Reordering books in the library

Submitted by Prashant (United States), Feb 18, 2014 at 19:48

Dear Dr Pipes,

Your reader Anne described an incidence where a library was forced to reorder books so Quran can be "rightfully" placed on a top shelf. It was done as a result of demands from Muslim students of the institution. Small as this incidence sounds, it describes the universal problem with Islam in our world. When it comes to things related to Islam, Muslims, the Prophet, and Quran even normal muslims stop thinking and start acting as a unified body of people with no diversity of opinion. I think this style of acting is ingrained in the Islamic minds at a very early age in life and is reinforced everyday there after. And when this kind of unified demands meet open minded people of free societies, they have no choice but to "cave in" as Anne's library did. And if they do not cave in, it becomes a case of discrimination against Muslims. Under the right circumstances it can also turn into street fights, stone pelting and burning of buses. At around this time knee-jerk liberals jump in and take over.

Of course, non-muslims will be rational about this kind of issues. And they will follow the golden rule. If we all start demanding top-shelf placements of our books, we know, the library will need to reorder new book-cases and take special pains to maintain the sorted order of books. And who will decide which books qualify to be holy. And which of them is the holiest so it must get a placement at the top and in the front. But these "golden rule issues" are not a matter of concern to the current Islamist mind-set. To them, Islam deserves to be placed at a padestal by everyone. And let us not even begin to discuss the treatment that the bible gets in some of the Islamic lands. It is a corrupted book afterall.

I hope it is just much ado about nothing and this fever will not spread to all libraries in all cities of all countries. But it may very well do so because all Muslims are supposed to vote with the umma.

We need more rationality and tolerance (not for Quran alone but for all reasonable thoughts and things).

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