Column: Firing an art history professor for showing students an image of the prophet Muhammad is out of line

An art history class at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., included Islamic artworks from the 14th and 16th century that depicted the prophet Muhammad. David Everett, Hamline’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence, wrote that her lesson was “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.” Another email from the administration said that “respect for observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” In early December, the school also organized a forum about Islamophobia, where a local advocate for Muslim civil rights defended the university’s action, according to the New York Times. PEN America, which supports free expression, accused Hamline of “academic malpractice” and called its treatment of López Prater, who did not respond to my request for comment, “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.” In a statement released Monday, the Muslim Public Affairs Council declared flatly of the 14th century image, “The painting was not Islamophobic.” It went on to point out that López Prater was emphasizing “a key principle of religious literacy: religions are not monolithic in nature, but rather, internally diverse. This principle should be appreciated in order to combat Islamophobia, which is often premised on flattening out Islam.” In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carleton College associate history professor Amna Khalid, who is Muslim, wrote that “barring a professor of art history from showing this painting, lest it harm observant Muslims in class, is just as absurd as asking a biology professor not to teach evolution because it may offend evangelical Protestants in the course.” A leading scholar of Islamic art also took issue with Hamline’s position on showing the work, which depicts Muhammad receiving his first Quranic revelation through the angel Gabriel. “Hamline administrators have labeled this corpus of Islamic depictions of Muhammad, along with their teaching, as hateful, intolerant and Islamophobic,” wrote University of Michigan art history professor Christiane Gruber in New Lines Magazine.