As a born American and as an Italian Jew, I am absolutely dumfounded by what is occurring at UNC-Chapel Hill. (Thirty-five verses out of let's say, 800 to 1,000, give me a break, please.)
It would be much better if Chancellor James Moeser, Michael Sells, inter alia, peddlers of a peaceful, utopic, Iowa-State-Fair Interpretation of Islam would just stay away from the intelligent students at the UNC-Chapel Hill. They are insulting the intelligence of UNC students by not allowing these students to read the Quran, the primary source of Islam, on their own.
In fact, I believe he is afraid that many of them will read the Quran on their own, so he is running football-like interference, making sure that they are spoon-fed only his particular interpretation -- Islam as the messenger of peace in the world.
Wouldn't it be fine if all those literate incoming students at UNC first read the Quran by themselves and drew their own conclusions, as I have. If only Moeser and Sells would do this, but of course they will not because they does not want many of the incoming students to draw the conclusion that I drew -- that the Quran is the obsessive/compulsive tirade of a paranoiac megalomaniac, an almost unabated spuming of hate, vengeance, fire , threat and death -- Josef Goebbels with an overlay of religion.
On the other hand, it is very probable, even inevitable, that some freshman students might feel themselves turned positively toward the whole Quran and Islam and even be enlightened and consider themselves genuinely broadened by it
But your chancellor has got to let the chips fall where they might. Let him make a very short appearance at the University of North Carolina , simply telling the students, "I urge you to read the whole Quran" and then leave the room.
As I recall, when I was a college undergraduate, we were not told about Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," we actually had to read it for ourselves and draw our own conclusions first -- the interpretation by others came after the fact, not before. Of course, the assumption was that we had brains.
Let us say it like it is: the last thing Mr. Sells wants is for the students to read the Quran before he gets his chance to peddle his own Walt Disneyland interpretation of it. He knows how bright those students are, and he is just plain scared of them. They are too smart.
Mr. Sells knows that the Quran was written in "plain Arabic" and has successfully been translated into plain English. The chancellor, Mr. Sells and Professor Carl Ernst should now back off and let the students be free to read the primary source of Islam if and when they choose to do so.
