Gainesville , Florida : Upholding Old Civilities
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
Into fragments by narrow domestic walls...
Where the clear stream of reason
Has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...
Throughout history, the burning of manuscripts and books has been aligned more with persecution and primitive censorship than with protest. From burning the agnostic treatise of Protagoras to the “amputation of all the gangrenous members of the bibliographic body” by Urbain Domergue’s French revolutionaries, all sides have partaken in the pogrom of the written word. But the thought of having something similar in the vicinity of one of US’s largest universities was rather disconcerting.
With Tagore’s above quoted lines from Gitanjali, Professor Vasudha Narayanan opened the Gainesville Interfaith Forum’s proceedings, a day before the obscure pastor of the fringe Dove World Outreach Centre had planned to carry out his abhorrent outrage. While listening to Vasudha enunciate the creed of our university community, I also thought of the Shakespeare’s Richard III rambling:
“And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.”
But when I looked around, they stood up for the right cause at the right time, in overwhelming numbers and they had subdued the lone bigoted charlatan. The people of Gainesville made Pastor Terry Jones look like not a saint, not the devil, not even a villain, but exactly what he was — a fool. The voices of sanity had drowned the voice of hate.
As the world just turned its focus on to what a fringe group might do on September 11, 2010, for many in Gainesville, a civil rights movement of sorts was turning a year old. Long before our erstwhile neighbor at the Centcom in Tampa, Florida, General David Petraeus weighed in on the national security concerns arising out of Pastor Jones’ planned biblioclasm, the local community was grappling with what may appear to some as the human rights minutiae like free speech, hate speech and the constitutional protections afforded, if any, to either one.
The Dove Church started its campaign more than a year ago with rather crude signage in its front-yard. Subsequently, some of the children from this church’s member families showed up at local schools, wearing shirts — ostensibly of their own accord — with a hateful message inscribed on them. This is when the Gainesville community decided to make its disgust at the Pastor’s actions, known for the first time. In August 2009, a few elementary and middle school kids, wearing the shirts with the abusive messages, were sent home by the school authorities.
The local school board then held public hearings where many testified to uphold the constitutional freedoms — including free speech — yet vociferously condemned the hateful messages. The school board subsequently decided to introduce a uniform dress code, which went into effect earlier this year. Whereas litigation against the school board — perhaps futile now — remains pending, this was the first the step in building a community consensus against intolerance.
After failing to gain traction through his front yard and T-shirt vitriol, Pastor Jones announced his book-burning plans some two months ago. Earlier on, the small local Muslim community felt uncomfortable, but even during these uncertain times, it made certain key decisions anchored in the best traditions of the human rights movements. In her book Burning books and Levelling Libraries, Rebecca Knuth opens the chapter on ethnic biblioclasm with F R Scott’s poem, ‘Degeneration’:
Soon kindling animosities
Surmount the old civilities
And start the first brutalities.
Then come the cold extremities
The justified enormities
The unrestrained ferocities.
The exact opposite of Scott’s concerns was to serve as the template for the Gainesville Muslim Initiative — a coalition for building the discourse against hate mongering. It included the leaders from two mosque-centers in Gainesville and individuals who did not belong to the either congregation or for that matter any particular doctrinal persuasion. The consensus was to steer clear of any reactionary or confrontational response to outrage, denounce and disown violence in any form and adhere strictly to the constitutional protections for everyone. Additionally, no financial, material or physical support was to be sought from outside the communities. Civilities were to be upheld and animosities avoided at all costs.
As the media spotlight began to simultaneously highlight and sanitize the Pastor’s virulence, support for the local community from the city’s political, civic and academic leadership, a host of local and national faith-based groups, American Civil Liberties Union, Council on American-Islamic Relations and so on, rose exponentially. With the national political and military leaders also recording their condemnation, it was tempting for the locals to latch on and seek their own two minutes of glory like the dubious Houdini act of Imam Muhammad Musri of Orlando or worse — seek an unconstitutional recourse. They fell for neither.
For the Gainesville citizens, whether followers of a faith or not, the issue was to set an example that the rest of the US and indeed the world could follow. No doubt the protests across the world could pitch the US troops and Muslim civilians against each other. But what if there was no war in Afghanistan? Would it be okay to remain mum then? For Gainesville, silence was not an option in either case, so it went on to do what it does best: serve humanity through healing, teaching and helping.
On September 11, 2010, people from across all divides came together for ‘A Day of Peace and Unity’ sponsored by the Gainesville Muslim Initiative at Gainesville’s Bo Diddley Plaza. They contributed books to the libraries, donated blood and fed the hungry. A local T-shirt shop distributed shirts with inscription ‘Love, not Dove’ while the university students shared wristbands reading, ‘Islam is of the heart’. As the speeches by religious and community leaders celebrated diversity, fellowship and charity, the vigil marking compassion and peace came to life with candles, a thousand of them — one lit from the other. Gainesville had successfully upheld its old civilities and built new bridges. Communities around the world where humans are savaged may have an example to emulate now.
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