Arabic professor Dr. Ibtisam Ibrahim asked the faculty for assistance publicizing her courses after a letter to the editor in the Kent County News criticized Muslim traditions.
Rather than responding to the letter in which Holden Rogers wrote, “If not arrested the [Muslim] movement will result in future generations of our daughters wearing burkas,” Ibrahim emailed the faculty. In the email, she said her classes have a “lack of marketing” and that she would rather write “for the sake of publicizing my courses than publicizing the letter of that ignorant person.”
Ibrahim teaches three classes at Washington College: Elementary Arabic, Women in War and Peace and Religion, Society, and Culture in the Middle East. Two out of the three have five students or less enrolled.
At Wheaton College, where she was a visiting assistant professor, Ibrahim had 20 students in Religion, Society, and Culture in the Middle East, while at Washington College only five students are enrolled in the same course. In the email, Ibrahim said she “would like to have more students.”
Ibrahim said her courses may be so small because “I’m still new.”
In her email, Ibrahim quoted a student who said, “I think students are scared. They don’t know much about the [Middle East].”
Sophomore Mike Golze, enrolled in one of WC’s Arabic services, said, “It is a tense area of study, and in a small town on the Eastern Shore we don’t get much contact with the outside world.”
While Ibrahim did not respond to Rogers’ letter, her students were asked to write about it in journal entries.
Ibrahim said, “I received such intelligent and knowledgeable responses and I am so proud of them.”
Some students’ intelligent responses will be published in the upcoming issue of the Kent County News.
“I am looking forward to Thursday,” when the Kent County News will be published, said Ibrahim.
When asked if Rogers’ letter reflects any attitude found at Washington College, Ibrahim and her students agreed that it does not.
“On campus, no way, and not even really in town,” she said, adding, “I pay no attention to these things. Every society has very critical conservatives with radical, vicious thinking, even in my society.”
Sophomore Sarah Story, a student in Ibrahim’s Women in War and Peace course, said she’s “never noticed” anti-Muslim sentiment on campus and that it has “just never been that way.”
Ibrahim does not believe Rogers’ comments are representative of the campus or the community.
“I think he is regretting it because it proved to the public how ignorant he is on the subject,” said Ibrahim.
Last week’s Kent County News published a response to Rogers’ letter in which Robert H. Kramer of Worton corrects several statements Rogers made.
Rogers’ stated that “the Koran orders [believers] to teach its faith to infidels and to kill or enslave those who do not convert.”
Kramer refuted the statement, writing that the verse Rogers references from the Koran “is not an absolute nor should it be taken as a stand-alone doctrine of Islam.”
With Kramer’s response published last week and the upcoming publication of Washington College students’ responses, Ibrahim stands by her decision not to write a letter of her own.
On a bulletin board outside her office are the pictures of some of her Arabic language students with sentences written in Arabic below them. Ibrahim smiled as she looked at them and said, “I am very proud of them.
Tonight they are coming to my house to cook a Lebanese dinner.”
Golze recommended Ibrahim’s classes, saying, “She brings a lot of culture to the class. She is from the area, so she can give a first person account.”
Story added that Ibrahim is “very knowledgeable about many things, not just the Middle East.”
