the literature on racial issues in the US, even old rhetoric from the Civil War - all of it leads me to think the urge to prevent people from informing themselves has always been a part of American life and has always been a key factor in its history.

One of the first things I came to realize after the first few months in spent living in this country, is that there is no such thing as a typical American or as standard America.

There is a mainstream mediatized iconized American archetype but it's relevant to very few real Americans, at least here in the Bay Area (this is a little less true since 9/11). But of course, the SF Bay Area is certaintly not representative of the US. But neither is Huston...

It soon appeared to me that the problem for this big country is how to maintain peace and harmony while making so many different people coexist together. This is one of the main root of this mainstream ideology Scott Martens is aluding to.

There used to be a time when high school education was available in several different (at least European) languages, for example. This was mostly abolished in the name of the creation of a homogenous American. I remember a movie clip showing US kids joyously burning instruction books in German. There were roads where only Italian or Chinese were spoken, etc. And 'prejudice' was so common is was not even part of the vocabulary...

Similarly, the mantra that says "no risk, no reward - self made man - all winners have tried their luck" is used to prevent a fracture along the racial & income classes line. "Fighting for freedom" was long used to soothe the same nerves during times of war, until people like Muhamad Ali et alias began to think that trick had been overused...

A lot of American culture, when you think about it, revolves around finding a common ground among Americans, sometimes at the cost of intellectual freedom. So W and his team knew where they were hitting when they proclaimed "United We Stand!". Because surely no American would like a civil fracture to follow a foreign attack.

However justified the original concern for unity be, it seems to inexorably lead to restrictions on freedom of speech (and, hence, thinking), by people who don't have those values high on their agenda for America to begin with...

Hey, dude... You're a Belgian studying at Berkeley, right? I've been living in Mountain View since - it seems like - the last Ice Age and I've moved to Belgium to study at the KU Leuven. Hmm... Okay, you got the better weather, but I definitely have the better beer. :^)

No, there is no typical American. There are countless millions of Americans who no doubt loath censorship in all its forms. Stil, I think censorship - especially the more implicit kind being discussed here: telling teachers what they can assign - is more common in the US than in, say, Belgium.

I had not thought to connect my argument to cultural homogenization in the US, but it's a good argument and I'll have to use someday. No, the Bay Area is not like the rest of the US. However, even in California, people are not nearly so exposed to foreign culture as the extraordinary variety of ethnic restaurants would lead you to believe. Having a Mexican cook your food does not mean you have been exposed to Mexican culture.

But you're right, except for the language thing, Belgium is remarkably homogenous compared to California. This is perhaps why there don't seem to be culture wars here like there are in the States. There's less at risk. For American cultural partisans there is the palpable sense that they might loose and that America could become unrecognisable to them. It has happened before, for example, in the aftermath of the Civil War and following the civli rights movement and the sexual revolution. Belgians don't seem to feel that, not even in the places with large immigrant populations. There just isn't the sense that whoever they are is under threat.

Of course Tom Friedman is right to uphold freedom of inquiry, but he misses what is wrongheaded in the University of North Carolina’s assignment of readings from the Quran.

What UNC did exemplifies four regrettable trends in contemporary liberalism. The first is the naïve notion that it is the failure of cultures to “understand” each other which is at the root of international conflict. The second is the equally naïve belief that it is easy to attain significant understanding of another culture. The third is to believe that if we do something provocative and rile up the local rednecks, we are ipso facto making a contribution to freedom of inquiry. The last and worst is the knee jerk guilt response: if they attacked us, it must be our fault, and we must do penance quickly so that they won’t be angry at us anymore.

Rather than presenting a smiley face Cliff Notes version of the Quran to freshmen, the universities should concentrate on teaching the basic principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, classical liberal theory 101. A good approach might be to have the students explore the concept of tolerance. How far does tolerance extend, and what should it do when it encounters intolerance?

Joe, we're talking about a university, not a marine academy...

I haven't followed this story, but I have a few questions:
1. Did the UNC kids have the option not to read this book about the Koran?
2. If the answer to question 1 is no, when the kids were making the decision to matriculate did they know about this assignment?
3. Tolerance of Islam should be mandatory. But is it really necessary to read a book about the Koran to learn tolerance of Islam?
4. If the answers to 1 and 2 are no, why not just let the people choose for themselves? After all Tom Friedman did say that the majority of amazon.com bestsellers were related to Islam -- and we can probably assume that it was the buyer's choice in most cases.

Here is the fruit of my web research:

Students will meet in small classes to discuss the book after arriving on campus in the fall. The class is required by the university, but students are not punished for not reading the book because no grade is given based on the reading.

Joe - can you offer some support for your claims? All I've heard about this is that the UNC assigned some readings from the Quran. I never heard about them committing any of your 4 "liberal" sins.

Nick, first let me ask you two questions. Why did you think that UNC assigned readings from the beginning of the Quran as required reading? Do you think that they should do so, and if so why?

Joe, if I might interject: the question "Why teach ______?" can always be posed, whether _______ is the laws of supply and demand or the plays of Shakespeare, and the answer will obviously depend on what you expect a college education to accomplish. But if the text held sacred by a very large proportion of the world's population isn't a legitimate topic of instruction, what is?

So if the question is, abstractly, "Should the Quran should be taught," my answer is "of course!" If the question is "should the UNC teach it, using these texts," that depends. If it's being taught by knowledgable people, yes; if it's being taught by an emergency draft of TAs, then the students would probably be better off without it.

Well, at this point it looks like militant Islamism will play a significant role in world affairs in the coming years. Thus understanding Islam will facilitate understanding of world affairs and of the proper shape of US foreign policy. These sound like good things to me.

Is this why UNC assigned it? I dunno. Here's what their webpage has to say about it:

Approaching the Qur'án: The Early Revelations, translated and introduced by Michael Sells, consists of thirty-five suras, or short passages from the chief holy book of Islam, that largely focus on the experience of the divine in the natural world and the principle of moral accountability in human life. Easily accessible to any college-level reader, these suras are poetic and intensely evocative, beautiful meditations, comparable in many ways to the Psalms of David and other classics of world literature.

...

Westerners for centuries have been alternately puzzled, attracted, concerned, and curious about the great religious traditions of Islam. These feelings have been especially intense since the tragic events of September 11. Approaching the Qur'án is not a political document in any sense, and its evocation of moral "reckoning" raises questions that will be timely for college students and reflective adults under any circumstances.

So we have two parts here. The first part is certainly something I've heard before. The second basically says, "And it's something you might be especially interested in, you know, these days." Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Sure, everybody should read the Quran. But why just the "early revelations" (which is the subject of Michael Sells' book assigned at UNC)? The Quran is divided into early and late suras, the Meccan and Medinan suras. The tolerant, pacifist stuff is almost exclusively in the early suras. By contrast, the later suras contains plenty of intolerant, beligerant and inflammtory statements, such as "when you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads," etc. . Some people have explained the difference by pointing out that the Meccan Muhammad was politically and militarily weak and needed to cooperate with "infidels", but by the time he was in Medina he had gained political and military power and was ready to start his fully-fledged theocracy, which inspires current Islamists. Most Muslim theologians, when faced with contradictory statements from the Quran, have traditionally followed the standard legal practice of giving supremacy to the newer statements (Medinan) over the older ones (Meccan). To assign a book that is ONLY about Meccan suras gives undergraduates a misleadingly benevolent view of Islam. Was that unintentional? Sure, Americans should read the Quran, but the WHOLE thing.

Sure, everybody should read the Quran. But why just the "early revelations" (which is the subject of Michael Sells' book assigned at UNC)? The Quran is divided into early and late suras, the Meccan and Medinan suras. The tolerant, pacifist stuff is almost exclusively in the early suras. By contrast, the later suras contains plenty of intolerant, beligerant and inflammtory statements, such as "when you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads," etc. . Some people have explained the difference by pointing out that the Meccan Muhammad was politically and militarily weak and needed to cooperate with "infidels", but by the time he was in Medina he had gained political and military power and was ready to start his fully-fledged theocracy, which inspires current Islamists. Most Muslim theologians, when faced with contradictory statements from the Quran, have traditionally followed the standard legal practice of giving supremacy to the newer statements (Medinan) over the older ones (Meccan). To assign a book that is ONLY about Meccan suras gives undergraduates a misleadingly benevolent view of Islam. Was that unintentional? Sure, Americans should read the Quran, but the WHOLE thing.

Sure, everybody should read the Quran. But why just the "early revelations" (which is the subject of Michael Sells' book assigned at UNC)? The Quran is divided into early and late suras, the Meccan and Medinan suras. The tolerant, pacifist stuff is almost exclusively in the early suras. By contrast, the later suras contains plenty of intolerant, beligerant and inflammtory statements, such as "when you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads," etc. . Some people have explained the difference by pointing out that the Meccan Muhammad was politically and militarily weak and needed to cooperate with "infidels", but by the time he was in Medina he had gained political and military power and was ready to start his fully-fledged theocracy, which inspires current Islamists. Most Muslim theologians, when faced with contradictory statements from the Quran, have traditionally followed the standard legal practice of giving supremacy to the newer statements (Medinan) over the older ones (Meccan). To assign a book that is ONLY about Meccan suras gives undergraduates a misleadingly benevolent view of Islam. Was that unintentional? Sure, Americans should read the Quran, but the WHOLE thing.

"To assign a book that is ONLY about Meccan suras gives undergraduates a misleadingly benevolent view of Islam. Was that unintentional? Sure, Americans should read the Quran, but the WHOLE thing." -- Lapo

But reading the entire Quran could just as easily offer a misleading view of Islam as it is practiced today (which is presumably the major point of the exercise). An 18-year-old in Karachi who thought he could learn much about American Christianity simply by reading the King James Bible would be deluding himself. The books, chapters and verses all have accumulated so much historical baggage in the way of scholarly interpretation, cultural warfare, etc., etc. that he would have no hope of deducing from a reading of the original text how American Christians -- even fundamentalist American Christians -- think about that text. I'm sure the same is true of the 18-year-old in N.C. and the Quran. A good instructor with a partial selection of a text can still convey a fair account., and an ignorant instructor plus a complete text is still a recipe for ignorance.

" But if the text held sacred by a very large proportion of the world's population isn't a legitimate topic of instruction, what is? "

Does UNC require all students to read the Bible?

As to Jeffrey Kramer's odd:

" But reading the entire Quran could just as easily offer a misleading view of Islam as it is practiced today "

Would reading only the Old Testament not give a less complete picture of Christianity than one would get from reading both Old and New Testaments?

If there is a book of readings from the Qur'an it should contain some of the passages about holy war, smiting the unbelievers, etc. The commentary could point out that there is a debate going on among Muslims about how to interpret those passages, a debate in which the armed forces of the United States are playing a considerable role.

I meant for my name to be on that last post.

I enjoyed and essentially agree with the long post at the top by Scott Martens. That's a reflection of my experience in college as well.

One of the objections to Chapel Hill's reading list that I've heard (at least on the O'Reilly show, which has covered this extensively) is that if there was a requirement to read the New Testament liberals would be up in arms. What of that? I think most of my appreciation for the Bible comes from religious studies courses while an undergraduate. Of course, that was 30 years ago. Are the testaments now forbidden in college courses?

O'Reilly's other argument is along the lines of "I don't need to read the Koran to know the terrorists are evil; I wouldn't need to read Mein Kampf to know Hitler was evil." Apart from the arrogance of that position, isn't that simply saying that ignorance is bliss? If there's one belief a liberal arts education imparts, it's that learning, study and knowledge are good things. Isn't that all that UNC is trying to do?

The University should sponsor a series of lectures on Islam with, say, half a dozen speakers of varying points of view. Attendance at the lectures should be voluntary, but I'd wager the hall would be full to everflowing.

The speakers should include the great historian of Islamic civilization, Bernard Lewis.

I agree with Patrick Sullivan that Jeffrey Kremer's observation is somewhat odd. Let me rephrase my point with a statistical metaphor. Say you have an urn (the Quran) with 40 white balls and 60 red balls. A sample with 25 white balls is NOT representative, and gives a biased view of the Quran. That seems pretty clear. Now, Kremer would add: but Islamic civilization really includes one MILLION balls, and knowing the color distribution of the 100 Quran balls may lead to a misleading estimate of the composition of all those other balls. For example, if I KNOW that 999,000 of those balls are really white while only 1000 are red, knowing only the 25-white-balls sample may give me a BETTER idea about the very big urn than knowing the WHOLE original Quran urn. However, if I do not KNOW the exact composition of the million-balls urn, but know that 1) there must be some correlation between the small Quran urn and the big Islamic urn, and 2) Muslim theologians historically have given MORE weight to the 60 red balls than to the 40 white balls, I might find hard to believe, ex ante, that most of the million balls are indeed white. This becomes even more true if I have been hit with a few red balls myself in the past year or so. In fact, there seem to be a nontrivial amount of red balls in current interpretations of Islam. How many is an interseting empirical question, that should be addressed by obtaining unbaised samples of the LARGER urn, and cannot be settled by providing biased sampels of the smaller urn. In any case, the main purpose of reading the Quran is NOT to get an unbaised view of the following 1300 years of Islamic civilization (a much more difficult task), but to get to know the original TEXT. In fact, Islamist "fundamentalists" a la Bin Laden do say that they do not care about "corrupt" mainstream Islamic "interpretations". Like all fundamentalists, they want to go back to the original "sources" (the 100 original balls). So, they claim that their all-red-ball version of Islam is closer to the Quran than the (supposedly mainly white) mainstream version. This is a claim that UNC students - exposed to lily-white-ball Quran - will find incomprehensible. In fact, UNC students will probably conclude that Islamist fundamentalists are just illiterate fools who do not know what they are talking about, and will therefore underestimate the fundamentalists' potential appeal among large Muslim communities. Unfortunately, Islamist fundamentalist may well be fools, but they DO KNOW the WHOLE Quran (many of them know little else), and so do most other Muslims. The bottom line is that American students (and Americans in general) should be treated as adults. They should be shown both the the "good" parts and the "bad" parts of the Quran, and made aware that the big one-million-balls urn contains many, many good white balls but also a fair amount of red balls.

>>Does UNC require all students to read the Bible?<<

I don't know. If it has a required course in Western Civilization, and if that course has a typical reading list, then students will read large portions of Genesis, Exodus (at least the Ten Commandments story), some of the Gospels and some of St. Paul. But the question seems to assume a symmetry which doesn't exist; the great majority of Americans already have read (at least part of) the Bible before entering college, but only a small minority has read (even part of) the Quran.

Regarding selection bias in reading, I may have phrased things oddly (it certainly wouldn't be the first time) but the point I was trying to make is really pretty commonplace: education depends on having good teachers, not just having complete texts. All things being equal, it is certainly better to read the whole Quran than it is to read a biased selection. The obvious problem is that all things aren't equal, since the whole Quran would take an entire semester (at least).

Then there is the problem of bias. If you have limited time, you must make a selection, and that selection will always be biased. "The Quran as Literature" requires one selection, "The Quran as Historical Document" requires another, and "The Quran as Sacred Book of Al Quaeda" requires a third. Obviously if you are claiming to be teaching Courses Two or Three, you can't honestly avoid the passages which issue calls to conquest and woe to the unbeliever. One problem may be that UNC is trying to fudge the issue of which course it is teaching. From my (limited) browsing it seems to me that UNC is basically saying that it is teaching Course One, in which case the bias may be (for all I know) entirely correct, like teaching Genesis and not Joshua in a "Bible-as-Literature" course. But UNC then muddies the waters by simultaneously advertising this as a course which is of crucial relevance given current events (which at least implies that it is teaching Course Two or Course Three).

Lapo Corsi's analogy is fine, but notice an assumption which surfaces in the way he develops it: "[I know that] Muslim theologians historically have given MORE weight to the 60 red [call to conquest] balls than to the 40 white [innocuous] balls." That’s more than I know, both WRT the proportion of red to white in the Quran and the historical tendencies of Muslim theology, but then I’m essentially ignorant on both topics. Still, I imagine Lapo’s conclusions here would also be assumed by most (maybe close to all) entering UNC. In other words, everybody knows that there are Muslims who cite the “hard” passages to support war or terrorism, and even if UNC had a master-plan to inculcate cultural relativism, they are surely not so mad as to think a one-week exposure to the “soft” passages could erase that knowledge. And every student with any common sense knows that selections are inherently… well, selective. So Lapo’s fear that “UNC students - exposed to lily-white-ball Quran - will find [Al-Quaeda’s claims to be justified by the Quran] incomprehensible” seems to me to wildly underestimate both the memory and the common sense capacities of those students.

I would certainly subscribe to Joe Willingham's suggestion for a lecture series.

A problem with teaching or lecturing on Islam is that the once great Islamic civilization has been in a pretty steady decline for the last few hundred years. Any course or lecture which deals candidly with that fact is likely to hurt some people's feelings. Fearing trouble, and eager to show "sensitivity" and deplay their allegiance to "multiculturalism", university officials are likely to insist that political correctness take precedence over historical accuracy.

It's worth noting that religions themselves, not just secular teachers, are strongly selective about their sacred texts.

Orthodox Jews read the Torah integrally in worship every year and start again at the beginning; but select in the rest of the Tanakh, the Christian Old Testament. Christian churches roughly speaking have replaced the Torah with the similar-sized New Teatament, except for the strange and embarrassing Book of Revelations. In the lectionary they pick and choose in the Tanakh - Joshua and the technical bits of the three legal books of the Torah are more or less dropped.

Jack Miles' splendid "God: a Biography" includes a fascinating paragraph on scrolls and codices.

To paraphrase: up to about 100 CE, a book was a scroll, and finding a citation involved unrolling, as in an overlong Web page. Scrolls were shelved in pigeoholes, in no particular order. The codex or edge-bound book changed this. The rather scruffy Christians were early adopters of the new technology, and may even have invented it. Codices reduced access time to citations - at a time when thi swas the key to argument - by maybe a factor of ten: this gave the Christians m a polemical advantage against their rabbinical and Hellenistic opponents, wedded to inefficient tradition.

(I - not Miles - surmise that the later invention of verse numbering by the printers of Calvinist Bibles also gave Protestants a polemical advantage in reducing acces time to citations, perhaps by another factor of ten.)

Another consequence of the codex revolution was that as the scrolls now became chapters in a linear codex, the order had to be fixed. Jews and Christians fixed their shared packet of scrolls in different orders: the Tanakh goes Torah-Prophets-Histories, the Old Testament Torah-Histories-Prophets: in the former God first speaks directly, then indirectly, then hardly at all; in the latter God speaks directly, then hardly at all, then indirectly - pointing forward to a new revelation.