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.

Libraries have a proud history of defending the freedom to read. Richard Ovenden was justifiably proud of his own library’s participation in just defence. Ovenden is the 25th Bodley’s Librarian, director of libraries at the University of Oxford. In the 1660s and 1670s it was in fact Milton’s books that were the subject of book banning.  All copies of his books were ordered to be burned. This seems remarkable today as Milton is considered one of  England’s greatest poets and one of Christendom’s strongest intellectual supporters. A predecessor Head Librarian Thomas Hyde bravely and perhaps even foolishly, refused to obey the Royal order, when he refused to surrender to the flames a special copy of Milton’s works including one that had been presented to the second Head Librarian by John Milton himself

As Ovenden said,

“libraries are proud to protect the freedom of all writers. While fighting to protect their right to write, and publish whatever they want to, they protect the freedom of readers to read them.”

The freedom to write and the freedom to read are of course opposite sides of the same coin—the coin of freedom.

In Manitoba, as far as I know libraries have all resisted misguided efforts from Christian evangelicals to ban books they disapproved of. We should be proud of them too.   And defend then when necessary.

The Holocaust that followed the book burning in 1933 was likely the greatest and most well-resourced attack on books and learning in world history. As Richard Ovenden said in his lecture at the Toronto Library:

“It was estimated that 100 million books were destroyed during the Holocaust.  These attacks on knowledge were a cultural and intellectual genocide that prefigured the human genocide that would soon follow.”

These truths must not be forgotten. We must remember them when the freedom to read is challenged as it is now in many places in North America including so far, Winkler, Winnipeg, and Brandon 1 in Manitoba. As Ovenden said,

The current wave in book banning and the broader context of censor[1]ship and constraints around freedom of expression are all stark reminders that the techniques used in Nazi Germany are once again in fashion.

Who would ever have thought that Neo-Nazism would find such a comfortable home in North America? This is an important reminder that fascism is never dead. The best we can do is tamp it down for a spell. We must never assume that it is permanently erased. It is always able to be resurrected when conditions are right.  As Ovenden added,

“Suppressing freedom to read is a core tactic used by those who seek to exercise authoritarian control over societies. Let’s be clear; it is our minds that are the true battlefield and libraries are a good proxy for those. As John Milton wrote in Areopagitica in 1644 in response to the English Parliament imposing a restrictive printing ordinance:

“For books are not absolutely dead things but do contain a potency of life within them. To be as active as that soul whose progeny they are, nay they do preserve us in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that intellect that bred them.”

If you love books you must love freedom and be ready to protect the right to read.

Banning books, so popular now, and so popular often, is really just a race to the intellectual bottom.

The Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbells urged the German people to say no to “decadence and corruption” and instead follow the Nazi lead. This sounds a lot like modern American conservatives. After all who is in favor of decadence and corruption?

The Nazis were not satisfied with their achievement in creating a bonfire of books they had to convince people this was done in the name of real freedom. It is amazing how often and in how many different places around the world, freedom is attacked in the name of virtues, even in the name  of freedom.

This reminds me of the words of George Orwell in his magnificent novel 1984 where he talked about the slogans of the totalitarian Party in power:

“War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

 

There was also “the Ministry of Peace which concerned itself with War.” And of course in the novel the most frightening ministry was “The Ministry of Love.”  As Orwell wrote, the people were given a new language, called appropriately, “Newspeak” which was designed “not to expand but diminish the range of thought.”

Before the German occupation, a freedom library was opened in Paris as part of the counter revolution to the book burning in Germany. As Richard Ovenden said, “ Many people realized banning books is an act of war on truth.”

That library soon contained over 20,000 books, including not just the banned books, but even Nazi books, because the agents of freedom realized it was necessary for people to understand Nazism in order to understand what an assault on truth it constituted. The library was supported by intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Andre Gide and the founder the Polish intellectual Alfred Kantorowich.

The Brooklyn Jewish Center in New York also made a home for Nazi banned books for the same reason in 1934 supported by world famous intellectuals, like Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair. These are all intellectuals who understand the importance of libraries for freedom.

Freedom to read is an essential part of freedom. No freedom to read; no freedom.