education

At the request of the Harvard Islamic Society, Harvard University has created female-only exercise hours at one of its athletic facilities, so that Muslim women don't have to work out alongside men.

The argument about how Western societies — from universities to nation-states — should accommodate their Muslim inhabitants tends, for the moment, to break down along the pre-existing left-right lines of partisan debate. The liberal administrators who granted the Harvard Islamic Society's request no doubt viewed it as an innocuous and reasonable gesture, and a case study in how multiculturalism ought to work. Critics of such accommodations, meanwhile, tend to be right-wingers fretting about creeping shari'a, and the possibility that multiculturalism's tendency to buckle under pressure from aggrieved minorities who reject its premises entirely is paving the way for the Islamification of the West.