Fiction Beyond Secularism

5. Reading Islam

chapter 5 Reading Islam In 2002, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was engulfed by a firestorm of controversy for selecting Michael Sells’s Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations as the summer reading text for incoming first-year students. On its “Carolina Summer Reading Program 2002” webpage, specifically citing the tragic events of the previous fall as inspiring its choice, the university explained: 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’an 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. The Carolina Summer Reading program is especially happy to offer a book of enduring interest this year that also offers the Carolina community an appropriate introduction to the literature and culture of a profound moral and spiritual tradition that many of us now wish to learn more about.1 Students were asked to read Sells’s book, compose a one-page response prior to their arrival on campus, and participate in a two-hour seminar 156 ❘ Reading Islam led by faculty and staff during orientation. For a growing number of first-year college students, a discussion of a novel or work of literary nonfiction in a small-group seminar constitutes the first academic experience of their college career; at UNC in 2002, it was an object lesson in academic freedom and the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment.2 Outrage over the assignment was immediate and systematic, catapulting UNC’s summer reading program into national headlines and ultimately the courtroom. While highlighting the surge of interest in Islam after 9/11, the controversy also underscores the incendiary nature of debates about the role of religion in the public sphere and, more specifically, raises questions with far-reaching epistemological and pedagogical implications about what kind of knowledge reading “about the great tradition of Islam,” as UNC put it, might be expected to produce. James Yacovelli, of the Family Policy Network, claimed in a Fox News interview on July 8, 2002, that reading Approaching the Qur’an, which includes annotated translations of thirty-five of the Qur’an’s 114 suras and a compact disc recording of Qur’anic recitation in Arabic , could lead to conversion. Whether in good or bad faith, Yacovelli attributed transformative power to the reading experience: teaching the book, he asserted, was “really a veiled coercion to get students to accept Islam.”3 Alleging infringements on the First Amendment’s protection of free religious exercise and violations of the establishment clause, several incoming freshmen backed by Yacovelli’s socially conservative Christian advocacy group filed a lawsuit to bar the assignment on constitutional grounds. For its part, the university stood by its choice of text and made a principled defense of academic freedom; it also noted that concessions in the assignment specifically allowed students “opposed to reading parts of the Qur’an because to do so is offensive to their own faith” the option of composing a statement on why they elected not to read the book. On August 19, three hours before the orientation sessions were scheduled to begin, the Virginia Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision denying the requested injunction, and students in 160 discussion sections, attended by reporters from the New York Times, CNN, FOX News, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, began their university educations by briefly discussing the thirty-five suras translated and analyzed in Sells’s book. From the standpoint of constitutional law, the legality of UNC’s assignment was hardly in doubt. Since the origin of the field in the late nineteenth century, religious studies programs of various sorts have Reading Islam ❘ 157 become ubiquitous in university education and have avoided serious legal challenges based on First Amendment grounds. The landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Abington v. Schempp drew sharp distinctions between unconstitutional school prayer and desirable academic study of religion; the UNC assignment hews carefully toward the latter. Writing for the majority in Abington, Justice Tom Clark asserts that “one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion ,” adding furthermore that “nothing we have said here indicates that . . . study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular...