From the questions-thou-shall-not-ask file:
Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn’t like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.
So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed.
What follows, you might ask?
Muslims, not surprisingly, are outraged. Even Danish cartoonists who triggered global protests a couple of years ago didn’t portray the Prophet as fictional. German police, worried about a violent backlash, told the professor to move his religious-studies center to more-secure premises.
“We had no idea he would have ideas like this,” says Thomas Bauer, a fellow academic at Münster University who sat on a committee that appointed Prof. Kalisch. “I’m a more orthodox Muslim than he is, and I’m not a Muslim.”
(Via Damian Penny) This speaks to the importance of not just freedom of speech, but freedom of religion, too. The latter implies not just the right to practise your religion, but the right to change religions, reject religion, and question religion.If religious sensitivities override historical and critical inquiry then we have violated both freedom of expression and freedom of religion.
Even if these professors were motivated by ill-will toward Islam (which clearly does not seem to be the case), there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking such questions.
As one of the professors involved notes:
Prof. Kalisch, who insists he’s still a Muslim, says he knew he would get in trouble but wanted to subject Islam to the same scrutiny as Christianity and Judaism. German scholars of the 19th century, he notes, were among the first to raise questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible
Damian Penny notes these two examples of historical inquiry into whether Jesus existed and whether the tales of the Old Testament are at all true. Here are two more examples of scholarly inquiry into whether Jesus existed. Religion aside, people like Jesus and Muhammed are historically significant figures, and therefore this is an entirely legitimate area of scholarly pursuit.
Yes, both figures probably did exist, but as Eugene Volokh notes:
...the only way one can trust the judgment of professionals on this is if they’re free to challenge conventional wisdom, and to respond to such challenges. Even if Prof. Kalisch is wrong, and badly so, we can’t know that he’s wrong unless he is free to provide his evidence and his conclusions and others are able to rebut them.
Even though the German government has not yet stepped in, using intimidation or the threat of violence (or actual violence) to silence a point of view is indeed censorship.
