(dis)Honorary Degree Of Theological Ignorance
The United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall will host a special February 30th ceremony at which Dr. Moelarrycurly Joeshempjoe will present (dis)Honorary Doctor of Theological Ignorance degrees to a member of the United States House of Representatives and a US senator.
The unique not-really-doctorates will be awarded to Rep. Randy Fine (Florida’s 6th District, including Daytona Beach and Titusville) and Senator Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) in recognition of their peculiar efforts to spread fear, hatred and theological ignorance.
Fine will be honored for his Monday, December 15 social media post:
“It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible. Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us. The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.”
Tuberville, whose only employment before the Senate has been as a football coach (a position that requires no background in theology or American History), has missed several Senate votes in order to attend golf tournaments; he will receive his doctoral hood in recognition of his efforts to introduce legislation prohibiting the establishment of Shria and Roman Catholic Canon Law in the United States. “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult,” he wrote in a Sunday, December 14 X post. “Islamists aren’t here to assimilate. They’re here to conquer. … We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.”
While we’re guilty of kidding – or ridicule - about Canon Law, it’s critical to remember that in the mid-1800s White Angle-Saxon Protestants made similar statements about Irish immigrants, there were anti-Italian riots in the 1920s and the United States refused entry to more than 900 German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939.
Despite Fine’s two Harvard degrees (in Business, which may explain why he doesn’t understand history), we’re offering some facts and history they may not teach at Harvard Business or in Tuberville’s locker rooms.
The next time a legislator (or anyone) proposes expelling American-citizen Muslims or Muslims seeking asylum from persecution, consider:
Slaves were introduced into the American colonies in 1692; they had grown up and were enslaved, bought and sold in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria - lands where Islam had been known since the 8th Century and spread in the early 1000s.
Muslims constituted at least 900,000 of the 12.5 million Africans sold into the Americas and tens of thousands of the 400,000 Africans who spent their lives enslaved in the United States.
That means African Muslims and their (eventually America-born) children were present in Colonial America before White Southern Baptists, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism), Seventh-day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Methodist Episcopal Church, Christian Science, Pentecostalism, Scientology, Universal Life Church, the Church of Satan, and dozens of others.
Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, ninth secretary of state Henry Clay, and author of the US national anthem Francis Scott Key all wrote of their encounters with faithful and praying Muslims.
From the earliest years of slavery in the Americas, their fidelity to Salat - the obligation to pray five times a day - and dietary laws – Halal – were noted by slave owners and freemen.
While the colonial forces and the Continental Army did not track religions, we know freed Muslim slaves Peter Salem and Salem Poor fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill; Yusuf ben Ali (Joseph Benhaley), a Turk, fought with South Carolina forces against the British; and Bampett Muhamed served as a corporal in Virginia beginning in 1775.
Twenty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson, then a law student in Williamsburg, bought a Qur’an eleven years before drafting the Declaration of Independence. He criticized both Islam and Roman Catholicism as “stifling free enquiry” and thought both fused religion and the state at a time he wished to separate them in his commonwealth. Jefferson wrote that religious liberty and political equality should not be exclusively Christian and, in his autobiography, asserted that his original legislative intent had been “to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Muslim], the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”
Want more?
African slave Bilali Muhammad and a group of 80 - mostly Muslim - slaves armed with muskets defended Georgia’s Sapelo Island from British attacks during the War of 1812.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, in the first decade after 9/11, a total of 6,024 Muslim-Americans served in overseas deployments
Captain Humayun Khan was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star
Consider Humayun Khan. Born in the United Arab Emirates on September 9, 1976, he and his parents moved to the United States – first Houston and then Silver Spring, Maryland – when he was two years old. His father, Khizi, regularly took Humayun and his two brothers to the Jefferson Memorial and made them read the words inscribed there. In part, Humayun earned his acceptance to the University of Virginia by quoting Jefferson in his letter of application. Despite his hope to attend law school, Khan enrolled in the UV Army ROTC program and was commissioned after graduating in 2000.
“After we pinned him his lieutenant bars after commissioning, we got the first salute from him and it meant the world to us, looking at our young son in the uniform of this beautiful, beautiful place where we have made home. And the pride in his eyes and happiness and joy on his face was just amazing,” his father recalled. In a Mother’s Day 2004 phone call Ghazala told her son “I don’t want you to be a hero. I want you to return back to me safely.” Khan, 27, replied: “Of course I will. But mother, you should know I have responsibility for these soldiers, and I cannot leave them unprotected.” (“In Tribute to Son, Khizr Khan Offered Citizenship Lesson at Convention,” The New York Times, July 29, 2016. Richard A. Oppel, Jr.)
On the morning of June 8, 2004, while serving with a logistics unit of the 201st Forward Support Battalion guarding the gates of the Camp Warhorse base, Humayun was alerted to a slowly approaching yellow-and-white taxi. After shouting for his troops to hit the ground, Khan walked ten steps toward the taxi, signaling for it to halt. At that moment, before the car could ram the gates or a nearby mess hall where more than a hundred soldiers were at breakfast, the driver detonated his explosive device. Khan, 27, and two Iraqis were killed.
He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and buried at Arlington National Cemetery in a service that included the Nimaz-e-Janaza, an Islamic funeral prayer.
Brigadier General Sharif M. Khan
In September 2025, Bangladesh-born and 1997 US Air Force Academy Graduate Brigadier General Sharif M. Khan was named Director of Staff for the Golden Dome Initiative at the Pentagon, a top secret, high-tech missile defense program often called the Iron Dome of the United States. Twice deployed in the Middle East, he has held senior positions at the Pentagon, US Space Force, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Friends still call Salman Hamdani “an American Jedi.” He was a proud Pakistani-American, devout Muslim, New York City Police Department cadet and emergency medical technician when he gave his life saving others in the Twin Towers. Because of his religion, ethnicity and his disappearance in the wake of 9/11, he was initially suspected of participating in the attacks. His remains and medical bag were found in the rubble of the North Tower five months later.
Marine Corps helicopter pilot Col. Doug Burpee in 2004
At nineteen years old, as a student at the University of Southern California, Doug Burpee converted to Islam, a decision he made after studying the religion of the woman who was to become his wife. After graduation, he was accepted into the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. “When you join an organization like the military it’s a little bit like being on a football team. You have to take some razzing. You become part of the pluralism of the organization, which is made up of all kinds of persons from all walks of life. It’s OK that you’re a Muslim; you fit in… We are Americans. I am an American. I just happen to be Muslim. There is pluralism here” he told Deseret News. (“4 Muslim vets on life in the military,” August 19, 2016. Ruth Nasrullah.) Col. Burpee spent nearly thirty years as a Marine helicopter pilot and retired in 2012.
Corporal Kareem Rashas Sultan Khan
Corporal Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan enlisted in 2005 and was deployed to Iraq; he was killed while clearing a house in Baqubah, a town outside Baghdad in 2007. Posthumously awarded his rank and the Bronze Star Medal and Purple Heart, he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
U.S. Army Reserves Brig. Gen. Cindy Saladin-Muhammad
U.S. Army Reserves Brig. Gen. Cindy Saladin-Muhammad is one of only a handful of African American women to attain her rank in the medical field of the U.S. military. With her husband Sayyed Muhammad, who served in Army Special Operations, and her son, Air Force Tech Sergeant Reshard Saladin, the family has given a combined three-quarters of a century in U.S. military service.
Neither the football coach senator nor the entrepreneur congressman ever served in the Armed Forces of the United States.
Given the legislators’ (apparently) theology-free academic records, we remind them that Pope John XXIII convened the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (Vatican II) on October 11, 1962; his successor, Pope Paul VI, closed the Council on December 8, 1965. Four of the Council’s Constitutions are considered binding and dogmatic. Among them was Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church) issued November 21, 1964, which declared:
“But the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place among whom are the Muslims: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.”
While not dogmatic and binding, the conciliar document Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) is a pastoral statement of the relationship of the Universal Church with Judaism and Islam. In Nostra Aetate the almost 3,000 bishops gathered from around the world declared:
“The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions [Judaism and Islam]. She has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines which, although differing in many ways from her own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men…
“The Church, therefore, urges her sons to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions. Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, also their social life and culture…
“The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one, living and subsistent, merciful and almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, …who has spoken to men. They strive to submit themselves without reserve to the hidden decrees of God, just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan, to whose faith Muslims eagerly link their own…
“The sacred Council now pleads with all to forget the past, and urges that a sincere effort be made to achieve mutual understanding; for the benefit of all men, let them together preserve and promote peace, liberty, social justice and moral values.
“Therefore, the Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against people or any harassment of them on the basis of their race, color, condition in life or religion….”
Pope Francis and Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, grand imam of Egypt’s al-ASzhar mosque, November 15, 2016.
Messrs. Tuberville and Rice, your position is in direct contradiction to Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate. (We were going to say “opposition,” but we’re hopeful you would not oppose the dogmatic and binding teaching of Vatican II and the Roman Catholic Church.)
Twenty-two hundred years ago, a Jewish teacher observed “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.” (Matthew 25:40 -KJV) The lesson was profound and simple: Justice is universal. If you demand freedom of religion and belief and respect for American Christians – regardless of their immigration and citizenship status, Justice demands the same freedom of religion and belief and respect for Muslims.