alt.education

The MSA: Segregation Not Integration
By Robert Spencer
Friday, February 29, 2008

Muslim students at Australian universities have
demanded that class schedules be changed to work
around their prayer times, and that male and female
students be provided with separate cafeterias and
recreational areas.

This is in line with similar initiatives in the United
States, where the Muslim Students Association
carries, on the "Muslim Accommodations Task Force"
page of its website, pdfs of pamphlets entitled "How to
Achieve Islamic Holidays on Campus," "How to
Establish a Prayer Room on Campus," and "How to
Achieve Halal Food on Campus."

The MSA directs Muslim students to present these
demands in the context of multiculturalism and civil
rights. "Most campuses," explains the publication on
getting recognition of Islamic holy "include respecting
diversity as a part of their mission statement. They
consider enrollment of diverse students an asset to
the community, as they enhance the classroom
learning experience and enrich student life. Try to
find these statements specific to your campus, and
explain that recognition of Islamic holidays would
serve as a practical example of upholding these
ideals."

Such recognition would also serve to right wrongs
done to Muslims on campus: "If any cases of bias
against Muslims took place on campus in the recent
past, present the proposal as an opportunity to foster
cooperation and increase understanding." It would be
a simple matter of civil rights: "Additionally, if special
holiday recognition is being offered to other faith
communities (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant), Muslims
have strong grounds to make a petition for equal
consideration of their holiday requirements."

It's ironic that such calls for equal consideration would
be made in service of an agenda that is so interested in
being separate: the calls for separate eating and
exercise facilities are a strange discordant note in a
movement that claims for itself the mantle of the
American civil rights movements. By the MSA's lights,
the Muslim Rosa Parks would insist on sitting in a
separate place on the bus, and Muslim students would
demand the right not to have to eat at infidel lunch
counters.

This is one of the primary reasons, but by no means
the only reason, why the increasingly shrill demands in
Western countries for accommodation of Muslim
practices are not the latest manifestation of the push
for equal rights for minorities, notwithstanding the
posturings and protestations of Muslim leaders.
Demanding a place at the table is not the same thing
as demanding a separate table of one's own. In the
civil rights movement, black Americans were working
for full inclusion in the larger secular democratic
culture, not trying to carve out their own enclave
within it. If anything, they had that already, and that
was the problem: if the Supreme Court could conclude
in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka that "in
the field of public education, the doctrine of separate
but equal has no place," because "separate educational
facilities are inherently unequal," then they are still
unequal.

And just as they were deemed unequal in 1954
because they abetted cultural attitudes that exalted one
group as superior to the other, so also today: the
demands of Muslim groups for separate facilities are in
the service of a supremacist ideology that emanates
from the Qur'anic assertions that Muslims are the "best
of people" (3:110) while unbelievers are the "vilest of
created beings" (98:6). Unbelievers are unclean (9:28)
- which leads to the conclusion, reasonable to the pious,
that Muslims should be chary of contact with them. Every
Western capitulation made to demands for Muslim
accommodation only feeds these supremacist notions,
and works directly against the actual goals of the civil
rights movement, which were equal justice and equal
rights for all.

What's more, the MSA, the chief proponent of the
growing Muslim accommodations movement in the
United States, was listed as a "friend" of the Muslim
Brotherhood in the infamous 1992 memorandum which
spoke of the "grand Jihad" aimed at "eliminating and
destroying the Western civilization from within and
'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the
hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and
Allah's religion is made victorious over all other
religions." The victory of Allah's religion over other
religions is a Qur'anic imperative: "And fight them until
persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah"
(8:39), and it is an inherently supremacist imperative,
in which non-Muslims pay a special tax from which
Muslims are exempt, the jizya, "with willing submission
and feel themselves subdued" (9:29).

Instead of capitulating to Muslim demands for separate
facilities, university administrators and public officials
ought to question those making the demands about
their overall goals, and about the incongruity of claiming
that creation of their own enclave is a matter of equality
of rights for all.

But when will we have university administrators and
public officials with that kind of courage and foresight?

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology,
and law and the director of Jihad Watch.
He is the author of seven books, eight monographs,
and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic
terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the
Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.
His latest book is Religion of Peace?.