Islamism, the Subject We Still Avoid at Harvard

After the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, then-Harvard President Drew G. Faust was unequivocal: “The abhorrent hatred, racism, and violence carried out by neo-Nazi, KKK, and other white supremacist groups deserve our strongest condemnation.”

Amidst racial justice protests in 2020, her successor Lawrence S. Bacow was similarly clear, promising that he grasped the urgency to “fight racism and denounce white supremacy.”

That same year, Harvard’s Office of BGLTQ Student Life issued a matter-of-fact reminder: “It is imperative that we dismantle white supremacy together.”

It was in this context, then, that I was intrigued by Harvard College Dean David J. Deming’s recent remarks on the 25th anniversary of 9/11: “It was terrorism. Airplanes flying across this beautiful country — symbols of progress — turned against us, turned into weapons,” Deming told students. “In the confusion that morning, we didn’t initially realize we were being attacked, or who the enemy was.”

The problem, however, is that airplanes don’t turn themselves into weapons. Ironically, Deming too could not name “the enemy.” His reflection made no mention of al-Qaeda, nor the ideology that drove the terrorists to attack America: radical Islamism.

Deming’s speech is no exception. When Faust announced a vigil on the first anniversary of the al-Qaeda-inspired marathon bombing right here in Boston — what was America’s largest post-9/11 terror attack — she never named the motive. After the 2015 coordinated terror attacks in Paris, President Faust condemned an “attack on universal values of human decency that bind the peoples of the world together.”

As students mourned what was then America’s worst mass shooting ever, the 2016 killing of 49 at an Orlando LGBTQ nightclub by a man loyal to the Islamic State, she deplored a “quicksand of fear, anger, hatred, and distrust.”

Compare those comments to her numerous denunciations of white supremacy and racism. A quicksand of fear is not what killed people in Orlando.

Faust, to be clear, is not an outlier either: Examining the public comments of Harvard’s last four presidents, I was unable to find one reference to radical Islamism, even while they addressed major attacks like the ones in Paris. Though the Orlando massacre targeted LGBTQ people, the BGLTQ office’s 2016 statement offered no appeal to “dismantle” radical Islamism.

Today, a new policy strictly limits the administration’s public statements, but aversion to the subject goes much deeper. In classes, it appears virtually non-existent: In my searches of Harvard’s course catalog, I found just one class mentioning either “Islamism” or “Islamist.” (Full disclosure: I’ve taken it, and the professor is wonderful.)

Or take the offerings outside class: In a Georgetown University women’s wellbeing index, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan ranks dead last. Yet I couldn’t find one event at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights from the past six months addressing the subjugation of women in Afghanistan — nor radical Islamism’s impact on human rights anywhere. When I searched for “Islamism” or “Islamist” in the Harvard Gazette, I found only a single event described across all of campus in the last two years.

This dearth of attention is not because the issue’s geopolitical relevance has declined. According to some analysts, the Houthis — whose motto curses America, Israel, and Jews — are working to conquer the entirety of Yemen, while an al-Qaeda affiliate is advancing rapidly in Mali. The past two years have seen radical Islamists slaughter Congolese churchgoers and force Syrian Druse to jump from rooftops; the Vatican reports that, from 2009 to 2023, they killed over 52,000 Nigerian Christians. There are few issues with comparable global impact, begging the question: Why aren’t we talking about this?

While making “whataboutist” comparisons is always easy, the scale and breadth of radical Islamism is unique. It’s a women’s rights issue, as shown by Afghanistan. For minorities in the Congo, Syria, or Nigeria, it’s a religious freedom issue. In parts of Somalia, where Sharia law punishes homosexuality with death, it’s a gay rights issue, too.

Yet even in classes on the Middle East, I’ve found the subject to be anathema. I’ll never forget, sitting in a class on Middle Eastern politics, the moment I questioned whether journalist Mehdi Hasan — who once compared non-Muslims and atheists to “cattle” — could be an Islamist. The well-known professor lambasted my “ad hominem attack.” Had I said someone who labeled Black people “cattle” was a potential white supremacist, would he have reacted similarly? I’d wager not.

Of course, one must differentiate extremists from the world’s two billion Muslims — indeed, the root of the word “Islam” means peace. We also shouldn’t forget that historically, Muslims have comprised the vast majority of radical Islamism’s victims. The tragic irony is we avoid naming this threat for fear of offending its primary victims.

In 2017, Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates Abdullah bin Zayed offered a warning: “There will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe because of lack of decision-making” and “trying to be politically correct.”

Talking about radical Islamism is not Islamophobic. I’d argue that choosing silence — by avoiding the topic in conversations, events, and classes — falsely conflates radicalism with Islam as a whole.

Harvard rarely shies away from the world’s toughest human rights challenges. This should be no exception.

Charles M. Covit ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Economics and Modern Middle Eastern Studies in Lowell House.