Bibliophobia: The Cancelation of Collin May, an Interview

Collin May’s essay “Critical Theory as an Anti-Emancipatory Project” appeared earlier this week in TelosScope.

Collin May would not seem like an ideal target for cancelation—if by that one means someone relatively defenseless, inarticulate or unable to speak for himself, lacking in intellectual resources to understand his predicament, uncredentialed, without elite professional training in the subject he is accused of mishandling, or ready access to legal counsel. Or if by that one means someone accused of having done something wrong under murky circumstances, in any way nebulous, difficult to check, or hard to prove one way or the other.

To the contrary. May is himself a lawyer, trained philosopher, theologian, and scholar of Islam. Yet he ran afoul of the powers of “woke” that be, over the publication of an academic book review on the subject of Islamic history, published years ago in a prestigious outlet, just when he had stepped into a prominent role as a Canadian civil servant.

Nor was his “crime” anything at all subjective, such as perceived sexual harassment in private can sometimes be (a matter of whom to believe) or even what counts as plagiarism these days (difficult to establish at places like Harvard), but of “Islamophobia,” as reflected in an easily accessible written text concerned with another text by a well-established historian of the Middle East, a book published by Yale University Press.

Moreover, neither is he a mere straight white male, hopelessly denuded of any “identity politics” concerns of his own, but, rather, an openly gay man making inroads where this is still not easy, in Canada’s socially conservative Alberta Province, with his cards in this respect courageously on the table.

Yet in today’s climate, “Islamophobia”^[1] trumps “homophobia,” let alone “Islamic imperialism,”^[2] at least in confrontation with communities not known for their tolerance regarding what used to be called “sexual preference,” among other things. Or so it seems, thus far, anyway, in a battle as yet ongoing and still not finally settled, by any means.

For this “victim” of fashionable claims to victimhood is the perfect podcast guest, the ideal subject of interviews, a brilliant writer and an exemplary model of how to not give in to the administrative state’s currently favored methods of intimidation. Nor is he afraid.

More important, when shadowy, esoteric falsehoods, difficult to pin down, are allowed to obscure plain truth, in full view of anyone who can read, something too obvious to miss is clearly amiss. And there’s the rub, for those who would capitalize on the unequal power of obscurantist privilege. After all, who, nowadays, among the beneficiaries of the non-white, non-Western privilege rooted in claims to “structural” injustice can read what they happen to deem “offensive” without sensing opportunity. And yet May’s cut-and-dried case is, if anything, an opportunity for the forces of light and demystification of the cult of injured self-esteem to have their day in court.

As a result, May’s unfortunate—on a personal level—and deeply painful experience of intolerance, infused not incidentally by anti-intellectualism, now appears to have produced, rather fortuitously—for all those who dare to push back against censorship—the paradigm instance of an open-and-shut case of “bibliophobia,” or fear of the written word, the authors of books, and those that read them with care.

Thus, I sat down with the inspirational Mr. May for a conversation, and the following is a transcript, edited for readability, of what I learned. Having read his recent blog post for TelosScope, I was intrigued, and wanted to know more about the man behind the trenchant take on the meaning of “elite” academia’s humiliating, emblematic Claudine Gay scandal—over antisemitism, for a change—and what motivates him to tackle subjects many fear to get within a mile of.

Gabriel Noah Brahm: What happened to you and why, as cogently and, if I may, as concisely as you can recount here in the limited space of a short interview? You were dismissed from your position as Director of the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in Alberta, in September 2022, having been charged with “Islamophobia,” is that correct? So, are you an “Islamophobe”? What is your real interest in Islam, if any? Why even go there, given the controversial nature of the subject?

Collin May: As to what happened, I was appointed Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in May 2022, by the Alberta government after serving for three years as a part-time Commissioner. The opposition Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) and its allies in the blogosphere and academia launched an effort to bring about my termination, ostensibly on the basis of a single academic book review I had written in 2009.

The book I reviewed was Professor Efraim Karsh’s book Islamic Imperialism: A History, published by Yale University Press. Karsh is one of the most renowned historians of contemporary Middle East history. Both my review and Professor Karsh’s book were characterized as being “Islamophobic,” racist, and hate speech. My review was even linked to violence against black Muslim women in hijab in Alberta more than ten years after its publication.

Due to a prolonged effort by the NDP and the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) throughout the summer of 2022, I was eventually terminated by a weak conservative Alberta government. While I was originally accused of “Islamophobia,” the reasons given for my eventual termination were that I had failed to prioritize meetings with the Muslim community and that I had threatened to sue my critics for defamation.

In terms of my alleged “Islamophobia,” no, I am not Islamophobic. I do not have an irrational fear of Islam. My interest in Islam is both scholarly and political. On the scholarly side, I studied the medieval Islamic philosophers (Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes) and the “Islamic Enlightenment” with Professor Muhsin Mahdi while I was a student at Harvard. I was especially interested in a non-orientalist approach to studying Islam and the Middle East, one that does not reduce the history and thought of the religion and the region to little more than its interactions with Western colonial powers.

While I was a student in Paris, I was especially interested in the versions of the political form which was the scholarly focus of my advisor at the time, noted French philosopher Pierre Manent. Manent wrote a history of the political form—Les Metamorphoses de la cite—that traces the history of the West from the Greek city-state, through the Roman Empire, to the development of the modern nation-state. His work emphasizes the specificity of the nation-state in the context of the theological-political problem created by Western Christianity. My interest in Islam is the contrast it presents to the Christian nation. Islamic political life was, until 1924, built around the caliphate, which is a version of the imperial form. Professor Karsh’s book brought together what I had learned from both Professors Mahdi and Manent.

On the political front, the question of whether democracy was possible in Muslim-majority countries was a subject of great interest in 2009 when I wrote the review. We were still living in the fallout from September 11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but before the Arab Spring had dashed many hopes for a new birth of democracy in the Middle East. At the time, the topic was quite popular. Given my academic background and the currency of the issues around Islam, I had no reason to believe that writing a book review of a scholarly book was in any sense problematic.

Brahm: What was the nature of the evidence brought against you, how was the case pressed, and how has it decided (thus far)? Without leaving out anything essential that’s already been said so far, is there yet more you might add as well, in addition?

May: The evidence against me consisted largely of two lines extracted from my review. One referred to ongoing conflicts on the ground between Muslim communities and a number of other religious groups. This reflected my past experience working with the International Red Cross in Geneva, where many of the ICRC’s missions involved Muslim communities clashing with other religious communities. The second line was one in which I noted that Professor Karsh, in his own non-orientalist approach, referred to Islam as a highly imperialist and militaristic religion. The NDP-affiliated blogger who wrote the first piece on my review wrongly attributed this view to me while ignoring the context and nuances of my review. Indeed, he ignored the very next sentence following my statement of Karsh’s position, which started with the words: “But we need to be careful here . . . ” As it turns out, none of my critics were even remotely careful when it came to attacking me.

Eventually I was terminated by the Alberta government on the urging of the NCCM, but as I’ve said, I wasn’t actually fired over the contents of the review, but for an alleged failure to prioritize meetings with the Muslim community and because I had served Notices of Defamation on two bloggers and a journalist for falsehoods in their coverage. What has largely gone unsaid about this so far is that, while I had met with the NCCM when this firestorm started in May 2022 and continued to communicate with them in August, I was approached by one of the AHRC Muslim Commissioners, on the urging of the Alberta Minister of Justice, and told that I should not meet with the Muslim groups suggested by the NCCM. Also unreported is the fact that I cleared serving the Notices of Defamation with the Deputy Minister of Justice in late August 2022. Despite these facts, I was terminated regardless.

Brahm: So, then, if charges against you were, indeed, as it seems, essentially bogus (given that anyone who bothers to read your short, erudite review essay, can easily see for themselves that it’s an exemplary, if relatively modest piece of scholarly work: a learned book review on a rather rarefied, abstruse subject), why was this strenuous campaign to have you ousted undertaken, as you see it? What was at stake, what forces were in play? To what end, and what made it “successful” (at least for the time being, albeit, you are still contesting the legality of your removal)? Why should someone with your remarkable qualifications, impressive record of work as a public servant, and prestigious scholarly background be targeted? Were you a victim of “cancel culture”? What does that mean? Does the perhaps overused sounding, by now, hot-button phrase seem to fit the circumstances well enough (or what else might one call it, if less contentious, ideally more illuminating terms are demanded, should there be any)?

May: As to why I came under attack, it largely depends on the party doing the attacking. The NDP had a couple of reasons. The first, and certainly the most disturbing, is that there had been abusive and sexually harassing behavior going on at the AHRC under the Chief appointed while the NDP was in government. Most of this was targeted at women. From what NDP insiders have told me, the NDP did not want this information coming to light and they feared I would not continue to cover it up as my predecessors had. Add to this that the NDP itself had allowed fairly pervasive sexual harassment of its own female staffers—I’ve heard some quite shocking stories—by male politicians and staffers, and it becomes obvious that the NDP did not want someone blowing the whistle on abuse of women.

Additionally, the NDP were attempting to increase their vote appeal among Alberta’s ethnic communities. Apparently, they calculated that attacking me, an appointee of the conservative government, as a purveyor of “Islamophobia,” racism, and hate speech, was a means to curry favor with the fast-growing Muslim community in Alberta.

As far as the NCCM was concerned, they are a lobby and activist group that claims to speak for Canadian Muslims. Taking down a government-appointed official increased their kudos with the community they seek to represent. But again, there is a more disturbing issue at play. I am an openly gay man, a fact known by both the NDP and the NCCM. The CEO of the NCCM, whom I had met with via Zoom, has made comments in the past equating homosexuality with adultery, usury, and even the production of alcohol—in other words, my existence is haram as far as the NCCM was concerned. At the time, I was the only open member of the LGBTQ+ community serving as a Commissioner/Chief. With my termination, there is no LGBTQ+ representation among the 17 Commissioners of the AHRC. There are, by contrast, three members of the Muslim community.

But beyond the homophobia directed specifically at me, there was a more disturbing and insidious homophobia at work. When my termination occurred, my legal counsel noted that I was the first openly gay man to serve as Chief of the AHRC. This statement was met with derision by a number of the commentators who had already deemed me unacceptable for the job, including by academics who should have known better. Duane Bratt, a perennial if uninspired political commentator in Alberta, who is also a professor of political science at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, chimed in on Twitter with the phrase: “It is possible to be gay and Islamophobic.” Lise Gotell, a Womens and Gender Studies professor at the University of Alberta, went further, stating that it is “also possible to be gay and intemperate and not suited to an adjudicative role.”

I would argue that what happened to me was an example of cancel culture. But I am also a bit wary of that highly politicized phrase. In fact, I’ve recently written another book review—I seem to be a glutton for punishment—on Greg Lukianoff and Ricki Schlott’s recent book on cancel culture. And on January 25, I’ll be giving a talk on the subject at the University of Lethbridge. One of the problems I’ve found with the notion of cancel culture is that its definition is almost always functional. The term is defined by how cancel culture works but not what it is intrinsically. I’m hoping to arrive at a definition that links the term to an underlying ideological stance, with the goal of giving the notion some more scholarly heft. Of course, I may fail. Or I may find that it is an instance of something more substantive within our contemporary culture, or within the democratic mindset generally.

Brahm: What have you learned from this challenging experience? Was it a total loss or was there something gained as well? Did you ever expect to be singled out and called to account like this for such apparently ill-intended scrutiny? How has it affected you, and what are some “takeaways” that readers should derive from your encounter with weaponized anti-intellectualism?

May: In terms of what I’ve learned personally, I’ve become far more aware of the dangers politics presents to intellect. Syracuse is a fraught and threatening place for philosophers. I’ve also gained a greater appreciation for the issues swirling around our universities. That I was attacked by academics who should have known better, who should have sought out the fuller picture before condemning me, just confirms what we’ve been seeing on campuses across North America. But personally, this has led to a significant loss of reputation, an ongoing loss of my livelihood, and a stinging and deep sense of betrayal, along with severe emotional and physical distress for me, my partner, and my family.

And I’ve learned a great deal about betrayal. While I was appointed Chief of the AHRC by the governing United Conservative Party, I was hardly an unknown quantity to the opposition NDP. While they were in power from 2015 to 2019, my partner worked closely with them and their leader, Rachel Notley. The entire NDP caucus knew him well and many of the members of cabinet had been to my home. We even hosted two fundraisers for an NDP cabinet minister at our condo. I’ve learned rather painfully why Dante reserved the lowest level of Hell for the treacherous.

Brahm: How would you advise others who might find themselves in analogous situations to respond? Is it best to seek to placate the critics when confronted, out of an understandable “self-preservation instinct,” or is there something worth defending by standing firm on principle when attacked unjustly? Moreover, is it not best to be wary of running afoul of the censors in the first place? Do you have regrets about carelessly opening yourself to such incendiary charges, or have scholars by the nature of the enterprise got to be fearless, even—or especially—nowadays, in spite—or because—of the atmospheric thought-policing all around? Weren’t you being naive if not foolish, daring to take on the topic that you chose to address? Why not leave it alone?

May: My advice to anyone faced with this situation, is to fight, and not attempt to appease or apologize. Reflecting on my own experience, as well as others that I’ve read about, once the cancelation mob has you in its sights, there is very little you can do to assuage it. Apologies are useless as they only become additional fodder for those who would destroy you.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that cancelation is often not a one-time assault but an ongoing process. In my case, even before I was accused of “Islamophobia,” Nigel Bankes, an apparently well-known former law professor at the University of Calgary and NDP ally, was already on the attack, again on social media, making false claims as to my would-be lack of qualifications. He noted that I was merely a corporate and estate lawyer. While I was that, he failed to mention that I had extensive academic training in the history and philosophy of human rights. He also failed to mention that I had served as a part-time Commissioner for the past three years and that I had written over 40 published decisions, far more than other Commissioners. Professor Bankes even went back a full 10 years to question an appointment I had received to review applicants for federal judicial positions. He reasoned, again, that I was unqualified, failing to point out that I had just spent two years at my law school doing virtually the same thing, reviewing applicants for tenure and promotion in the law faculty.

Professor Bankes’s disingenuous critique was just the first salvo in a prolonged attack on me. My experience indicated that cancelation is a process that will continue to look for new avenues to discredit the target. In my case, first my qualifications were questioned by a law professor with no expertise in human rights. When this failed, a more vigorous broadside was launched on my academic work with the intent of ostracizing me from respectable society altogether under the allegations of racism and “Islamophobia.” Finally, when even that didn’t initially succeed, I was taken down by a mob of organizations under the guidance of the NCCM, not for the contents of my review but for my subsequent would-be failure to have been adequately contrite and accommodating to my accusers.

Despite all that has happened to me and despite all that I have lost, I find it hard to regret having written the review. Initially, after my termination, I was relieved because the pressure was over, but I did go through a fairly intense depressive phase in which I questioned everything I had done up to that point. This lasted for about a month, and then I got myself out of my hole and started fighting back. I have learned there are few allies in the fight against cancel culture, but once you’re in the middle of it, all you can really do is keep going, keep fighting. Sadly, many do not come out the other side intact. Many are psychologically traumatized for life. And many take their own lives.

Beyond that, I do believe that academics do need to have courage, they need to address issues that might be uncomfortable or untimely. Whether they should express their probity in such a public manner is difficult for me to say. But I do think that we need to do what we can to preserve academic freedom.

Brahm: How and why is this background story relevant to readers of your recent TelosScope post on the ex-president of Harvard’s case? Does it illuminate something there? Are the two incidents related in some way that demands reflection? What motivated you to contribute to Gay’s pile-on yourself, when you, yourself, after all, have been also been driven out of a position for holding controversial views that run afoul of powerful interests? What’s the difference between her and you, seen from a distance, or up close for that matter? Why not call a ceasefire on politicized criticism of public figures?

May: In terms of the recent furor around Claudine Gay and her short term as Harvard president, I see a number of parallels between her experience and my own. Most obvious to me is the ongoing nature of the attack on her. Something I’ve noted in a number of items I’ve posted about the story is that it is clear that the three university presidents were walking into a political fight pit when then were being interviewed by Congress. Certainly they gave overly legalized answers to the question they were asked about campus antisemitism. But it’s also evident that the proceedings were politicized, and I think it’s also obvious that they were the victims of cancelation initiated by the right.

In Professor Gay’s case, this initial attack failed. But once it began, there was no reason to believe it would end. Ultimately, a conservative activist turned from the moral outrage directed at her answers on antisemitism to her credentials. In this regard, her experience mirrored mine but began with the moral outrage and then moved to her qualifications. Once the cancelation hunt starts, it will find its prey one way or another.

The difference between our experiences is that her attackers came from the right, while mine were on the left. Though there are similarities to the two approaches, I would suggest there is a more ideological element at work when the attack comes from those on the left, while right-wing cancel culture is a more individualized and political response. I think we do need to reflect on this difference, as well as the ideology that underlies the leftist version of cancel culture that itself is a contemporary version of political correctness from the 1980s and 90s. This is an important difference between President Gay and me that I will be discussing in my upcoming talk at the University of Lethbridge. And ultimately this ideological foundation does seem to have a connection to postmodernism and critical theory, at least as it was conceived by thinkers like Michel Foucault and Herbert Marcuse.

As for my own thoughts on President Gay’s experience, I was always somewhat ambivalent about whether she should be removed as Harvard president. I did find her responses to Congress’s questions to be rather ham-fisted. I also felt that on a broader level they reflected a problem at our universities with the racialized theories and policies President Gay herself supported. Finally, I was a bit taken aback by her rather sloppy scholarly missteps when it came to her citations and even her paucity of extensive scholarly output.

Still, during the entire saga, I always expressed my unease with governments investigating academics. I also was unsure whether her alleged plagiarism really reached a level that indicated she was actively stealing thoughts from other academics. This is something that should have been left to a jury of her peers, so to speak. Similarly, when she was finally terminated, I wrote that I was pleased that she was not losing her teaching position. I know what it’s like to have your livelihood destroyed, and I certainly did not wish it on President Gay.

Ultimately, I agree that cancelations should end whether the attack comes from the left or the right. This isn’t accountability. It’s an ideological effort to avoid the persuasion that is so central to liberal democracy, replacing it with the elimination of discourse. From the perspective of critical theory, this is very much an ideology that needs to be unmasked. And while I think it is an ideology that was born in our universities, and must be fought there, I also believe that most professors and academics are decent people who just want to go about their business. They shouldn’t be canceled, but they will also need to challenge the anti-intellectualism in their midst and promote a more diverse intellectual atmosphere that is not subject to the machinations of activists and overly zealous administrators.

Brahm: Since your run-in with the thought police, a lot has happened. In particular, given that the issue of concern to your detractors had to do with the taboo on mention of Islamic imperialism, I wonder if your experience shed any light on the October 7, 2023, Hamas Pogrom, with its ideology of Islamic antisemitism so central, or the perverse reception of this rampage in North America, particularly on the college campus. Is there a lesson here for us now in the post-10/7 reality as you see it from your perspective? Do you look at 10/7 or its aftermath (including for example the Claudine Gay affair, which your recent blog post brought to mind) any differently, given what you’ve been put through?

May: Absolutely. The events of October 7, 2023, which serve as something of a bookend to September 11, 2001, can helpfully be understood in the context of the distinction between the two political forms involved: the nation-state and the empire.

Consider Israel. It is very much a nation-state on the west European model. The secular Zionists who founded Israel wanted to be a nation like the others, but they also wanted a nation of their own because they believed that the liberal democracies of Europe had failed to resolve what was known as the Jewish Question. Historically, Western civilization, for all its successes and failures, was essentially the result of the modern effort to leave the imperial form behind, both politically (the Roman Empire) and religiously (the Roman Catholic Church). Even during the heyday of European imperialist adventures in the nineteenth century, the European nations remained national in form.

Domestically, the nation-state, since the sixteenth century, was the means by which Europeans evolved evermore representative and democratic polities on a scale unknown previously. And when economic innovations threatened social cohesion, those same nation-states devised national programs to ensure the popular classes did not secede from the nation altogether. As Hegel would have it, from the Reformation through to the twentieth century, the nation-state was the objective means by which Europeans subjectively appropriated their democratic ambitions.

But things have changed. In the West, we have significant movements that would have us throw off the objective form of the nation-state to concentrate on pure subjectivity in the form of human rights and the basket of personal identities which we in fact conceive on the pattern of Lockean property: our identities are our property. We seek, more and more, an empire of humanity linked not by the national form but by administrative procedures and activism. If there were ever an issue for critical theory to grapple with, it would be how much our contemporary radical left have imbibed a property rights model of identity.

Still, Israel, more than its European forebears, seeks to remain a nation. Internally, it attempts to deal with its vast array of social differences brought on in large part by the profound diversity of its immigrants since 1948. Externally, it engages in war and diplomacy. Indeed, the very presence of Israel among the dictatorships of the Middle East has nudged other nations in the region to leave behind their imperial structures and increasingly engage with Israel on the model of Western nations. Despite all the conflict in the region, Israel is a light to these nations.

But this fact points to what Islam has lacked and why the radical left in the West is so enamored of it to the extent that it will overlook the manifest injustices directed towards women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ in Muslim-majority countries. In terms of Islam, as my book review made clear, it is a religion that has traditionally governed itself through the caliphate, a version of the imperial form, though not a very well-determined one. In this regard, Islam is objectively both very strong and expansive, but it has yet to discover a means to activate its strength. And without a caliph since 1924, it is a vast imperial movement without even a head to direct it.

In the West, the radical left is drawn to Islam’s objective strength precisely because Islam offers an undifferentiated objectivity onto which the left can project its pure subjectivity, including its own hatred of Western civilization. Of course, it is this insight that must be denied, both by the Islamists who seek to extend the House of Islam and by the radical left who hope to efface the national form and its representative, democratic, and social processes. In the eyes of both the Islamist and the radical left, the West is irretrievably corrupt (racist, colonialist, misogynist, etc.), and both seek to escape it through a collective submission to a version of will-to-power.

What happened to me was an instance of this desire. The radical left, in the form of the Alberta New Democratic Party (having largely thrown off its concern for the working class), attacked me as a racist and Islamophobe, parroting the standard tropes against the West used by the purveyors of subjective identity. At the same time, the National Council of Canadian Muslims activated the objective strength of the Muslim community in Alberta, using the force of its numbers to remove me from office. And despite claims by representatives of the Muslim community, including Professor Faisal Bhaba from Osgoode Law School, that the description of Islam as imperialist does not represent the views of Muslims, the CEO of the National Council of Canadian Muslims had, in past social media posts that he had attempted to delete, called precisely for the construction of the Cordoba caliphate in Canadian cities while explicitly demanding the dismantling of false European national borders.

In short, the events of 9/11, which began this particular phase in our history, and the recent attacks of 10/7 come to light as the period during which the radical subjectivity of the Western left formed its alliance with the objective strength and proto-imperialism of Islamism, as the counter to the Western nation-state and its democratic forms and processes. What is happening on our campuses and in the Middle East are the visible conjunction of this imperial versus national dynamic. Israel remains solidly in the camp of the nation-state. And as I’ve said, it may even be bringing the Arab nations further into this family by the force of both its domestic economic strength and its external military successes. But the radical forces of unbounded Western subjectivity and Islamic imperialism cannot abide this development just as they could not abide my discussion of Islam’s political form. The problem is that the masses of the radical left and Islamism have nothing positive to offer. The campus protests, the attacks of 10/7, and the efforts made to remove me from office were entirely destructive. While they have a goal, there is no positive form under which the goal can organize any gains it makes. They invite only chaos.

Notes

1. Pascal Bruckner, among others, has cast grave doubts on the usefulness—or abusefulness—of this term, placed in quotation marks here for that reason.

2. This phrase is the title of a book by Ephraim Karsh, and also features in the title of an essay by May on that same book—both of which are linked to in the conversation above—and is placed in quotation marks here for that reason.

This post is part of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Israel initiative. For more information about this initiative, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.