"I knew there would be controversy, but I never imagined international attention to this," Moeser said. "I mean, to a two-hour discussion group over an assigned book. I think it says a lot about our country, not all of it good."
Michael E. Sells, the Haverford College comparative religion professor who wrote Approaching The Qur'án has been swamped with reaction. "The peace-loving Muslims you defend are involved in virtually every conflict on the face of the earth," said one typical message, he said.
Sells wrote Approaching The Qur'án before Sept. 11. His book is now in demand as interest in Islam grows. But so does the sensitivity to the topic, he says.
"There's a large undercurrent out there that did not believe President Bush when he said Islam is not our enemy," Sells said. "We don't need to condemn those people, or dismiss them. We should talk with them and really talk this thing through, because we're going to be involved in conflicts in areas with largely Muslim populations for the foreseeable future."
‘The Enemy’s Religion’
Popular television talk show host Bill O'Reilly of Fox News made the university's assignment a national cause. Why, he asked, should students study what he called "the enemy's religion"?
"I wouldn't read the book, and I'll tell you why," O'Reilly said on his show. "I wouldn't have read Mein Kampf [by Adolf Hitler] either. If I were going to UNC in 1941, and [a] professor said read Mein Kampf, I would have said, 'Hey professor, with all due respect, shove it. I ain't reading it.' "
Some North Carolina state legislators threatened to cut university funds. Rep. Larry Justus, a Republican in the North Carolina General Assembly, reviewed the book and judged it insensitive.
"This is about singling out a religion to the exclusion of all the others," Justus said. "And it happens to be that they picked one that our terroristic people right now are using to justify what they're doing."
In July, when James Yacovelli of the Family Policy Network announced the group would challenge the assignment in court, he said: "When you think about it, this book is really a veiled coercion to get students to accept Islam from a distorted viewpoint."
