I am deeply disappointed in Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies for hosting a screening of the film The Ground Zero Mosque today, with public appearances by two of the film’s participants, Mr. Robert Spencer and Ms. Pamela Geller.
Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller, along with an organization they both operate called “Stop Islamization of America,” traffic in (and profit from) hateful and often factually incorrect or deeply misleading characterizations of Muslims and Muslim societies.
It engages in systematic efforts to misinform the American public about issues pertaining to American citizens who follow Islam. Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller have every right to speak about this issue in any forum that will host them, but our community is under no obligation to invite them, and I urge members of our Ohio University community to choose not to participate in this event.
While I am not an expert on the subject of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” I am an expert on politics in the Muslim world and on Islamic law (sharia).
The positions adopted by Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller with respect to, among other things, the political beliefs and motives of ordinary Muslims in the U.S. and abroad and the internal threat to U.S. security and society posed by sharia, are not only not grounded in systematic evidence but, in their (explicitly stated) implications for U.S. domestic policy, violate the spirit of more than 200 years of religious freedom and tolerance in this country.
This nation has always led by example when it has come to the relationship between state and religion and has offered a degree of religious freedom unknown even in the democracies of Western Europe. With their intolerance, Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller would undo that legacy.
I have conducted scholarly research in Muslim-majority societies for my entire professional career, and my findings, based in the careful analysis of primary sources, participant-observation and fieldwork, and conversations and interviews with hundreds of ordinary Muslims, tell a story that systematically contradicts the portrayals of these societies offered by Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller.
I (and many similarly credentialed American scholars) consistently find that ordinary Muslims support (and, as the events of 2011 make clear, demand) democracy and desire many of the same sorts of freedoms and liberties that characterize life in the United States.
American Muslims in particular are often “model citizens,” participating in civic and political life at a higher rate than other citizens, and engaging in efforts to create a sense of community and provide assistance to the less fortunate in ways that foster what political scientists call “social capital.”
Islam, as a world religion with a billion adherents worldwide, simply cannot be reduced, as Ms. Geller and Mr. Spencer so frequently do, to the words of a small number of radicals and decontextualized quotations from scripture — a practice that, as many know, does not treat Christianity kindly, either.
Again, Mr. Spencer and Ms. Geller have every right to speak their minds on these issues, but I urge members of our university community to seek out better, more informed and less bigoted sources of information. I believe that their appearance on our campus represents a decrease in our communal level of civility and tolerance, and I would urge the School of Media Arts and Studies to reconsider before again affiliating itself with individuals like these.
Brandon Kendhammer is an assistant professor of political science.
