BU Forum Aims to Combat Anti-Muslim Bigotry

At Monday’s forum, Susannah Heschel (center) argued that BU has an obligation to denounce Islamophobia. Stephen Prothero and Pamela Lightsey were also on the forum panel. Photos by Cydney Scott

After last month’s Paris terrorist massacre, a BU professor’s high school daughter, a Muslim, was approached by another student’s mother. The woman threatened “not only to kill her, but to kill ‘all f—ing Muslims,’” says the professor, who requested anonymity.

Such fear-fueled bigotry “is not an aberration. It is the norm” in American history, Stephen Prothero, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of religion, told more than 100 people at a forum Monday night titled After Paris: Anti-Muslim Backlash, What You Need to Know. The forum addressing the upsurge of Islamophobia came the same day that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States in the wake of the ISIS-inspired murders of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., last week.

Prothero, who has a forthcoming book on the country’s culture wars, cited anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism in the 1800s—both attended by violence—as precedents for the current rage against Islam. Indeed, the first president suspected of being a surreptitious Muslim wasn’t Barack Obama—it was Thomas Jefferson, Prothero said.

There has been no anti-Muslim bigotry reported on BU’s campus, according to forum organizers Jennifer Knust and Kecia Ali. But they came up with the idea for the event, held at the George Sherman Union, to counter virulent Islamophobia off campus. Knust is a School of Theology associate professor of New Testament and Christian origins and a CAS associate professor of religion, and Ali is a CAS associate professor of religion.

Ali, herself a Muslim, gets “a depressing amount of Muslim-bashing email and voice mail from people outside the BU community,” she said. “Much of it is profane, sexist, and truly ugly; with astonishing frequency, my correspondents express the wish that I become an ISIS sex slave.”

Also on the panel, moderated by Kenneth Elmore (SED’87), dean of students, were Pamela Lightsey, STH associate dean for community life and lifelong learning and a clinical assistant professor, and Susannah Heschel, a Dartmouth College professor and chair of Jewish studies, who argued that “religion does not make people psychotic.…We know this. There are chemical issues…” in individuals’ brains.

Prothero took polite exception to that, recalling that he once taught at a southern college about Christian theologians who defended Nazism. His Protestant students insisted that Christianity had nothing to do with Hitler’s ideology, and “I always found that chilling.…I heard that as a refusal of responsibility.” The intention of pointing out perversions of Christianity was well-meaning, he said, but it avoided the necessary question of “what responsibility do you have as a Christian to be careful this doesn’t happen again.”

Lightsey argued that Islamophobia reminded her of the backlash against civil rights for African Americans in the 1960s, exploited by politicians like Richard Nixon. “We’re on the cusp of repeating history with a lot of what you’re hearing in the presidential campaign, much of which is fascist,” she said.

Anti-Muslim sentiment is not just about religion, but it summons “stereotypes largely due to race,” she said, citing a newscast she’d heard in which some American soldiers didn’t speak of Muslims as a religious group, but as “sand n—ers.”

“This is Racism 101 that we’re dealing with here,” Lightsey said. As to solutions, she stressed building relationships with people outside one’s race and religion and participating in protests for equal rights, after informing yourself about the cause and its needs: “Speak up, even if your voice trembles.”

She also said that religious self-critique improved her own tradition (she’s an ordained Methodist elder): “We’ve been critiquing Christianity for quite some time…to the benefit of Christianity.”

Prothero said history suggests that current bigotry “will end as the wars on Catholicism and Mormonism ended,” with most Americans concluding that bigotry is incompatible with the Constitution. “At the heart of modern American conservatism is, in my view, a narrative of loss and restoration. Most of the shots in the Concords and Lexingtons of our cultural wars were fired by those who had the most to lose.”

Yet from the legalization of gay marriage to the election of nontraditional presidents like Kennedy and Obama, liberals win the culture wars “because their opponents attach themselves to lost causes,” he said.

During the question period, one student objected that liberals dismiss any criticism of Islam as bigoted or racist. “The presence of this conversation is a refutation of what you just said,” Prothero responded. “We handed you a mike to say it.”

Amanda Gaber (SED’17) asked the panelists to suggest references that people could consult to counter anti-Islam arguments from Koran-quoting critics. “One source is the Koran,” Prothero replied. “The Koran is not that long. You actually can read it in a weekend.” Heschel added that “scriptural reasoning” groups, where people of diverse faiths jointly read and discuss one another’s sacred texts, are growing in popularity.

After the forum, Gaber said she planned to follow Prothero’s advice. She has family members who often quote the Koran to criticize Islam, and take “everything out of context to sort of promote these anti-Muslim notions and ideologies, which…I totally disagree with.”

She found the forum valuable: “Sometimes it’s hard, when you have your emotions get in the way, to talk about it academically.…I think BU provides a lot of resources to sort of combat those emotional feelings and gives you these academic resources and these great people.”

Knust said the organizers’ goal was to “place anti-Muslim violence and speech undertaken in the name of Paris, an event that shocks us as well, in a much broader context” of American history and religious and racial bigotry. “As a religion department, I think it is our job to help students address what is happening thoughtfully, respectfully, and with the critical social, cultural, and historical tools necessary to address the inflammatory language, stereotyping, and aggressive actions that have been taking place.”