An inspired assignment.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gathered in small groups during last week's orientation to discuss the annotated excerpts from the Koran that they were assigned to read before the start of classes.

With the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11 fast approaching, university officials were seeking to prompt understanding and debate about a work that is regarded as holy by more than a billion human beings throughout the world. Yet this timely, thought-provoking assignment has outraged some Christian fundamentalists, state legislators and right-wing commentators.

A conservative Christian group filed a suit - one promptly rejected by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - arguing that the reading assignment and discussions amounted to ``forced Islamic indoctrination." Meanwhile, the state's General Assembly passed a bill denying funding to the university if it did not give equal time in the classroom to "all known religions" One lawmaker denounced the Koran as "evil," and another declared that young people should not be allowed to read about ``our attackers."

Conservative commentators also took hyperbolic note. They included Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who likened the assignment to requiring students to read Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in 1941.

One should never underestimate some people's capacity for ignorance, bigotry and pandering. But such reactions to what was nothing more than a scholarly discussion of the Koran are both disheartening and alarming. Either these critics have forgotten this nation's First Amendment protections of free speech and religion - or they're willing to feed them into the same federal mulcher that has been grinding up our other constitutional protections since Sept. 11.

North Carolina, one of the finest public universities in the nation, should be commended for having its 4,000 incoming freshmen read the Koran. The assignment, which was optional, was not an attempt to force-feed Islam down the throats of impressionable youngsters. It was a thoughtful bit of homework intended to help these students better understand some of the powerful, complex and diverse forces that are at work across the world.

It's encouraging that many of this nation's universities, including the University of Oregon, have begun taking a better look at Islam, which has too long been ignored or, worse, stereotyped as patently intolerant, reactionary, fanatical and violent. The reality, of course, is that there is no monolithic Islam, which, like Christianity, encompasses a broad range of different, sometimes contradictory theories and practices.

If critics have any grounds for criticizing the university, it might be that the selected text, "Approaching the Qur'an" consists of selected excerpts and omits some controversial verses that some radical, anti-Western Islamic movements have used to justify acts of violence. But most of North Carolina's critics seem to oppose any attempt to study the Koran objectively without an a priori assumption that it is both evil and violent.

There's a name for such a view - ignorance. Students at North Carolina and elsewhere should read and reflect on the Koran, as well as those of the world's other main religions, during their student years. So should those who tried to squelch the University of North Carolina's excellent reading assignment for orientation week.