Rain can be destructive. Late Wednesday evening, a pine tree fell across Chapel Drive, blocking traffic and effectively turning the main Duke traffic circle into a bus stop. Many cars opted to jump the curb to avoid the felled pine, but the Duke buses were not so fortunate. Students stopped to examine and even take photos of the barricade. Grounds keeping crews anticipate that they will be able to remove the blockage by Thursday morning. It’s still raining in Durham.

Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Hull, who recently self-published “Muhammad: The ‘Banned’ Images” and directs Duke’s Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace,” what he would say to Muslims offended by his decision to include controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

“Join the Enlightenment,” he replied.

He went on to discuss how different people are offended by different things. What matters, he said, is not that people are offended, but how they react.

“You don’t respond by saying, ‘I don’t like what you said, therefore I’m going to throw a grenade at you’,” he said.

He added: “If I were a serious Muslim, would I be offended by some of these images, especially the cartoons? Absolutely.”

Hull said he thinks the Muslim response will be guided by what he sees as a religion stuck in the past:

“The problem here is that of all the world’s religions, Islam was the one least touched by the Renaissance. It never had its maniacal attachment to faith and force—just using guns and swords against enemies—it never had that tempered by the Enlightenment. You know, Voltaire, the Jeffersonian view that the prioper response to opposing ideology is to present your own ideology and to have arguments. Judaism and Christianity both obviously were tempered by Enlightenment thinking. Islam never had that kind of Enlightenment element injected into it. And so today of all the world’s great religions… it is the most fascistic and terror-mongering because it doesn’t even have that semblance of respect for reasoned discourse… It’s no accident that worldwide terrorism is motivated by fundamentalist Muslims.”

• Bowerbirds
• Megafaun
• Birds of Avalon
• Red Collar
• The Love Language
• The Future Kings of Nowhere

Also noteworthy (I could go on about all the shows–Pipe!–but Trekky has a good guide here) is the Rock Paper Scissors art/music event Saturday afternoon. If nothing else, you can be a humanitarian and buy some of Red Collar drummer Jonathan Truesdale photos to help him work out some medical bills caused by CMJ (see the story for clarification).

See you at Troika.

[Photo of Bowerbirds in Paris by Oliver Peel. Courtesy Flickr.]

[Photo by Anahita Farahani. Courtesy flickr.com]

[Photo courtesy flickr.com, by Helena Agmar]