Examining Free Expression and Protecting the Marginalized

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, on WNYC. This week, in the city, the annual PEN World Voices Conference will take place. It's held every year by the group PEN America, which defends the freedom to write in the United States and around the world. Events are being held Wednesday through Saturday. An event on Thursday will be a dialogue between two top writers, on the tension between freedom of speech and protecting people in marginalized communities.

We are very happy to have with us now, for a preview, the two participants in that dialogue, Eboo Patel, founder and CEO of the group Interfaith America. His latest book, out in paperback tomorrow, is called We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright, novelist, and currently the President of PEN America. His books include Homeland Ellegies and American Dervish. His plays include Junk and Disgraced.

Eboo and Ayad, welcome to WNYC today. Thanks for engaging, thanks for offering us a preview of your live event.

Ayad Akhtar: Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.

Eboo Patel: Yes, thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: The title of the event is Matters of Offense. Eboo, what's the premise, as you see it?

Eboo Patel: The premise is that diverse democracy needs to have a wide space for free expression. Ayad and I are going to be talking about some concerns that, as a dogma digs in, diversity suffers. I am principally concerned about the diversity of expression of religious and philosophical views, that I think is really at the heart of American civilization. Ayad is, of course, principally concerned about free expression in art and writing.

We believe that there may well be a dogma setting in, that makes diversity of both art, philosophical, and religious expressions suffer.

Brian Lehrer: Ayad, the President of PEN America, did you personally pick Eboo to have this dialogue with?

Ayad Akhtar: I met Eboo a few years back, when he gave a really brilliant lecture at Union Theological Seminary, that I found very inspiring, which was about reading your own religious faith by the light of other faiths. It was a case study of Dr. King, finding inspiration in Hinduism, and Gandhi, in particular. I thought a lot about that speech over the years, especially as this conversation around appropriation has become increasingly central to artists' lives.

I've always had trouble with this idea of appropriation being problematic when it came to art, just because I'm in agreement with writers like Carmen Maria Machado, who talks about us as Magpies, who find what we will and make what we can, from what we find. We are appropriators [unintelligible 00:03:05]. Anyway, when Eboo and I started having a conversation about this--

It was around the controversy at Hamline University, some of the events there, that I'll let Eboo summarize, that got us talking, once again, more granularly about some of these issues, and we figured-- We did a version of this conversation a couple weeks ago, at the Chicago Humanities Festival and we're doing it now, in New York.

Brian Lehrer: Eboo, you want to pick up that story as you were queued to do?

Eboo Patel: Sure. Ayad I have been friends for a very long time. I think he's one of the great writers of American civilization. I admire him a great deal. When something comes up, that I think he's going to have wise things to say, talk about it, I give him a call.

Ayad Akhtar: I paid him to say all that, Brian.

Eboo Patel: The situation in Hamline University, which came to light a couple of months ago and was a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times, was a case of that. Here's what happens. An art history professor shows a piece of art in her class, which is precisely what you would expect her to do. It happened to be a beautiful reverential image of the prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him, depicted by a pious Muslim, commissioned by a Muslim ruler from the 14th century.

A widely known piece of Muslim art that is not only art, but it's also for many Muslims, including me, devotion. A Muslim student at Hamline said that she felt marginalized by this image, that it was Islamophobic and racist, and the art history professor got fired. I had not gotten the phone right away. We're shocked by this, in one sense. In our current context, it actually felt par for the course in the sense that, once the term marginalization is invoked, lots of things are lost in the process.

Lots of other goods are burned. That is part of what I mean by as a dogma digs in, diversity suffers. A piece of art that has been widely understood as not only civilizationally great, but a matter of devotion for literally tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of Muslims, was basically excluded from the teaching canon. An art history professor was defamed, called a racist in a public email, and then ultimately fired.

I look at this, and I think to myself, "Here is a student who was claiming to represent all Muslims, saying that Muslims find this marginalizing, bigoted, racist, Islamophobic, and setting an authenticity standard that all Muslims should feel this way." Instead of saying, "Listen, I recognize that there are a diversity of expressions of both art and piety in every tradition, including Islam. My view is X, that such images should not be shown. I recognize that other people have different views."

If the student doesn't say that, which I understand, absolutely, the college should. I think about the Hamline situation as a microcosm of what's happening in so many areas of our society, that, again, as the dogma digs in, as certain phrases can be used, as you can claim marginalization, and not just for yourself as an individual, but for literally tens of millions, in this case, well over a billion people, all Muslims feel marginalized by this, then you suffocate other forms of expression. I just think that is a bad thing for a diverse democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Ayad, I'll go back to you, to pick it up from there, and I'll admit, I'm not familiar with the Hamline College story that the two of you have been telling, but I would imagine that there would've had to be more to this firing than the fact that the art history professor showed a piece of art that comes from within the Muslim tradition, commissioned within the Muslim tradition, from centuries ago, and got fired just because of that.

Ayad Akhtar: Yes, no, Brian, actually, there isn't more to it. It was quite a big to do in the Chronicle of Higher Education and other circles. There is some background context too, Hamline is a university in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, where there's a large East African Muslim population. A lot of their students at that university are tuition-paying. They rely on tuition, as some universities these days don't.

There's a-- I think something close to 30%, 30% of their student population is Somali or Sudanese, so I think that there was a sense of responding to constituents, responding to the customers, if you will, to the customer business of higher education, that was probably part of this. There was not more to it than that, in the sense that-- Interestingly enough, very differently than Eboo, I grew up in a Sunni house.

I would've been one of those students, maybe not my third or fourth year in college, but my first year in college, I would've been one of those students who would've been offended by an image like that. To me, whereas Eboo-- This is where we have common cause, he has an interest as an institution builder, and as somebody who's thinking about democracy and the diversity, the importance of diversity as a meaningful category, not as a category, that maybe has less value to us, to the extent that it becomes a marker.

I think that, for me, I want to defend the right to transgress, that for art, for images, or for thought to be transgressive, and in some cases, offensive, a vehicle of consciousness breaking through, or breaking those dogmas. Again, we have common cause, coming from different perspectives. This thing at Hamline was followed up by something that happened at McAllister, where an exhibition was shut down because an artist had depicted a woman in a burka in an offensive position, showing some lingerie, and giving the finger.

A bunch of students, similarly, felt offended by it, Muslim students felt offended by it. The exhibition was literally veiled. It was covered over. These two things happened in very close proximity to each other, and got me and Eboo talking about how, I think, given our perspective as Muslim Americans from different traditions, I think we really have a pretty multivalent perspective on some of the stuff that's happening, with regards to marginalized identity, DEI, and all of that stuff.

That's what the conversation is going to be about, and what we've been plotting and planning.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD, and AM New York, WNJT FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcon, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio, and live streaming, @wnyc.org, as we continue with this preview of a dialogue that's going to take place on Thursday as part of the annual PEN World Voices Conference here in New York, between Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, novelist, and currently the president of PEN America, which is a freedom to write organization, and Eboo Patel, founder and CEO of the group Interfaith America.

Do the two of you disagree? It sounds like you're agreeing a lot on the Hamline College case, at very least, and its implications, and even the more, I think, explicitly offensive one that you brought up, which might have had an even more derogatory, or might have even had a derogatory intent, Ayad. Do the two of you part ways at any point on this, to make it a dialogue that searches for where the line should be?

Ayad Akhtar: Well, I mean--

Eboo Patel: [crosstalk] I think--

Ayad Akhtar: Please, Eboo, please.

Eboo Patel: This is Eboo here. I think our principal interest is different. I am not principally interested in transgression. I think that transgression ought to be allowed within a diverse democracy, because you never know when-- What is transgression to one person, is piety to another person. I think depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are a great example of that. I am not principally interested in transgression.

I'm principally interested in the flowering of diverse expressions, and I think free speech is a sine qua non for that to be the case. Listen, diversity is not just the differences you like. It is not just the expressions that you enjoy. Diversity means disagreement. If you're going to have a diverse democracy, you have to learn to disagree on some fundamental things, precisely so that you can work together on other fundamental things.

That's what we do at my organization, Interfaith America. You learn to disagree on some fundamental things, like ideas about salvation and the nature of Jesus, et cetera, so that you can work together on other fundamental things, like doctors from different religious backgrounds, in hospitals, saving lives together, right? We cannot let--

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] When you put it like that, it sounds like you're assuming people of good faith are the only ones in the conversation. What about not something that's a moral difference among people of goodwill, but racist speech coming from places of hate on college campuses, or anywhere else, and people reacting to it as speech, or other expressions of hate, can cause real harm to individuals?

Ayad Akhtar: Let me take that, Eboo, if it's okay.

Eboo Patel: Of course.

Ayad Akhtar: Brian, I was on the show, I think, in September, just before we did the symposium, in part honoring Salman. I remember mentioning this. The attack on Salman made something really quite clear to me. I think it was many decades in the making, this understanding of this epiphany, if you will. I grew up in a community where The Satanic Verses was experienced as an offense. I bristle when folks who are not Muslim, or folks who disregard the offense that that book caused.

Salman was using representations that had been used by Western Orientalists to denigrate and demonstrate Western superiority over Muslims for hundreds of years. It was a depiction of tropes, of the Prophet, that Muslims have rightly felt very deeply offended by. In some ways, The Satanic Verses was an instance of hate speech. At least that's how my community experienced it. Yet, that book stands at the center, the experience of reading that book stands at the center of my awakening and growth as an artist.

It was a sublime encounter through that offense, or what you might call hate speech, if I was to really walk you through, beat by beat. I think that, to me, the claims that the harms of speech make on us are not commensurate with the importance of the freedom of imagination, and the freedom to speak. They just aren't. I think that, whether or not Eboo and I have a difference, what we have is a common cause at a time when there is a decline in understanding the implications of the importance of freedom of expression.

Freedom of the imagination, freedom to make sense of reality by your own lights. I joke at some of these events now, that it seems, at times, that we're entering into an era of socialist realism without the genocide, where there's a lot of codification of representational forms and there are lots of acceptable ways of talking about certain categories of social being, whether it be marginalization or victimhood, and I don't think that the response to speech you don't like is to shut down speech.

It's better speech, better ideas. That's the way that it works in a democracy. It's the way it works in order to advance human knowledge. Anyway, that's my two cents about that.

Brian Lehrer: Eboo?

Eboo Patel: I'm really glad I went first, because that was so well stated, and it's more than two cents. That's a treasure, I think, of wisdom, right there. Listen, I do think that there is a difference between a pig's head left on the doorstep of a mosque or a synagogue, and a piece of art. I think that there's a difference. I think that there are a whole set of very interesting conversations to be had about the massive gray area.

New Yorkers will remember, of course, Chris Ofili's piece of art, The Holy Virgin Mary, which was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in the late 1990s, which was a depiction of the Virgin Mary as a Black woman surrounded by dung. There were massive protests against it, largely from the Catholic community. Giuliani threatened to withhold funding from the Brooklyn Museum. Virtually, every artist and intellectual came to the aid of the artists in the Brooklyn Museum.

Of course, this artist should be able to depict Virgin Mary in this interesting and creative way, and we understand that it causes some offense, but this is what artists do. They depict things in a variety of ways. One of the things I--

Brian Lehrer: That one was also mischaracterized by its critics, wasn't it? The dung wasn't intended to say the Virgin Mary is a piece of you know what, or anything like that. My understanding is dung was a material that, in the cultural tradition that Chris Ofili came from, that was sometimes used, and he was making a subtler point.

Eboo Patel: Brian, don't you think that people would say, "Well, the Muslims who are offended by depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are mischaracterizing those depictions"? This is the point. The point is that artists, writers, religious communities, and philosophical communities ought to be able to express themselves based on their own terms, within certain reasonable limits. I think one limit is a pig's head on a mosque. Here's an interesting question.

What if Chris Ofili wanted to hang that painting today in the Brooklyn Museum, and it was the Muslim community, which is widely thought of as marginalized, although I, personally, as an Ismaili Muslim, really dislike that characterization, but it was the Muslim community who was protesting against it, because after all, Mary is holy within Islam. There's a virgin birth in Islam. Mary is a whole chapter in the Quran. What if it's the Muslim community protesting that painting?

What if the Muslim community is saying, "We protest this as a marginalized community"? Do we take the painting down? Back in the 1990s, no artist, no intellectual, no professor would have said, "Let's take the painting down."

Ayad Akhtar: We are in a different era. Just to add an addendum to that, the Andres Serrano Piss Christ piece was intentionally transgressive. Ofili's piece was an homage according to his tradition, but we do have instances of outrage on the Christian side of things. In that case, it wasn't shut down, as I recall, either. We are in a new era. I think trying to figure out how to have a meaningful conversation about it, and not necessarily a conflicted conversation about it, that's the goal.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Well, the event on Thursday, featuring our guests Eboo Patel and Ayad Akhtar, will take this up in greater depth. It's called Matters of Offense. It is part of the PEN World Voices Festival, which happens every year in New York, and is happening this week. Ayad, as the president of PEN America, do you want to give people a further preview as you leave, tell people how to get tickets, or anything like that?

Ayad Akhtar: For sure. Most of the events are taking place in Greenwich Village, bunch of the Cooper Union, Strand bookstore, the NYU Spaces. You can get tickets at pen.org. Most of the tickets are $20, but there's about a quarter of the events that are free, and it's a real who's who. Arthur Miller lecture this year is being given by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and so many different events, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Kushner, Andrew Marantz, Masha Gessen, Roxane Gay, Matthew Desmond, Min Jin Lee.

Brian Lehrer: Boy, that's a lineup.

Ayad Akhtar: It's an amazing lineup this year. Maybe the best we've ever had. Please do come, four days of events, and should be a lot of fun.

Brian Lehrer: Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, novelist, and currently the president of PEN America, you may know his books, including Homeland Elegies and American Dervish, his plays, including Junk and Disgraced. Eboo Patel, founder and CEO of the group Interfaith America, his latest book happens to come out in paperback tomorrow, it is called We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. Thank you both so much for coming on together with us today.

Ayad Akhtar: Thank you, Brian.

Eboo Patel: Thanks, Brian.

 

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