Last week’s column was about something that doesn’t exist — a multilevel strategy to combat the advance of Shariah (Islamic law) across the West.
The strategy doesn’t exist because there’s little understanding that the entrenchment of Shariah in the Western world poses a threat to liberty in the Western world.
This understanding doesn’t exist because the critique of Shariah (a legal system best described as sacralized totalitarianism) required to devise a defensive anti-Shariah strategy is not considered possible.
Why not? The main obstacle is, well, the advance of Shariah across the West. In other words, we cannot criticize the spread of Shariah simply because Shariah’s influence has spread. Thus, the reflex reaction to critical commentary — even a newspaper page of political cartoons — is to follow Islamic law and stop it (or try), or just shut up.
That’s certainly what Yale has done, as events beginning in August demonstrate. That’s when news broke that Yale and its press were omitting the Danish Muhammad cartoons (and other Muhammad imagery) from a forthcoming Yale University Press book expressly about the Danish Muhammad cartoons.
This sudden act of censorship, Yale said, was due to fear of Muslim outrage over the Muhammad cartoons again turning into Muslim violence. (Roger Kimball, Stanley Kramer and I have laid out evidence that Yale’s censorhip was also due to fear of alienating Muslim donors.)
This violence, along with general Muslim outrage, has its roots in Islamic legal prohibitions against life imagery, criticizing Muhammad and sarcasm about Islamic law — all outlawed by the standard Al Azhar University-approved Shariah manual, “Reliance of the Traveller,” but all tools for the political cartoonist moved to comment on the connection between Muhammad and jihad violence. And why not? Indeed, the Islamic-world-renowned Sheik Yussef al-Qaradawi calls Mohammed “an epitome for religious warriors.”
The publication of the Danish cartoons forced the question: What is more important to the West — freedom of speech, or Islamic law masquerading as something Orwellian known as community harmony?
With its censorship of the Muhammad imagery, Yale chose Shariah. But that wasn’t all. Wearing my hat as vice president of the International Free Press Society, I asked Yale’s Steven Smith, master of Branford College, one of Yale’s 12 residential colleges, if he would host Kurt Westergaard, the most famous of the Danish cartoonists, at a “master’s tea” for students.
The IFPS was then finalizing Westergaard’s U.S. tour long planned to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the publication of the cartoons on Sept. 30. Smith agreed and held the event on Oct. 1. And Yale, it seems, will never be the same.
Even now, institutional consternation at Yale over Westergaard continues. In the pages of the Yale Daily News, ire is directed at Westergaard’s Yale host, Smith, simply for having issued the invitation, as attested by letters from University Chaplain Sharon Kugler and “coordinator of Muslim Life for the University” Omer Bajwa, and even Smith’s fellow Yale masters, Davenport College’s Richard Schottenfeld and Tanina Rostain.
At a panel this week sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office and the Yale Muslim Student Association, several Yale professors discussed “what made the cartoons offensive … and how the West’s response heightened tension.”
The lesson here? Free speech about Islam at Yale is a liability, something to censor, oppose, even remove physically, as symbolized by the administration’s decision to bus students to the edge of campus to attend Westergaard’s talk.
Campus security — bomb-sniffing dogs, two SWAT teams — was so extreme it stood as a reproach to critics of Islam, and perhaps as justification for Yale’s decision to censor the cartoons in the first place.
Having shrouded free speech in the Islamic veil, Yale stands exposed.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
