Islamic society claims campus harrassment

Author: Derek Schlickeisen

In recent weeks, two separate incidents affecting the student-run Islamic Society's ability to communicate with the Middlebury community have led the club's leadership to suspect harassment. The events sparked a condemnation from President Ronald D. Liebowitz and are now the subject of a Public Safety investigation.

According to Public Safety and Islamic Society Co-Presidents Owais Gilani '08 and Amro Shurrab '08, an unidentified caller contacted the Department of Web Services during the week before Fall Break and asked that the Society's web pages be deleted and its account be closed.

Although clubs normally first approach the IT Helpdesk with requests regarding changes to their accounts - a fact which, said Gilani and Shurrab, "should have made Web Services suspicious" - the department complied with the caller's request and deleted the club's account. "Since they deleted the account entirely, they could not just put the site back online," said Gilani. "We lost all of the work we have done to update the site in the past four years."

Web Services did not provide additional details regarding the incident, citing Public Safety's ongoing investigation.

In a separate incident, the Society's notice board in McCullough Student Center was stripped bare of photographs, scriptures and announcements. Said Shurrab, "At first, we thought that someone may have just made a mistake or that somebody was drunk and had removed them. However, after the incident with the Web site, we started to suspect that the two events were related."

While the College considers both acts vandalism, Public Safety Director Elizabeth Boudah said the investigation will focus on trying to track down the caller who sabotaged the club's Web site. "We are trying to figure out who made the call, what they said, where they called from and what they sounded like," she said. "Unfortunately, the phone system here can't tell us the exact origin of the call, so we are looking for other ways to identify the caller."

Boudah added that Public Safety is planning to work with the Islamic Society's leadership to identify anyone who may have been motivated to harass the organization.

Several arms of the College administration are participating in the investigation and assisting the Islamic Society in rebuilding its communication efforts. In a meeting following the incidents, Dean of the College Tim Spears and Dean of Student Affairs Ann Hanson promised to "review the [Web Services] policies that allowed this kind of action to slip by."

Gus Jordan, director of the Charles P. Scott Center for Spiritual and Religious Life, outlined the steps that the Chaplain's Office has taken on behalf of the organization. "Our program coordinator, Ellen McKay… followed up with Web Services while we were all trying to understand what had happened," he said. "After we realized that someone had asked for the site to be removed without authorization from the Islamic Society, I met with the co-presidents to discuss our next steps."

Gilani said that the Chaplain's Office helped organize the Society's response. "They have basically been the link between us and the rest of the administration," he explained. "They alerted us to what happened, they contacted Public Safety, and they notified President Liebowitz."

Gilani and Shurrab stressed that the two incidents came at a critical time for their organization. "It was urgent that the Web site be available because it had information for club members about prayer times and breaking fast during Ramadan," Gilani said. In total, the Web site was offline for 10 days during the month-long Muslim holiday.

The co-presidents also noted a correlation between the harassment and their organization's re-emergence as an active club on campus. "We think this is very significant because the two incidents have occurred just as we are getting the club active again after several years of dormancy," said Shurrab. "We definitely believe there is a link between our new activity and these events."

The alleged Islamic Society harassment would not stand alone as the only recent incident involving religious intolerance on campus. The College InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Hillel spent part of Friday, Oct. 28 working to remove anti-Semitic commentary inserted into several volumes of the Library's collection of Jewish and Israeli literature.