Muntazir Ali
This Tuesday, April 15, I taught a seminar on \”The Quran, Environment, and Climate Change\” as part of my Approaches to the Quran course. My students – more than half of them from non-Muslim backgrounds and studying the Quran for the first time – grappled with questions most of us assume belong to scientists and policy experts. But there we were, in a Religious Studies classroom in North Carolina, reading and translating verses and thinking about stewardship, justice, trust, and balance as they relate to our and our planet\’s future.
It was an irony – and one that wasn\’t lost on me. As we grappled with the Quran\’s theological, cosmological, and ethical visions of the human and non-human world and its parables, oaths, metaphors, and signs, I came across two news stories – one from the United States and the other from Pakistan – that tell very different stories about the limits and possibilities of harnessing difference as a mode of critical intellectual inquiry.
The Nimitz Library – named after Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz of the United States Navy – was recently the scene of mass exile. No, not of people. But of books. Three hundred eighty-one titles got removed from the shelves, including books on race, decolonization, and gender – books that the Naval Academy identified as being related to the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion themes and part of the Trump administration\’s push to eliminate \”woke\” initiatives throughout the federal government. Meanwhile, in the mountainous region of Chitral in northern Pakistan – my hometown – the local chapter of Jami\’at Ulama-e-Islam (F) raised concerns about a massive donation of books – nearly 80,000 volumes – from a US-based Chitrali philanthropist, Lakshan Bibi, declaring them a threat to the region\’s religious and cultural identity and, especially, its \”peaceful\” society.
The vocabularies differ – \”alignment with national security objectives\” in one case and \”danger to peace and religious and cultural identity\” in the other. The logic, however, is quite similar. In both Annapolis and Chitral, efforts to restrict access to books are justified in the name of protecting values, traditions, and national or religious identity. Beneath these rationalizations, one can detect a deeper fear of ambiguity, difference, and the power of ideas to unsettle established norms and those who uphold them.
The two cases are also similar in that they forego overt censorship in the classic sense and resort to \”administrative removal\” at the Naval Academy and a press statement by the district leadership of JUI (F) in Chitral.
In Chitral\’s case, the opposition appears to be based less on the actual content of the books than on a video statement by Lakshan Bibi herself, in which she reportedly acknowledges being unfamiliar with the contents of about one-third of the donated materials. Instead of serving as a prompt for review or dialogue, this admission ended up as a justification for wholesale suspicion, rooted in fear and control rather than in any specific critique of the books themselves.
In both contexts, the source of fear is not so much misinformation as disruption. The books being removed – such as Maya Angelou\’s seminal autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – and rejected potentially provoke reflection and ask questions about entrenched views of history, culture, and identity. In doing so, they threaten the ideological coherence that societies and institutions rely on to sustain their authority.
These incidents are all the more troubling given that our times demand that we educate the public, especially young people, to confront the ecological, political, and moral crises of our era critically and compassionately, not through retreat but through openness, intellectual vulnerability, and through and across difference.
It is this that makes both of these stories so deeply unsettling. The U.S. Naval Academy is telling its cadets that the study of structural racism, feminist theory, and settler-indigenous encounters is dangerous. In Chitral, the rejection of Lakshan Bibi\’s donation implies that literacy, curiosity, and pluralism threaten peace rather than enable it. The anxiety that exposure to differing ways of thinking will destabilize the foundational myths that hold societies and institutions together is not misplaced. Books, after all, are known to unsettle. But the answer to this discomfort is not erasure, rejection, or retreat. The answer is a deeper engagement.
In my seminar, we didn\’t arrive at a consensus. That wasn\’t the point. What mattered was that we opened the Quran to ecological and environmental questions, listened to each other across religious and cultural lines, and allowed a 7th-century text to speak to 21st-century dilemmas. In doing so, we modeled, in our own small way, a different approach to knowledge – one rooted in humility, imagination, and shared inquiry.
It is that kind of learning that book bans, removals, and refusals resist. The real danger is not what is in the books. It is what happens to a society that fears the act of reading itself.
(The writer teaches religion, history, and literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro).