That the situation has gotten out of hand is only a pale understatement, because what happened last Friday within the confines of the University of Turin is much more, much worse. And the fact that the rector Geuna avoids the argument that the Piedmontese higher education center is occupied, therefore outside his jurisdiction, certainly does not help to come to terms with this serious incident. Last Friday the students/occupiers invited Brahim Baya University to celebrate prayer and his sermon praising the holy war. Indeed, he noted that the holy war is underway, waged by men, women and children against the “Zionists” who dared to trample on that blessed land even before the nabka.
How is it possible that in a secular institution by definition, students who protest in the name of their vision of progress – civil, political, social – decide that the prayer of a certain confession has space and almost everything else does not? Shouldn’t university mean “universality”? Dialogue? Or perhaps it is much, much more convenient for these students (who, by the way, are not all of them and perhaps not even the majority, but they occupy and dictate the law), to simply mimic what happens in universities overseas, whether fair or deplorable? And so, after scrolling through some videos on social media, they decided that they too were entitled to Islamic prayer, so as to increase the views?
And then there is Imam Baya’s sermon. Because, it must be said, Islam is a complex reality, full of different opinions and approaches. Far from a monolith, as one is often tempted to think. And even in our territory there are conservative and other progressive imams, and there are many different ways of feeling, expressing and communicating one’s Islamic faith. Last Friday’s sermon at the University of Turin (which already writing this sentence in full – and rereading it – makes the hair stand on end due to its fundamental incongruity: where has our secular and pluralist society gone?) was all nothing more than a discourse of peace, faith, spirituality. Full of fiery hyperbole – “Palestine is resisting a genocidal fury emerging from the worst barbarism in history” – he invited those who are not yet doing so to “use their hands” and contribute to the “liberation” struggle of a land that the Zionists have dared to “occupy” well before, by decision voted by a majority of the United Nations, the state of Israel was born (and a Palestinian state should have also been born, if the Arab front had not opposed its refusal). In the best tradition of which the Iran of the ayatollahs is now almost the only heir, the imam never mentions Israel.
As Amos Oz repeated, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a tragedy because it is a confrontation not between a wrong and a right but between two reasons. What happened inside the University of Turin last Friday is yet another testimony to an increasingly greater disconnect between the sacrosanct rights of the two peoples to a livable future and to protests increasingly divorced from reality, from the complexity of this conflict. These episodes in the universities, the screams of those who shout “from the river to the sea” without any geographical, historical and political knowledge, are increasingly distant from the ongoing tragedy that Israelis and Palestinians – both victims – suffer. The fact that the rector declines any responsibility because the University of Turin is under occupation – therefore it is no longer a common, public, open good – further aggravates the situation.
