New Students' Convocation Keynote Address
Delivered by Charles Kurzman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a restaurant in Istanbul, Turkey. This restaurant is underneath a bridge, so there's traffic honking over our heads and water practically splashing up on the table. I'm having some beers and fried fish with some young Turks, and we're looking out over the water at these ancient mosques and Ottoman palaces and I'm just shaking my head at how gorgeous the scene is, and it's getting more and more gorgeous as we keep ordering more, you know, fried fish.
And then we hear the call to prayer -- just like Track 1 of that CD we made you buy this summer? Except they use these really crummy P.A. systems, so it sounds like the muezzin is sitting in a tin can -- like high school announcements or something, if you could get the principal to sing them. In Arabic.
And then another loudspeaker starts up from the other side. And then all of a sudden there are maybe 10 loudspeakers going, all at the same time, and not in unison. They're each taking their own time about it, everybody in their own key. I mean, it's cacophony.
It's so disorganized. They can't even agree on a single call to prayer. Every mosque has got to have its own. And then I realized: this is such a great metaphor for "Approaching the Qur'án," the book you were assigned as summer reading.
I hear that this book has been somewhat controversial. I was overseas for most of the summer, but I got some e-mails saying that Carolina was being made fun of in the national media for trying to convert you to Islam, or some such nonsense. I have only one thing to say about that: if we are afraid to study other people's faiths out of fear of losing our own, then maybe our own faith needs to be examined.
Look -- it's a big wide world, and part of our job here at Carolina is to show you some of what's out there. We call it "internationalizing the curriculum." It may sound touchie-feelie or politically correct, but it's not. There are strategic interests behind our efforts at globalized education. As a great man once said: If everybody all around the world were to hold hands, all around the world, then two thirds of them would drown. So I'm against it. Too much hand-holding is not going to get us anywhere. There are real disagreements out there; there are people who hate us, and it's about time we started asking why.
As it happens, the most visible threat to homeland security these days, aside from accountants, seems to come from people who call themselves Muslims -- so it makes sense to find out what Islam is all about. All across the United States, sales of the Qur'án and books about Islam have skyrocketed over the past year as people realize that they know very little about this major world religion. If we were being attacked by Zen Buddhists, then I suppose we'd all be reading, I don't know, a book about yoga or something. But Islam it is, so let's learn something about it.
I have to mention that this kind of curiosity can get you in trouble these days. There are people in this country who confuse "understanding" with "approval." So if you try to understand, for example, why some Muslims object to the U.S. military bases stationed in the monarchy of Saudi Arabia -- then some Americans will automatically assume that you object to these bases too. If you try to understand why a handful of Muslims are angry enough to kill themselves in suicide attacks, then some Americans will accuse you of treason.
I know this because I've received my share of hate mail over the past year. One particularly memorable email told me to go back to Siberia with the Communists, which I thought was pretty funny, since Siberia is where the anti-Communists used to get sent. In any case, it seems to me that sticking our heads in the sand and refusing to learn what the rest of the world thinks is no way to run a world superpower. Ignorance would only doom the U.S. to stumble from crisis to crisis, heavily armed but constantly clueless.
Some people prefer to leave these things to the experts. But we are the experts -- an educated citizenry is the ultimate check and balance on our government. Even in a time of war -- perhaps, especially in a time of war -- we can't absolve ourselves of the responsibility to figure out what is going on in the world.
Now one of the interesting things you find when you start to look around the world is how many people share the ideals that we hold dear. And this is true of Muslims as well as non-Muslims. In Tienanmen Square in China, for example, some of the student leaders who built a statue of liberty and called for freedom and democracy in 1989 were Muslims. In Iran, the Islamic reform movement often cites the philosophical documents of Western liberalism, along with their own Islamic sources. In France, many Muslims are demanding the right to religious liberty that other French people enjoy.
It turns out that when we look at surveys and election results, we find that Muslims around the world by and large prefer democracy, human rights, and non-violence. Radical Islamists rarely get majority support. Let me give some examples: Among Palestinians, support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the radical groups, peaked at 26 percent in the 1980s, then dropped to around 15 percent in the 1990s -- though it may have jumped again during the current crisis. In a Gallup poll of nine Muslim societies at the end of 2001, only 15 percent of respondents said they considered the September 11 attacks to be morally justifiable. That's still millions and millions of people -- but there are millions and millions more who consider these attacks as appalling as we do.
Let's look at elections for a minute. When free or partially free elections are held, the radicals almost never win. In Pakistan, for example, the radical Islamist party has never won more than 10 percent of the vote. Virtually the only majority vote that Islamists have ever received was in Algeria in 1991 -- and that because the Islamist leader repeatedly pledged his commitment to democracy. "We do not monopolize religion," he said during the campaign. "Democracy as we understand it means pluralism, choice, and freedom." These sentiments may have been insincere, but we'll never know, because a secular military regime refused to allow the elected government to take office.
In fact, when given a choice between liberal and radical Islamists, Muslim voters prefer the liberal. In Indonesia in 1999, the liberal Islamic party received 17 percent of the vote; the most radical Islamic party received only 11 percent. In Kuwait, the moderate Islamic slate of candidates won more than twice as many seats as the more hard-line party. The most dramatic example is Iran, which has been the role model for Islamists for two decades. Since the liberal reform movement was allowed to run for office a few years ago, it has swept every possible election in Iran: the presidency in 1997, city councils the next year, parliament the next year, and the presidency again in 2001. These reformists still have to contend with the un-elected branches of government, but their popularity is clearly far greater than the radicals.
This is not to say that all Muslims, all over the world, want to be just like "us." Even liberal Muslims often want to maintain their own cultures, their own priorities, their own specifically Islamic justifications for liberalism. And then there are radicals of various stripes, who may be a minority but who still have enough wherewithal to make a disproportionately large impact. The United States suffered this impact last September -- but many Muslim societies have been feeling this impact for years. In fact, the number one target for the radicals is not the U.S. of A., but Muslims in their own countries who refuse to go along with their plans. In Egypt, the radicals have harassed and killed more Egyptians than foreigners; in Algeria, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, and all the other hot-spots of Islamist activism, radicals have targeted moderate Muslims for assassination.
My point here is that Muslims themselves disagree, sometimes violently, about what their religion demands. Of course, the same is true of Christians and others as well. Some say democracy, while others say theocracy. Some say war, while others say peace. And all sides of the Islamic debate quote the Qur'án to show why they are right, and the other folks are wrong.
Almost all religions that place their faith in divine revelation face the same dilemma: what do you do when the revelation stops? Then it's just us mortals trying to figure out what the revelation really meant. And mortals inevitably argue and disagree. In my courses on the sociology of the Islamic world, I ask students not to use the phrase, "Islam says...," as in, for example, "Islam says that Muslims have to live under Islamic law." Because Islam is a faith, not a person -- it doesn't "say" anything. It's Muslims who say things, and when they say "Islam says..." they are trying to speak for the religion as a whole.
This applies even to the Qur'án itself, which Muslims accept as the exact and precise words of God. The Sells translation that was assigned this summer is particularly honest in pointing out that the Qur'án is a difficult text, that there are parts of it that we don't fully understand, even after 1400 years of scholarly analysis.
And then there are debates about which parts of the text should be privileged over other parts of the text. There is even a small movement in the Sudan that says that these early revelations that Sells translates are the only ones that apply to Muslims today, and that the later verses of the Qur'án applied solely to the particular context of the early Muslim community. This movement in the Sudan also believes in democracy, human rights, and gender equality -- but the government of the Sudan considered the movement and its interpretation of the Qur'án to be so threatening that it executed the group's leader in 1985.
This is why approaching the Qur'án is sort of like listening to the call to prayer in Istanbul, or any other Muslim metropolis: there are so many different readings going on all at once, all of them competing with the others to be the best reading they can. And the competition never ends. When an old reader dies, there are always new readers. And all of them have to improve their reading, constantly, in order to stay compelling.
And if you think about it, isn't this really an analogy for our university's mission as well? We too are reading in order to
understand what we consider to be right and good. We too have to constantly improve our reading, because we too face
competition from a cacophony of other readings. You've gotten a taste of this cacophony already, I'll bet, in the debate over
this summer reading assignment. But as you join the Carolina community this week, and as you stay a part of this community
for the rest of your college years and your alumni years, please remember one lesson from all this: Your reading will only
get stronger if you make the effort to listen to other readings as well.
For more information about the Carolina Summer Reading Program, send email to read@unc.edu.
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Last revised: August 23, 2002.