Why do I have to be aggravated right before I have to visit a doctor and have my blood pressure checked? In a bout of inexplicable industriousness, I decided to visit the course blog before the appointment. Which is where I discovered that a student had left the following comment:
Today we see Muslims as terrorists, so how come Iberian Muslims were so different?
If there is one thing capable of making me rabidly angry, it’s this. And as if the statement itself weren’t enough to make my BP shoot up, the student just had to use the word “we” in the comment. At least, one could have the consideration of not attributing one’s offensive ideas to others.
This is the same student who has already regaled us all with a story of visiting Mexico that contained the following gem:
I visited Mexico once and what I found really annoying were all those Hispanics begging us for money.
I had to have a personal talk with the student after that statement but I’m seeing now that it had no effect. We are starting to talk about the indigenous civilizations of the Americas today, and I cringe in fear of what we might hear from this student in class discussions.
If you are thinking that this is some ignorant kid, you are wrong. The student is at least my age. And she homeschools her two children. At first, I was very happy to have her as a student because it was as if I were educating 3 people for the price of one. But now I’m afraid of reading the course blog because I never know what she might write there.
Yes, I know it’s my job to educate people. But we are all human and we all have things that are difficult for us to process. For me, “all those annoying Hispanics and terrorist Muslims” are such a thing.
Clarissa's Blog 
You can’t fix stupid and that really takes the cake in that regard!
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Especially given that we have Muslim and Hispanic students in the course who saw these comments.
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I am with you in yout am aggravation
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Thank you.
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Knowing that she is an adherent of home schooling should have alerted you.
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We have all kinds of students but it is the very first time I see this kind of insensitivity. Normally, people at least stop tot hink when they know there are representatives of other ethnic groups in class.
I shared that I’m from Ukraine and can’t wait to see what she will have to say about us. 🙂
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This video is hilarious. Good riddance to a really bad Sarah Palin/Tina Fey wannabe. I’ll stick to Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer if I want to hear a good stand up comedienne. Lol.
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Ah! Thank you for this great news! You totally made my day. This was a good moment for me to find out. 🙂
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The wording is unfortunate but the question is legitimate, how did muslims (in general) go from having an enlightened intellectual tradition to what they have now? Muslim majority countries are increasingly backwards looking and dysfunctional. In the 1950s people laughed at the idea that the muslim brotherhood could revive and expand the silly medieval custom like hijab… (to giive a small trivial example).
My own hint would be that Muslim decline can largely be traced to the rejection of reason and diferent schools of interpretations of the koran in favor of a single flat literal interpretation. Religion and science and advancement aren’t mutually exclusive but literalism in theology is the great mind killer and muslims are actively suffering from it now. A revival of interpretative freedom in Islam could help turn things around in many muslim societies…
That might even make her rethink the idea of biblical literalism (a major tenet of some kinds of American protestantism).
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“My own hint would be that Muslim decline can largely be traced to the rejection of reason and diferent schools of interpretations of the koran in favor of a single flat literal interpretation. ”
– This was actually discussed in the lectures at length. And you are absolutely right, this is what happened in Iberian Spain. The enlightened caliphate became inundated and destroyed by fanatical Berbers who, as newcomers to the faith, practiced a holier-than-thou approach. I showed the pictures of Madinat al Zahra and discussed why it was destroyed and how that was a symbolic event that showed a turn towards a much more fanatical version of Islam, we discussed the contradictory versions of Islam and when they arose. This was all done in class.
This is yet another thing that aggravates me: that people don’t listen to my lectures.
I blogged about this here a while ago: https://clarissasblog.com/2011/03/07/two-trends-in-islam/
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Similarly, the British freaks that killed the soldier in the street and the French freak that attacked a soldier were converts…
“another thing that aggravates me: that people don’t listen to my lectures”
get in line….
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“Similarly, the British freaks that killed the soldier in the street and the French freak that attacked a soldier were converts…”
– Ah! I didn’t know! Very interesting.
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Similarly, the British freaks that killed the soldier in the street and the French freak that attacked a soldier were converts… (Cliff)
Not so much Islamophobia when you see what some Islamists are up to. I think its pretty rational to pay close attention to what some of those crazy fucks are doing 😦
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I hope that you won’t take this as a reproach or as someone coming to your blog and telling you what to do, because that’s not at all my intention. However, I did just want to mention that you are teaching your students an old and outmoded way of understanding those supposedly austere “Berber fanatics.” The Almohads have traditionally been badly understudied in modern scholarship, and a lot of what has been written takes as fact the primary sources written by people invested in portraying them badly. As more people begin to work on this period from a wider variety of methodological and lingustic angles, we are coming to see much more nuanced pictures of their governance and their intellectual and religious programs. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, to be sure, but nor was it at all as black and white as you’ve made it sound.
If you want to get a sense of the current state of the Almohad question, there is a special issue of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies from 2010. It has a number of articles on the treatment of minority religious groups as well as on the continuing traditions of rationalism and intellectual inquiry that persisted during that period, and there’s lots of good bibliography there, too. Also (excuse the shameless self-promotion, since one of them is mine, but) there are a number of articles on the Almohads in the most recent issue of Medieval Encounters.
Sorry for jumping in like this and, like I said, I hope you won’t take it as a criticism; it’s just that when people say “Almohads = fanatics,” it grates on my ears almost as much as it sounds like “Muslims = terrorists” grates on yours (and mine).
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I understand that covering 800 years of Muslim Iberia in two 50-minute classes is going to lead to a lot of simplification, but it’s either that or the students don’t get to hear that Muslim Iberia existed at all. Of course, I’d much rather our university hired somebody like you and you’d do this work for me. 🙂 🙂
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Well, it could have been worse. Maybe she could have said, “Hispanic Muslim Terrorist” 😉
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