TABLET MAG
How Not to Teach about Islam, Harvard Edition
by Liel Leibovitz
January 25, 2016

Looking for some good classes to take at Harvard this spring? If you are curious about the human rights of 1.6 billion of the world’s people, you might enjoy Professor Leila Ahmed’s Islam, Gender, Sexualities and Empire class. Herein is the course description in full: The twenty-first century has witnessed the production of a wealth of new literature in relation both to the history of sexuality in the Islamic world and to the entangled histories of Europe and the Islamic world and the role that Orientalism has played in shaping notions of gender and sexuality through colonial, pre-colonial and post-colonial times…In other words, for those of you who are not fluent in academic gibberish, Muslim countries only started permitting the killing, raping, burning, incarcerating, confining, and marginalizing of women once the bad Europeans arrived and forced the natives into abandoning their inherently peaceful ways and instead taking rusty razors to their daughters’ genitalia. READ MORE