While I was on the board of the Steinbach Public library we always mildly worried about unfavourable incursions into our library by unhappy citizens. After all we were in the midst of the Bible Belt in Manitoba. As a result, we tried to arm ourselves for a future attack by creating a “Statement of Intellectual Freedom” as  we called it. It was a statement saying we believed in the freedom to read and would oppose efforts to get us to ban books.

We never had a serious attack while I was on the Board. Perhaps this was because our first requirement for even considering an objection was that we received confirmation that the objector had read the book. That might have been enough to ward off some attacks.

Today, libraries in southern Manitoba have been met with a number of attacks, mainly from the camps of extreme conservatives and ultra-Evangelicals who have been attacking books as unnecessarily supporting the LGBTQ* community or their allies.

So far, I believe each library has successfully managed to hold off those who wanted to ban books.  If they had a statemen of intellectual freedom they would be well armed to hold off those braying for censorship. It helps to be prepared.

Yet complacency is dangerous.

I certainly hope that in a pluralistic society the tokens or emblems of an open and pluralistic society, such as libraries, can be maintained and protected against assaults by the ignorant and belligerent. As Richard Ovenden said, “we have become too complacent, we have allowed ourselves to permit these institutions to become battlegrounds for other political motivations…we have to take to the barricades.”

He is right. The barbarians are at the gates and we are the defenders of the city of civilization.

And the librarians are warriors.

The Hamline incident shows how libraries are on not quiet safe places. They are places where ideas boil over, though patrons should not be allowed to. As Richard Ovenden the Oxford librarian,  said,

The Hamline incident and the current spate of book banning in the US, show how libraries are on the front line of a war defending knowledge from attack. The American Library Association reported that in 2021-2022 there were more than 2,500 book bans in a 138 different school districts and libraries spread across 32 states covering 4 million peoples. The highest concentrations were to be found in Texas and Florida, states where the dominant flavor of politics is tea. Many of the contested authors seem so uncontroversial that their presence on these lists is a shock. Khaled Husseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Isn’t the US Constitution meant to protect freedom of speech? Apparently not.

Just today [September 23, 2024] I learned that book bannings have tripled in the past year!

To my mind, when I see outstanding books like these on a banning list, I cannot help but think it is hard evidence that the source of the bans is profound ignorance. Ovenden is absolutely right, this is a war on knowledge. A war waged by the ignorant that cannot be tolerated.  

One of the Images in the Manuscript the Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din) generated controversy in 1997 when Oxford University Press published Islam: A Very Short Introduction which contained one of the images depicting the Prophet. In 2001 when it published the second addition it removed the image from the book and inserted the following cowardly explanation: “A small number of readers found the pictures blasphemous.”

In 1922 an art history professor, Erika López Prater, at Hamline University which is the oldest university in Minnesota showed a reproduction of the image that was found in the Compendium after first warning her students that they would be seeing an image of the Prophet receiving divine inspiration.  She had also warned the students in the syllabus for the course that such an image would be shown. The student’s participation in the class was optional. She also explained the significance of the work of art for 2minutes before showing it, giving an opportunity to any student to step outside the class if they chose to do so.

Added to that she said, “There is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids, outright, any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages. While many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one, monothetic Islamic culture.” In other words, not every Muslim felt that the same about showing such images.

The adjunct professor even apologized to the one student who was upset saying she had tried hard to avoid offense to anyone and she was sorry that seeing the image made him uncomfortable

Nonetheless, one of the students complained to the university officials who then condemned the professor’s actions and essentially fired her for the controversy. They said she was disrespectful, and Islamophobic.

I always thought a university was where intellectual controversy should be played out and not avoided. Controversial ideas belong in such a place.  PEN called the university’s actions “academic malpractice.” I agree.

History professor Amma Khalid, who is also a Muslim, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carleton College that “barring a professor of art history from showing this painting, lest it harm observant Muslims in class, is just as absurd as asking a biology professor not to teach evolution because it may offend evangelical Protestants in the course

The Los Angeles Times reported on the case this way: “The idea that no one should be able to study historically important images of Muhammad on a college campus because some Muslim students object to them on religious grounds is intellectually indefensible.” ” I say Amen to that too.

Richard Ovenden the Oxford librarian says the image is not Islamophobic. It was painted by a Muslim “in a manuscript that exalted Islam. The Muslim students were warned so could have looked away. The other students were entitled to see the work and how it fit in to art history so as to better understand the religion of Islam and the art.

According to Ovenden, the position of barring images such as this have become dominant in Islam only recently and is still not universally adopted by Muslim.  In fact, he says, it is only predominant in the Sunni Branch of Islam. As Ovenden said,

“The officials at Hamline in their eagerness to show  how diverse their community is, sided with reactionary views within Islam and therefore have become less tolerant as a result.”

The Executive director of the Minnesota Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations thought it was Islamophobic, but the national branch disagreed. It said, “Although we strongly discourage showing pictures of the Prophet, professors who analyze ancient paintings for academic purposes are not the same as Islamophobes who show such images to cause offense.”

University officials should be careful about siding with extremist elements in any religion. More importantly they should recognize the importance of the freedom to read. People should be free to read. Others should not be free to impose their views on others.

The idea of a public library was born in Britain in 1850. This was the idea that a library should be funded by the government and should provide a majority of its services for free. Many politicians in Britain were opposed to the idea because they did not think the working classes would benefit from such libraries. One political leader, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, known widely as Colonel Sibthorp and frequently caricatured as a typical idiot thrown up by the British upper classes, and, unsurprisingly an ultra-Tory politician, said that he did not see the point of such libraries because when he was in University at Oxford he hated reading and since his days there did not read at all. This reminds me of Steinbach’s Mayor A.D. Penner when a public library was petitioned for in the 1970s who said he did not see the need for a public library because his children didn’t read.

Of course, since then public libraries have not always prospered. Some governments saw them as a prime opportunity for cost cutting by elimination or underfunding whenever the need for funds arose. As a result, from time to time, like current times, libraries in many places are declining in numbers or vibrancy. Richard Ovenden the Oxford librarian said it was a disgrace how Britain had allowed libraries to decline so badly. He calls libraries “an essential piece of social infrastructure.”

I couldn’t agree with him more.

Libraries are under attack around the world. This includes libraries in the Bible Belt where evangelicals want to control what people can read according to their own agenda.

Libraries are also attacked by a thousand budget cuts, right-wing extremists who abhor the freedom to know, and in some places, like Bosnia Herzegovina  by actual bombs.

According to Richard Ovenden in his lecture at the Toronto Public Library,

“We are going through a profound shift in the way that knowledge is created, shared and stored at the moment. As a result, public knowledge is increasingly in the hands of major technologies, or what the Oxford historian, Timothy Garton Ash , has called “private super powers.”

That really is an appropriate phrase for an age in which private individuals are taking over the world of so much that used to be solely within the public domain, including space travel, policing, armed forces, universities, hospitals, and so much else. The private domain is expanding with electric speed, while the public realm, after decades of neo-liberal ideological dominance is shrinking to the size of a modest bath tub like the wealthy had hoped.  Think about it—recently a private army marched on Moscow and the leader Putin cringed and made a deal with Prigozhin. That would have been unimaginable a mere 5 years ago.  Now people shrug at the insolence. What else is new, or as Bob Dylan said, “what else can you show me?”

Ovenden also mentioned how archives have changed in the modern age of emails, Twitter (now X), Tik Tok, and other new social media.  Who ever thought presidents of the richest most powerful country in the world would communicate directly to his fevered followers on Twitter or Truth Social at 3 a.m. clearly without the benefit of any curation or communications advice? In fact, such communications are not just made without such advice, but probably against such advice!

We have also seen a former president of the US, Donald Trump, housing classified materials in the washrooms of his private club and then bragging about it to his swooning cronies. Life doesn’t get much crazier than this. Is that how Trump was creating his presidential library in the age of social media and fake news?

The examples of President Trump and President Biden and Vice-President Pence each moving state documents to their private homes highlights the problems of mixing up private and public archives so casually. How can such a society carry on? Are these each merely one more example of the decline of modern democracies?

Another example was provided by Ovenden:

“The current investigation by the British House of Commons into former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration during the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on messages exchanged by senior figures, highlights the critical importance of these records for the health of our democracy. They used encrypted messaging systems like WhatsApp, and Telegram to evade the normal routine of keeping records in their department, evading the Freedom of Information regimes, and long-term archiving.”

To quote Dylan again, ‘The Times they are a-changing.”  And they will never be the same again and we had better make sure we protect our freedom to read from challenges posed by a wide variety of sources. We must do this at our peril.