Last Thursday, Duke University regrettably reversed its decision to allow members of its Muslim Student Association to chant the adhan, Islam’s call-to-prayer, from the university’s monolithic chapel bell tower every Friday.
Duke should have celebrated and took pride in its forward-thinking policy to allow Muslim prayers within their chapel, which has historical ties to its Methodist origins. But the decision attracted dismay and censure on social media. Franklin Graham, the outspoken president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, castigated Duke for “promoting” the Muslim faith while “followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law.” He also told donors to suspend their support unless the university changed its mind. Ultimately, Duke’s administration did change its mind, citing external threats of violence they had received in response to their initial decision.
Tragic incidents on American college campuses in the past have told us that the physical safety of students is, without a doubt, the primary concern of any academic institution. By that calculus, Duke’s reversal was the right call.
The problem, however, is that the university surrendered to supposed defenders of religious faith and their unscrupulous bullying tactics. Responses like Graham’s actually embody the very lack of tolerance, understanding, and interreligious dialogue they indiscriminately attribute to Islam. Graham is not wrong that Christians, particularly in the Middle East, are increasingly the targets of Islamist fundamentalist violence. Nonethless, Islam is a diverse faith that spans the four corners of the globe. Its 1.5 billion followers hail from Indonesia to Uzbekistan, speak dozens of languages, and are born with different ethnic backgrounds. They answer for these atrocities no more than the Catholics answer for the Crusades.
Some may not see the larger significance of Duke’s failure to take a stand against the fallout. After all, the Muslim students’ rights to free expression, including that of religion, remain intact: they will still be permitted to conduct the call-to-prayer on the chapel quadrangle before entering the chapel itself for prayer. But the policy reversal symbolically marginalizes its Muslim students, which, according to The Chronicle, a newspaper at Duke, number just over 700 out of the university’s 15,000-strong undergraduate population.
“Interreligious understanding” is a term we often hear on the Hilltop. We rally around the virtues of dialogue and research on other faiths in our required theology classes, with our residence hall chaplains, and in valuable institutions like the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. What happened last week reminds all of us—not just at Duke, but here at Georgetown as well— that even in the face of toxic adversity and backlash, we cannot waver in our clear-eyed look at religious absolutism.
Born of ignorance, this absolutism exists both as a weapon of jihad and as a trending hashtag—damaging whether spread via social media, threat of violence, or the barrel of a gun. The reversal of Duke’s policy is yet another win for fundamentalism and absolutism over understanding. This is where the real sin lies.
