The New School For Religious Suppression

On the first day of my class “Women and Gender in Islam,” a student sitting by the window raised his hand and, without waiting to be called on, interrupted the professor.

“I’m here to find out whether or not Islam promotes murder,” he said.Silence.

Finally, the professor responded.

“Well, that’s definitely something we’ll be talking about later in the semester,” she said, trying to move on.

But without missing a beat, he continued.

“Because I know that Mohammed murdered a whole lot of people, and I thought that was probably why 9/11 happened. It seems like a religion based on violence.”

And he continued, and continued, and continued. The rest of us watched in horror as he dominated the class for two entire weeks with remarks like, “Any woman who wears a veil over her face is weak,” or “Islamic men are all misogynists.” After the first few minutes of each class, he would begin lecturing us on why “religion is the root of all evil.” It was nearly impossible for anyone else to get a word in edgewise. This wasn’t a discussion, nor an analysis — it was pure rant.

Perhaps if the teacher had been a little more commanding, or perhaps if the rest of us had been a little more argumentative, this student would not have been able to control the conversation like he did. As it happened, he dropped the class after two weeks, for which we were all relieved. But the damage had already been done: Three people in the class were Muslim and had been subjected to hours of bigotry. They had sat silently and respectfully in their seats while this boy smiled and called them murderers, misogynist and backwards. I’m actually surprised they didn’t drop the class first.

Had that boy been espousing anti-gay, anti-black or anti-woman arguments, he would have been shot down in a moment, perhaps even reprimanded or kicked out of the class. But instead he was popping off about religion, and that, for whatever reason, was tolerable. Perhaps he called himself a free-thinker or an atheist, but he sounded a hell of a lot like a bigot.

This anecdote is not just a complaint about a poorly managed classroom or about the occasional vehement atheist. It speaks to a larger truth: An aversion to religion that, as a religious studies major, I have seen trending at our school. At Eugene Lang, religious students are forced to live in the religious closet. Although they peek out occasionally, fessing up to their beliefs in a few classes, they live under the constant threat of being otherized at best, condemned at worst.

Granted, we are a school of progressive thought: we tend towards deconstructionism, we hate patriarchal histories, and we hiss at heteronormativity. These are wonderful and necessary things, things that make The New School different from other universities. We should be questioning Judeo-Christian centered world-views, and we really should be asking why Islam is so often portrayed as violent. Identifying religious histories of oppression and prejudice is necessary. These are the threads of thought that make The New School experience so valuable: We analyze society and raise questions about it, we train thinkers and produce ideas that push boundaries, always looking a little closer at our culture. Which is why a classroom setting where someone is made to feel bad about their beliefs, their family histories, or their upbringing is antithetical to the project of The New School itself.

Plenty of New School students would say that they are opposed to racial, ethnic or gender stereotypes, and yet many of these same students hold unfair prejudices about religion. Equal treatment of queer people, minorities and women should extend to religious people, too. We have trouble grappling with the dress and behavior restrictions of certain orthodox religious people — restrictions that we deem conservative, that we see as opposed to the ideas of free will, self-expression, individuality, personhood, liberty. We don’t try to understand them; we simply assume that all religious people threaten these ideas.

But grouping the experience of all religious people into highly visible but highly limited categories is nothing more than the stereotyping and the bigotry that we hate so much. The leaders of Wahabi Islamic societies have said and done awful things, just like the leaders of many Christian communities here in the US, and Jewish leaders in Israel. We have to remember that these people don’t speak for everyone — that the girl in your politics class or the boy in your Spanish class don’t automatically agree with these leaders, even if they do practice the same religion.

The University in Exile once harbored and employed Jewish refugees of World War II, something which few students seem to know or care about today. “Why the hell do we have a Jewish studies program? That’s so weird,” I’ve heard students say. We act as though religious behavior is not a normal and valued part of our culture, but an undesirable blemish; not a serious and special part of many people’s lives, but illogical or infantile. I see it as an important part of a person’s worldview which, more often than not, enhances any discussion rather than detracting from it, adding complexity rather than dumbing it down with conservatism or single-mindedness.

Regardless of our personal beliefs, we need to understand and respect religion as an important part of our history and culture — as an important part of The New School’s own history and culture. The continuing conversation at The New School about cultural studies, women’s studies, queer studies and race should be an inclusive and pluralistic one, in which nobody feels the need to hide their beliefs or backgrounds. We must work to keep The New School a constructive space, full of diverse and unique people, where every student is comfortable expressing who they are without fear of ridicule or bigotry.