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Jytte Klausen, Brandeis University professor of comparative politics, has completed her second book about relations between the Muslim world and the West, centering on editorial cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad published in Denmark in 2006 that became the focus of diplomat protests and riots that claimed more than 200 lives.
The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” is not scheduled to be published until November, but has been attracting broad international attention since the New York Times reported that Klausen’s publisher removed the cartoons and all other images of Muhammad from the book out of fear of violent repercussions.
In the following interview, Klausen discusses the findings of her research for the book and her perspective on the current controversy. The Boston Globe also ran a front page story on the controversy in its Aug. 22 edition, and you can read an earlier Brandeis NOW story on the controversy here.
“I think it’s horrifying that the campus of Nathan Hale has become the first place where America surrenders to this kind of fear because of what extremists might possibly do,” said Michael Steinberg, an attorney and Yale graduate.
Steinberg was among 25 alumni who signed a protest letter sent to Yale Alumni Magazine that urged the university to restore the drawings to the book. Other signers included John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum and Seth Corey, a liberal doctor.
Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote in a recent letter that Yale’s decision effectively means: “We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.”
The moviemaker Theo van Gogh was advised by one of the best Islam scholars in The Netherlands, no the film would not provoke Muslims to anger. Van Gogh undertook the film project in cooperation with Hirsi Ali, a Somalia born Dutch politician who now works for the AEI institute.
On the afternoon of January 23, 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize winner took center stage in a packed gymnasium at the Jewish-sponsored university in Waltham, Mass., and a crowd of 1,700, mostly students, stood and applauded energetically. They welcomed the man and the reputation, although not necessarily what he’d come to say.
In a 15-minute speech, Mr. Carter summarized his own continuing efforts to bring peace to Israel and its neighbors, called the plight of the Palestinian people “almost intolerable,” and defended his use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Afterward he answered mostly critical questions and, after another prolonged standing ovation, left the campus. Alan M. Dershowitz, a Harvard University law professor, delivered a rebuttal in the same space about 30 minutes later, to a significantly diminished crowd.
Jehuda Reinharz, Brandeis’s president for more than a decade, didn’t attend the event. He was away on a long-planned fund-raising trip. His absence seemed to confirm faculty members’ suspicions that the university administration was trying to distance itself from Mr. Carter’s visit in order to placate some wealthy, conservative Jewish donors who were outraged by Mr. Carter’s opinions and resented his presence on the Brandeis campus.
Faculty members, sensing an affront to academic freedom, wanted Mr. Reinharz to make it clear that their campus was devoted to “truth unto its innermost parts,” the university’s motto.
Instead Mr. Reinharz complained at a faculty meeting in early February about the $95,000 that the Carter event had cost the university.
That rankled professors still unsettled by the administration’s decision last May to abruptly take down “Voices of Palestine,” an exhibit of artworks by Palestinian youths, which some Jewish students had found offensive. At the time, a majority of faculty members condemned the removal as at best a blunder and at worst outright censorship. In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Reinharz said the exhibit’s removal was justified because its lack of context was academically irresponsible.
At the time of the paintings’ removal, The Boston Globe reported that the administration had taken them down because the exhibit lacked “balance.” Brandeis professors overwhelmingly condemned the decision.
“It wasn’t really in our tradition, the extent to which we claim the heritage of Justice Brandeis, to make such demands,” says Jytte Klausen, a professor of comparative politics. She and two colleagues circulated a letter, signed by more than 100 faculty members, protesting the exhibit’s removal. An internal committee later called the removal a “serious error,” in part because the exhibit had followed university rules, representing a “legitimate student exercise of the right to free speech on campus.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
