Muslim Heretics Conference

ISLAM’S FOUNDATIONS AND PAST (continued)

After jihad, in some textbooks, comes Islamic law, shariah, which textbooks spell in a variety of ways. In their definitions, some textbooks lapse into intentional vagueness. The Holt seventh-grade volume says Islamic law “makes no distinction between religious beliefs and daily life.” This is absolutely correct, but the textbook does not explain what this statement means. Shariah is a “law” very different from the one that Americans understand. Separation of church and state is an alien concept to most Muslims. The struggle against the infidel (jihad) is rooted in theological law (shariah). “Shari’ah sets rewards for good behavior and punishments for crimes,” the Holt book says. What are “good behavior” and “crimes”? The volume does not explain, for example, that apostasy is officially a capital crime. Renunciation of Islam may be regarded as treason, not an act of conscience or personal choice. Nor does it explain, for example, that Saudi Arabia and Iran today exact the death penalty for homosexuality. It does not point out that freedom of religion is forbidden in nations throughout the Muslim world.

“The primary source of Islamic law is the Qur’an. Rules and precepts that are clearly stated in the Qur’an are not open to debate and must be accepted at face value,” Jamal J. Elias says. “The system of Islamic law, or Shari’a, attempts to regulate all aspects of human life.” Bernard Lewis concurs in several passages:

• In an Islamic state, there is in principle no law other than the shar’ia, the Holy Law of Islam.
• There is, for example, no distinction between canon law and civil law, between the law of the church and the law of the state, crucial in Christian history. There is only a single law, the shari’a, accepted by Muslims as of divine origin and regulating all aspects of human life: civil, commercial, criminal, constitutional, as well as matters more specifically concerned with religion in the limited, Christian sense of that word.
• The principal function of the Islamic state and society was to maintain and enforce these rules.
• . . . the idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, or any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to Muslim thought.

Any number of important study points thus cry for attention. Islamic law does not have much capacity or desire to promote freedom of religion. It is not “tolerant” by nature. The idea of Islamic coexistence with other systems of belief is at odds with foundational beliefs as prescribed in the Qur’an (a revelation) and the Hadiths (commentary on Muhammad). Sharia sanctions violence against nonbelievers. Deviations from any Qur’anic declaration may be risky. They may be judged as violations of the faith and subject to worldly punishment. Students learn none of this. What do they read instead? The Prentice Hall seventh-grade volume states:

Muhammad taught that there was no difference between everyday life and religious life. Living a proper life meant following God’s laws as revealed in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. These laws are collected in the Islamic law known as the Sharia. Sharia is an Arabic word meaning “the way that leads to God.”

The Sharia was based on the Qur’an and Sunnah. But those sources could not cover every situation that might come up. When in doubt, Muslims turned to religious scholars. Their judgments also made up part of the Sharia.

Muhammad himself saw the need for such judgments. In an account from the Hadith, or written record of the Sunnah, Muhammad asked a governor by what law he would rule. The governor answered:

“‘by the law of the Qur’an.’ ‘But if you do not find any direction therein,’ asked the Prophet. ‘Then I will act according to the Sunnah of the Prophet,’ was the reply. ‘But if you do not find direction in the Sunnah,’ he was asked again. ‘Then I will exercise my judgment and act on that,’ came the reply. The Prophet raised his hands and said: ‘Praise be to Allah.’”

What does Prentice Hall mean when it says, “Muhammad taught that there was no difference between everyday life and religious life?” Doesn’t a tale from the Hadith, which is sacred commentary on Muhammad’s revelation, scripture that ends with the declaration “Praise be to Allah,” carry a decidedly devotional finish? What is the Sunnah? Have Islamic content providers prompted the editors here? Do the tone and diction suggest an element of scripting? History Alive! contains detailed, arcane information on Islamic schools of jurisprudence and legal viewpoints that for thirteen-year-olds is conspicuously age-inappropriate. Of shariah and Islamic law, the volume says:

Shari’ah covers Muslims’ duties toward God. It guides them in their personal behavior and relationships with others. Shari’ah promotes obedience to the Qur’an and respect for others. . . . Islamic law helped Muslims live by the rules of the Qur’an. By the 19^th century, however, many Muslim regions had come under European rule. Western codes of law soon replaced the Shari’ah except in matters of family law. Today, most Muslim countries apply only some parts of Islamic law. But Shari’ah continues to develop in response to modern ways of life and its challenges.

The last sentence is ambiguous, and, as in many other textbooks, such vapid phrases as “continues to develop in response to modern ways of life and its challenges” substitute for insight and information. Some passages are meaningless. The chapter summary concludes: “Shari’ah, or Islamic law, helps Muslims live by the teachings of the Qur’an. It includes practices of daily life as well as the duty to respect others.” As in the case of jihad, the Glencoe and the McDougal Littell seventh-grade volumes do not mention shariah, omitting the topic in acts of deliberate self-censorship, fearing Islamist pressure, more eager to avoid controversy than to complete the narrative or teach students.

History textbooks highlight the theme of Islamic tolerance, celebrating what the Prentice Hall volume ludicrously calls a “multicultural society.” Once non-Arabs have been conquered, students learn, those societies and civilizations with non-Islamic systems of belief live in a wonderland of interreligious cooperation. TCI describes how “a unique culture flourished in cities like Cordoba and Toledo, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in peace.” In the McDougal Littell volume, lesson titles include the “Magic of Baghdad,” “The Glory of Cordoba,” “A Golden Age in the East,” “The Legacy of the Muslim Golden Age,” and “A Golden Age for Jews.”

The accompanying Teacher’s Annotated Edition includes a catechistic set of questions and answers that it labels an “Essential Question”:

Q: How did the caliphs who expanded the Muslim Empire treat those they conquered?

A: They treated them with tolerance.

Review:

Q: Why were the caliphs tolerant of the people they conquered?

A: Because the Qur’an did not allow Muslims to force people to convert to Islam.

At a time when intolerance marks Islamic cultures worldwide and multiculturalism is a ruling idea in U.S. schools, these “wonderland-of-tolerance” tropes constitute a major content distortion. To present Islam’s past exclusively through the lens of “tolerance” and “equality,” indeed, as a unique triumph of interreligious harmony, is seriously misleading. The McDougal Littell volume broadly states: “Muslim law requires that Muslim leaders offer religious toleration.” When the Prentice Hall volume proclaims medieval Spain to be a “multicultural society,” it illustrates the promiscuous application of the multicultural label by and in school curriculums.

While seventh-grade textbooks describe Islam in glowing language, they portray Christianity in harsh light. Students encounter a startling contrast. Islam is featured as a model of interfaith tolerance; Christians wage wars of aggression and kill Jews. Islam provides models of harmony and civilization. Anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, and wars of religion bespot the Christian record. Textbooks do not lament the West’s loss of control of three sides of the Mediterranean and Islam’s subsequent European incursions for nearly a thousand years. Charles Martel is no longer a legend. The Reconquest and the Siege of Vienna are no longer landmark events. In some cases textbook carelessness with European history - matched by enthusiasm for non-Western history - is staggering. To illustrate medieval domestic life in Europe, for example, TCI’s History Alive! chooses a seventeenth-century Italian baroque painting by Saraceni, one that illustrates an obscure moral allegory of a legendary fifth-century B.C. Roman king. Compounding the offense, the textbook labels the painting a Caravaggio.

The Crusades, students learn from TCI, were “a terrible ordeal for many Muslims. An unknown number of Muslims lost their lives in battles and massacres. Crusaders also destroyed Muslim property.” TCI is correct to say the Crusades “began as a response to the threat posed by the Seljuks.” But then the book contradicts itself. It describes the Crusades as “religious wars launched against Muslims by European Christians.” When the Seljuks or other Muslim groups attack Christian peoples, kill them, and take their lands, the process is referred to as “building” an empire. Christian attempts to restore those lands are labeled as “violent attacks” or “massacres.” A passage about the Second Crusade characterizes Christians as “invaders” - something they would have denied - while the Seljuks are simply “migrating” into Christian territories.

The treatment of the Crusades by History Alive! is riddled with major and minor errors, according to the historian Thomas F. Madden. The pope “promised entry to heaven to all who joined the fight.” Not so. The Crusaders wore red crosses, the book says. No, only Templars did. Richard spent the majority of his reign on crusade. Again, incorrect. Muslims “like Europeans, began to adopt a standing army,” the book states. There was no such thing in the Middle Ages. Standing armies were a product of the seventeenth century. In 1099 Jerusalem was captured; it did not surrender. “The victorious crusaders massacred Muslims and Jews throughout the city. The survivors were sold into slavery,” the book proclaims. In the eleventh century enslavement was a Muslim custom, not a Christian one. The Children’s Crusade was not a march of “tens of thousands of peasant children,” as TCI claims, nor a crusade. It was made up of adults, mostly poor. The story about Marseilles merchants’ selling these people into slavery is a story, a tale. No historian accepts its historicity.

TCI’s suggestion that the European economy developed liquid capital, banking, and taxation on account of the Crusades is ridiculous, Madden continues. It is equally absurd, he points out, to suggest that monarchs grew in power because nobles were frequently away on crusade. The narrative is biased. For example, Saladin is praised for not killing his prisoners in Jerusalem in 1187. What is left out is that Saladin had planned to massacre the entire city, but the defenders threatened to destroy the Muslim holy sites unless he agreed to allow the city to peacefully surrender to him.

The McDougal Littell textbook goes one step further than TCI in its revisionism. It contains a section titled “Defending Muslim Spain,” forgetting that Muslims encroached upon Christian territory, and not the other way around. “Christians are trounced and portrayed as murderers of the Muslim and Jewish people,” one parent complained of History Alive, objecting to bias. The Jews are “victimized, persecuted and murdered by the Christians. All the while, Islam builds great and grand new empires, has many great and wonderful achievements in architecture, education, science, geography, mathematics, medicine, literature, art and music, and ultimately rules benevolently over the Jewish and Christian people.”

In recasting the Crusades seventh-grade textbooks highlight Christian oppression of the Jews. Textbooks give the impression of unadulterated and unrelenting, centuries-long Christian anti-Semitism, and they put the subject into the center of the Middle Ages. This is not an area of history with settled claims and agreement among historians. Equally authoritative references exist to which historians and others point for verification. But a number of textbook passages, reviewers found, were exaggerated and disproportionate - and, in places, inaccurate. “Mobs of peasants turned on Jews who would not instantly convert to Christianity. Thousands of Jews killed themselves and their families in order to escape the Crusaders’ knives,” says the Glencoe text, for example, combining sharp language with disputed fact. The McDougal Littell volume claims that “Jews who faced persecution in Christian lands flocked to al-Andalus to enjoy this freedom.” No, in fact, Jews who migrated (not “flocked”) to Andalusia did so to escape persecution in Muslim lands. Seventh-grade textbooks also focus on anti-Semitism in lessons on medieval trade and commerce. From the unrelieved picture, a student or teacher would never know that few Jews lived in medieval Europe, that Christians and European Jews could interact in mutual interest and even amity, especially in trade and banking, or that Jews were not doomed to virulent Christian hatred.

History Alive! declares in bold strokes: “The violence unleashed by the Crusades caused great suffering for the Jews. Crusaders in the Holy Land slaughtered Jews as well as Muslims. Other Jews became slaves.” But when, precisely, did this general slaughtering and enslaving occur? The short of it is that this didn’t really happen, or relies entirely on slender, often contested sources. This passage, entitled “Impact on Jews as a Group,” continues:

During the First Crusade, European Jews suffered a series of violent persecutions. As Crusaders crossed northern France and Germany, some of them murdered whole communities of Jews. They destroyed synagogues and holy books. They looted homes and businesses. Some Crusaders tortured Jews to make them accept Christianity.

Anti-Semitism, or prejudice against Jews, spread among non-crusaders as well. Religious prejudice combined with envy of Jews who had become prosperous bankers and traders. Riots and massacres broke out in a number of cities in Europe.

The point of the Crusades was not to massacre Jews but to confront Islam, which had conquered Christian lands. The TCI volume, History Alive!, says Madden in his review, leaves the impression that killing Jews was a regular part of crusading. It was not. The killing of Jews was forbidden by church law, and those who engaged in it were considered criminals. The Crusades were a response to jihad and the loss of Christian territory. The history of the Jews and anti-Semitism is peripheral to the Crusades. There is no doubt that the position of the Jews in Europe deteriorated sharply from the twelfth century. Massacres occurred, and anti-Semitism was in certain times and locations intense. But that is a different story, and the result is textbook distortion.

While Christian belligerence is magnified, Islamic inequality, subjugation, and enslavement get the airbrush. Required to cover the status of women in the Islamic world, history textbooks find themselves in a muddle. In a failed effort to cover two troubling subjects - Islamic slavery and the subjugation of women - very quickly and as one, the Holt seventh-grade volume lapses into incoherence:

Before Muhammad’s time many Arabs owned slaves. Although slavery didn’t disappear among Muslims, the Qur’an encourages Muslims to free slaves. Also, women in Arabia had few rights. The Qur’an describes rights of women, including rights to own property, earn money, and get an education. However, many Muslim women have fewer rights than men.

The seventh-grade Prentice Hall volume introduces a section entitled “Men and Women” with two paragraphs and a long set-off quotation in bold, not from a document or highly authoritative source but from an extract from an otherwise unknown 1990 guide published by the defunct Middle East Editorial Associates and written by someone named John Sabini:

The Qur’an and the Sharia laid out clear roles for men and women. Men were expected to support their families and to represent them in the world. Women generally stayed at home, although some women rose to important positions. In general, however, women had fewer rights than men and occupied an inferior position. For example, a woman’s share of an inheritance was only half that of a man’s.

Nevertheless, in many ways Islam improved conditions for women. Before the development of Islam, Arabic women had virtually no rights. Under the Sharia, women and men had religious equality.

“As Muhammad once said: “All people are equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no claim of merit of an Arab over a non-Arab, or of a white over a black, or of a male over a female. Only God-fearing people will merit a preference with God.” -John Sabini, Islam, A Primer

Who Sabini is, what he is trying to convey, and the relationship of the Sabini material to the text immediately preceding it remain entirely unclear. Prentice Hall then features a sidebar that runs for two-thirds of a page in high color with 111 words of text on (as the book spells it) hijab, the Islamic veiling of women - material expressly designed to link past and present:

PAST: The teachings of Muhammad state that women’s garments should not attract attention. The female Muslim custom of hijab - wearing garments that cover the head and body - was followed only by upper-class women during the first few hundred years of Islam. In the Middle Ages hijab became more common.

PRESENT: Hijab today ranges from colorful scarves to black robes. Some women wear hijab, and some do not. Many wear hijab to follow Muslim tradition. Others think it allows them to be judged for themselves and not their bodies. In certain countries, the government requires women to wear hijab. Why do you think only upper-class women wore hijab in the early centuries of Islam?

This exercise is a total instructional failure. It contains vast misinformation in a few words. It makes no sense. There is no subject, no connection between past and present. It is vague. It does not begin to examine the emotional or psychological dimensions of the veil or, for that matter, why the veil is of abiding interest in the West. How can any student or teacher deduce an answer to the concluding study question?

At the high school level textbooks deal directly with the status of women in the contemporary Islamic world. Starting with a misleading headline, “Women’s Options Vary,” Prentice Hall’s The Modern World states:

Conditions for women vary greatly from country to country in the modern Middle East. Women in most countries have won equality before the law. Some women have entered professions such as law and medicine. In Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, many urban women gave up the tradition of hejab, or wearing the traditional Muslim headscarves and loose-fitting, ankle-length garments meant to conceal.

On the other hand, religiously conservative Saudi Arabia and Iran require women to wear hejab. In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive. In many Islamic countries, girls are less likely to attend school than boys. This is because of a traditional belief that girls do not need an education for their expected role as wives and mothers. Muslim women have begun to challenge this belief.

Yes and no, mainly no, as retrograde cultural forces in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan have in recent years discredited any embrace of Western ideas and social practices. What does “challenge this belief” mean? How and to what degree? Textbooks are not telling the truth if they fuzz the widespread gender-based subjugation that marks Islamic societies. What does it mean to be forbidden by law to drive a car on account of sex? Women in some Muslim countries who do not conform to strict social norms of gender separation and housebound seclusion may be shunned, oppressed, or punished, sometimes with quasi-legal sanction.

Instead of calling attention to these conditions and conventions, textbooks blur the subject and as a result make no sense. Glencoe’s Modern Times says that “in the 19th and 20th centuries, Muslim scholars began debating women’s roles. Many argued that Muslims needed to rethink outdated interpretations that narrowed the lives of women. In nations like Turkey and Iran, these debates led to an expansion of women’s rights and freedoms.” The text concludes: “There has been a shift toward more traditional roles for women. This trend is especially noticeable in Iran,” a gross understatement that typifies textbook language designed to circumvent harsh truths. Textbooks fail to register any objections to conditions of segregation, isolation, or enforced gender-based inferiority in the Muslim world that may have its roots in religion.

Social studies textbooks do not raise the issue of homosexuality in the Muslim world. As a matter of civil liberties, freedom, and due process, the subject is illustrative, contrasting Islamic culture with one aspect of Western modernity. Most high school students are not so sheltered that the subject needs to remain off-limits. The gruesome video-recorded 2005 execution of two Iranian teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, put to death for homosexual acts, is widely available on the Web and might chill the heart of every U.S. progressive, educator or not. Classroom silence about this kind of punishment, cruelty, and intolerance involves an element of cowardice. “One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement,” the cultural critic Bruce Bawer has asserted.

Textbooks mention Islamic slavery only obliquely, as with the janissary soldiers, or not at all. Enslaved Africans and Slavs were transported to Muslim lands from the eighth century on. Slaves were accumulated through conquest, tribute, and sale. In contrast to slavery in the Western Hemisphere, Islamic slavery did not have a racial dimension and slaves could and did achieve a variety of social stations, some of them of considerable power. Muslim enslavement went on from the Balkans to Africa and Central Asia, and the estimated fourteen million slaves taken captive by Muslim rulers all over the world was a larger population than the eleven million Africans exported to the New World before 1850.

In the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, in the late nineteenth century, an estimated twenty-five thousand slaves were traded annually. Vestiges of Islamic slavery persist worldwide. Despite the Qur’anic virtue of manumission, Islam “accepted slavery,” says the Columbia History of the World. “This institution left its mark on Islamic society more than in the West - economically, through the profitable slave trade, socially, through the institution of concubinage and the harem, and politically, as individual slaves gained power as favorites, bodyguards, and rulers.” Islamic scripture and doctrine do not condemn slavery or subjection.

If slavery looms large in Islam’s history, textbooks should highlight it as they do slavery in the Western Hemisphere after 1500. World history textbooks describe in agonizing detail the export of slaves from Africa to North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil, and the history of slavery in the New World; slavery in the far-flung Islamic world on several continents over the course of a millennium gets the airbrush. This glaring imbalance reflects a prevailing editorial mind-set that is often more sensitive to “cultural differences” than to accurate but disturbing perspectives that might elicit the protests of Islamist activists and watchdogs.

Family Security Matters » Publications » Islam in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us

ISLAM’S FOUNDATIONS AND PAST

Seventh-grade world history textbooks introduce Islam’s origins, creeds, and core beliefs as a blend of history and scripture, weaving together revelation, legend, and fact. “Muslims believe that God had spoken to Muhammad through the angel,” says the Holt book before going on to explain that “Muhammad reported new revelations about rules for Muslim government, society, and worship. God told Muhammad that Muslims should face Mecca when they pray.” Teachers’ Curriculum Institute’s History Alive! features a passage set off in large print and italics, a Muslim prayer from the Qur’an:

Recite - in the name of thy Lord!

Who created man from blood coagulated.

Recite! Thy Lord is wondrous kind,

Who by the pen has taught mankind things they knew not.

In its narration of Islam’s foundation story, the Prentice Hall volume concludes with a variant translation of the same extract, this time set off in heavy boldface type:

Seeking peace of mind, Muhammad retreated to a cave to think and reflect. One night in 610, according to Islamic beliefs, Muhammad had a vision and began to receive revelations. The angel Gabriel appeared before him and told him to spread God’s word:

Proclaim in the name of your Lord who created!

Created man from a clot of blood.

Proclaim: Your Lord is the Most Generous,

Who teaches by the pen;

Teaches man what he knew not. (Qur’an 96:1-3)

To set the scene of the origins of Islam and the teachings of Muhammad, the McDougal Littell volume features a lavishly illustrated page. Its central organizing motif is an inspirational but fictionalized tale about a seventh-century Muslim family traveling on the first hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca and the religious experience of two seventh-century children, Ayesha and Yazid. It states, “Nearly 100,000 have gathered for the journey.” The very size of the pilgrimage is a gross exaggeration. “Ayesha and Yazid stand with their parents for hours, praying in the blistering sun. But that memory soon fades when the sister and brother learn that they will spend the evening camping under the stars.” Ayesha and Yazid camping under the stars, under the watchful eye of the Prophet. The children later “agree with their parents that being near Muhammad was especially meaningful.” The enthusiasm of this invented story contrasts with standard textbook diction, which rarely expresses much emotion.

TCI’s lessons on Islam’s foundations are more wordy, detailed, and complex, containing stilted language that seem scripted or borrowed from devotional, not historical, material. The chapter entitled “The Prophet Muhammad” begins with the story of Abraham and Hagar in the desert:

Makkah (Mecca) was an ancient place of worship. According to Arab and Muslim tradition, many centuries before Muhammad was born, it was here that God tested the faith of the prophet Abraham by commanding that he leave his wife Hagar and baby Ishmael in a desolate valley. As Abraham’s wife desperately searched for water, a miracle happened. A spring bubbled up at her son’s feet. The spring became known as Zamzam. Over time, people settled near it, and Abraham built a house of worship called the Ka’ba.

Such detail runs through entire chapters of History Alive! Seventeen pages after this passage, the book reminds students of this foundation story in an extensive section on the Five Pillars. It continues its storytelling in ornate, enthusiastic language:

The Fifth Pillar of Faith is hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy city of Makkah. . . . Upon arrival, Muslims announce their presence with these words: “Here I am, O God, at thy command!” They go to the great Mosque, which houses the Ka’ba. . . . Muslims believe that Abraham built the Ka’ba as a shrine to honor God. The pilgrims circle the Ka’ba seven times, which is a ritual mentioned in the Qur’an. Next, they run along a passage between two small hills, as did Hagar, Abraham’s wife, when she searched for water for her baby Ishmael. As you may remember, Muslims believe that a spring called Zamzam miraculously appeared at Hagar’s feet. The pilgrims drink from the Zamzam well.

In the Holt seventh-grade volume two pages highlight a long prayer from the Qur’an to Allah “the Merciful.” The format is identical to that used on pages in the Holt sixth-grade volume that cover the Bible. This device typifies the ruling editorial principle of cultural equivalency: equal time for equal faiths, two pages each, using the same layout. One aspect of the scriptural quotations is strikingly different. The biblical passages are ethical teachings canonical in the Western tradition. The Qur’anic passage is poetic and devotional, more like the Lord’s Prayer or Apostles Creed. It begins:

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

It is the Merciful who has taught the Qur’an.

He created man and taught him articulate speech.

The sun and the moon pursue their ordered course. The plants and

the trees bow down in adoration.

In Islam this prayer serves a purpose different from ethical teaching - veneration and adoration of the Prophet -a difference that textbooks leave unexamined and unstated.

Among the textbooks examined, the editorial caution that marks coverage of Christian and Jewish beliefs vanishes in presenting Islam’s foundations. With material laden with angels, revelations, miracles, prayers, and sacred exclamations; the story of the Zamzam well; and the titles “Messenger of God” and “Prophet of Islam,” the seventh-grade textbooks cross the line into something other than history, that is, scripture or myth.

Lavish textbook praise of Islam continues after the presentation of these foundation stories. Some textbooks provide glowing declarations of Muslim social conscience. The Holt volume, trying to summarize Islam’s organizing principle, says: “People should help the poor.” It adds: “Helping and caring for others is important in Islam.” Muhammad “taught equality,” says Teachers’ Curriculum Institute’s History Alive! “He told followers to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in society.” The Holt seventh-grade volume says, “Fasting also reminds Muslims of people in the world who struggle to get enough food.” TCI says, “Muhammad told his followers to make sure their guests never left a table hungry.” The textbook continues, noting that Muhammad learned “about Arab traditions, such as being kind to strangers and helping orphans, widows, and other needy members of society.” These effusive formulations stop just short of invention and raise questions about the sources of information.

The textbooks feature manifold contributions of Islam to the arts and science, expanding coverage to a degree that seems out of proportion to the relative slimness of the material that the same volumes dedicate to European achievements. TCI devotes thirteen text-heavy pages to textiles, calligraphy, design, books, city building, architecture, mathematics, medicine, polo, and chess, some of it spun like cotton candy:

Singing was an essential part of Muslim Spain’s musical culture. Musicians and poets worked together to create songs about love, nature, and the glory of the empire. Vocalists performed the songs accompanied by such instruments as drums, flutes, and lutes. Although this music is lost today, it undoubtedly influenced later musical forms in Europe and North Africa.

Undoubtedly, the TCI volume declares. Yet the book acknowledges that the music is lost and the claims are speculative. Empty text dilates Islamic achievements.

The seventh-grade world history textbooks reviewed avoid all conflict and bloodshed in describing Islam’s push out of Arabia and rapid conquest of most of the Mediterranean world. They fail to explain how Islam spread in the seventh and eighth centuries. Islam appears out of nowhere, spreads smoothly and by implication without conflict. Once it was common to state that Islam was spread by the sword. Now, textbooks imply, it moves peacefully with traders. Islam is “brought” to apparently willing populations. People adopt it freely. TCI says, “An Arab man named Muhammad introduced Islam to the people of the Arabian peninsula.” The book continues, “Although the first Muslims lived in Arabia, Islam spread through the Middle East.” But non-Arabs did not passively “become” Muslim. They were conquered. Islam did not just spread. The Arab-Islamic conquest ended many centuries of Greek culture and Christian worship in the eastern Mediterranean. Sudden Muslim control of Syria, Egypt, and Persia was followed by the Muslim conquest of western Africa, Spain, and the Indus Valley.

Textbooks are trying, perhaps, to correct a misconception. Historically, as a conqueror, Islam was no crueler than its many adversaries. The notion that Mohammedanism was a “religion of the sword” forced upon the masses by bloodthirsty fanatics is based on a false reading of history that was discredited fifty years ago and is a view rejected by contemporary specialists. Michel Gurfinkiel of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute notes that the Islamic empire that swept beyond Arabia and quickly overran the mightiest powers of the day, Byzantium (Greece) and Persia, did so through alliances with religious rebels and internal political factions that did not share the beliefs of the regime. In Islam’s history the slaughter of conquered infidels was discouraged. Sometimes the fate of the conquered was slavery. Sometimes it was limited tolerance by the Islamic regime. In Islam’s early conquests Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians were to be the tax base of the state. One reason that conquered non-Arabic people became Muslims was to avoid being taken as slaves or to have preferential rights under Muslim law. Conversion gradually became a problem for the state as its tax base declined. Yet the idea of Islamic belligerence has lingering currency, not without reason. Efraim Karsh of King’s College London documents the long history of warring inclination and territorial ambition that makes Islam unique among the world’s major faiths, and the Economist magazine wonders, “Why is Islam involved in quite so many modern wars of religion?”

Students receive a different message from textbooks, one that points in another direction. As in the McDougal Littell volume, they read, “There was much blending of cultures under Muslim rule. Over time, many peoples in Muslim-ruled territories converted to Islam. They were attracted by Islam’s message of equality and hope for salvation.” McDougal Littell’s Teacher’s Annotated Edition reiterates this theme, telling instructors to stress that “many conquered people became Muslims [because] they found Islam’s message of equality and hope attractive.” What, exactly, was this “message of equality” and hope that teachers are told to stress?

In explaining jihad, several textbooks make an effort to cleanse it of belligerence. Defining jihad is admittedly difficult, as definitions in circulation vary radically. The common assertion now is that translating jihad as “holy war” is entirely wrong and that old translations are incorrect. But in fact, authorities and scholarship of varying perspectives conceive jihad to be a sacred obligation to extend Islam’s power - religious and territorial - by persuasion or force.

Jihad is “sacred” or “holy” struggle. Jihad is also a “just struggle” against the disbeliever. It is a religious struggle. A religion professor and college textbook author, Jamal J. Elias, says, “The concept of jihad covers all activities that either defend Islam or else further its cause.” Jihad is constructed as a “holy war” in much Muslim scripture. Historically, jihad involves efforts to subjugate or convert, impose sharia, and take political and military control over non-Muslim territory. Today, in government circles, in the foreign policy establishment, in the international community, among newswriters and editorialists and academics, that is how the word jihad is used. It is how Middle Eastern terrorists and Al Qaeda use the term. When Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006, his final words were: “I am a militant and I have no fear for myself. I have spent my life in jihad and fighting aggression.”

Islamic scripture is inconsistent toward infidels, but a harsh, punitive, and aggressive voice, not a charitable or kindly one, prevails. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, observes that punishment and humiliation are leitmotifs in Qur’anic scripture. Given radical Islam’s mind-set, and observing the contemporary clash of the Sunni and Shia sects, Harris wonders why U.S. religious moderates and cultural leaders refuse to look critically at the element of violence inherent in the Islamic project. The idea that Islam is a peaceful religion merely hijacked by a few extremists, Harris and others warn, is a dangerous fantasy. “Fighting is prescribed for you” (2:216) and “Slay the infidel wherever you find them” (4:89) are only two of many suras that suggest a degree of intolerance and aggression. Yet the Islamic organizations that act as academic reviewers for textbook publishers assure editors that jihad is something entirely different. It is a struggle against evil impulses, they say, misunderstood by the rest of us and in no way bellicose. To characterize jihad as holy war, they insist, would be a grave textbook error, yet a 2007 Pentagon-based study shows almost conclusively that Islamic law sanctions violence and that the Islamist threat to world security has a doctrinal basis.

New definitions of jihad started to circulate in U.S. history textbooks and classrooms in the 1990s. The engine was a 1994 Council on Islamic Education “guide” for publishers that maintained jihad meant “‘to exert oneself’ or ‘to strive.’ Other meanings include ‘endeavor, strain, effort, diligence, struggle. . . .’ It should not be understood to mean ‘holy war,’ a common misrepresentation.” Soon, jihad underwent a definitional overhaul. In this amazing cultural reorchestration, the pioneer was a Houghton Mifflin world history textbook, Across the Centuries, still firmly established in junior high schools. Across the Centuries said jihad is a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.” Jihad was reimagined as an “inner struggle” and element of Muslim self-improvement. These changes reflected the intersection of multiculturalism, suddenly a trendy social studies construct, and Houghton Mifflin’s commercial ambitions in social studies. Then and later, appearing from nowhere, the California-based Council on Islamic Education would become a fixture on the textbook scene.

Change was soon evident as well among high school textbooks. From 2001 on, Connections to Today, Prentice Hall’s market-dominant high school world history then and now, and several spin-off versions customized for California and other states, listed Shabbir Mansuri and Susan Douglass of the Council on Islamic Education as academic reviewers. The textbook says: “Some Muslims look on jihad, or effort in God’s service, as another duty. Jihad has often been mistakenly translated simply as ‘holy war.’ In fact, it may include acts of charity or an inner struggle to achieve spiritual peace, as well as any battle in defense of Islam.” As early as 2002 another high-profile textbook, Patterns of Interaction, a high school world history textbook published by Houghton Mifflin under the McDougal Littell imprint, did not mention jihad. Houghton Mifflin’s multigrade series then dropped jihad from textbooks; by 2005 Houghton Mifflin had apparently removed jihad from its entire series of social studies textbooks. The advisory role of the Council on Islamic Education in making these editorial decisions remains unclear.

But this was only the beginning. Among the history textbooks adopted by California in 2005, some definitions of jihad are more extreme and less valid. History Alive, the TCI textbook that Lodi and Scottsdale parents so objected to, provides the most detailed - and misleading - definition of jihad among seventh-grade textbooks reviewed:

The word jihad means “to strive.” Jihad represents the human struggle to overcome difficulties and do things that are pleasing to God. Muslims strive to respond positively to personal difficulties as well as worldly challenges. For instance, they might work to become better people, reform society, or correct injustice.

Then, in the next paragraph, which differentiates the “lesser” and “greater” jihad, the textbook tangles the subject and also seems slightly deceptive:

Jihad has always been an important Islamic concept. One hadith, or account of Muhammad, tells about the prophet’s return from a battle. He declared that he and his men had carried out the “lesser jihad,” the external struggle against oppression. The “greater jihad,” he said, was the fight against evil within oneself. Examples of the greater jihad include working hard for a goal, giving up a bad habit, getting an education, or obeying your parents when you may not want to.

Continuing the definition, TCI lapses into florid prose that invites questions about textual sources and scripting:

Another hadith says that Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.

Then it continues:

Sometimes, however, jihad becomes a physical struggle. The Qur’an tells Muslims to fight to protect themselves from those who would do them harm or to right a terrible wrong.

TCI leaves “those who would do them harm” and “right a terrible wrong” to the reader’s imagination. The textbook’s chapter summary reads: “Muslims also have the duty of jihad, or striving to overcome challenges as they strive to please God.” Since TCI describes jihad as being “the struggle against oppression,” students who hear of repeated Islamic calls to jihad against Christians and Jews that include the destruction of the United States and Israel must wonder who and what is at fault.

Other seventh-grade textbook definitions of jihad are ambivalent. The Holt volume defines jihad most accurately among the textbooks reviewed as “to make an effort, or to struggle. Jihad refers to the inner struggle people go through in their effort to obey God and behave according to Islamic ways. Jihad can also mean the struggle to defend the Muslim community, or, historically, to convert people to Islam. The word has also been translated as holy war.” The Prentice Hall volume offers a more acceptable and informative passage despite the unadorned declaration of Islamic tolerance:

The successful spread of Islam and Muslim rule was based on several factors. One was the decline of the Byzantine and Persian empires. Years of warfare had left these empires weak and vulnerable.

A second factor in the Muslims’ success was the skill of Arab armies. They were expert in the use of soldiers on horseback. They struck quickly and with deadly force in harsh desert environments.

A third factor was the energy and religious zeal of Arab warriors. They fought under the banner of jihad or “holy struggle.” In Arabic, jihad refers to striving hard in God’s cause. Sometimes it means a person’s internal struggle to live by Muslim principles. But it can also mean waging war to spread the Islamic faith.

Another factor helping the Arabs was their tolerance for other religions.

A final factor in the Muslim’s success was the rapid appeal of Islam itself. Islam offered followers a direct path to God and salvation.

The Holt and Prentice Hall definitions of jihad may be imperfect, yet they provide essential definitions that the Glencoe and McDougal Littell seventh-grade volumes do not. These two latter volumes fail to acknowledge jihad. The material has simply been deleted. This deliberate omission required editorial self-censorship at McGraw-Hill, and at Houghton Mifflin, where editors had previously whitewashed the definition of jihad in Across the Centuries.

Part Three will continue the focus on Islam’s Foundations and Past.

Family Security Matters » Publications » Islam in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us

AT THE END OF 2005 a major publishing event occurred in California. After a lengthy process the state adopted newly developed - not merely revised - world history textbooks. California has unique power to shape the content of textbooks across the country, and publishers make every effort to join its state-approved list of books for grades kindergarten through eight. Publishers Prentice Hall (Pearson), Glencoe (McGraw-Hill), Holt Rinehart (then an imprint of Reed Elsevier, now of Houghton Mifflin), McDougal Littell (Houghton Mifflin), and Teachers’ Curriculum Institute all received approval. The next year, local school districts across the state, selecting from this list, bought and put new social studies books into classrooms.

Not everybody was happy with the new books. Parents in Lodi, California, complained to school officials about the brightly titled volume History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond that had been purchased for seventh-grade classrooms. This book is produced by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute - despite its name, an aggressive privately held California-based educational publisher - noteworthy for its rapidly expanding popularity among textbook buyers. (The company claims that its books are adopted in one-third of California’s almost one thousand school districts.) For TCI “diversity” is the sell, and it is a good one. Curriculum supervisors at the district level rarely apply any other criterion in textbook selection. In recasting world history TCI pushes the boundaries of multiculturalism to a degree the larger publishers do not.

The Lodi parents were not objecting to a word or two that they took out of context but to a textbook long on chapters filled with adulatory lessons on Islam. In a passage meant to explain Jihad, they encountered this: “Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.” There was puffery and misinformation. Muhammad “taught equality,” said one chapter summary. “He told followers to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in society.”

In Lodi some of the parents objected on religious grounds, motivated by their awareness that educators and courts have minimized the story of Christianity in the curriculum. Others had different reasons. One thoughtful parent was disturbed by the “unrestrained admiration” that the textbook lavished on Islam in contrast to a sketchy and unsympathetic view of Europe and Western civilization. By late 2007 a heated community controversy had developed, fanned by an Associated Press report and Fox News national television feature on the uproar.

This was not the first time TCI had encountered local resistance and parental objections. In the academic year 2004-2005, History Alive! had been piloted in Scottsdale, Arizona, before the high-stakes California adoption. When parents complained about coverage of Islam - six months before California approved the textbook - Scottsdale officials pulled the book from local schools. They did not do so willingly. In Arizona, as in California, district administrators had selected the textbook for piloting and classroom use. The curriculum specialists who made the textbook selections had known little about Islam, but they were committed to “diversity education” and had bought TCI’s promises that it delivered a better curriculum.

It is not surprising that Arizona and California administrators would resist criticism of the books that they had selected. Long before the textbooks had arrived in Lodi classrooms, layer after layer of the local education bureaucracy had invested in History Alive! The Lodi Unified School District had formed a local selection committee, urged by the San Joaquin County Department of Education to use a “rubric” of “content assessment, differentiation for special populations, and peripheral materials.” (Peripheral materials are the CDs and lesson supplements that accompany student textbooks and teachers’ editions.)

This committee sent a recommendation to the local social studies “articulation committee,” made up of secondary school social studies teachers, and to secondary school principals. Then a curriculum council of teachers, site administrators, district administrators, and selected parents gave their approval to the choice. Finally, the local board of education approved it. According to parents who complained about the textbook, each group pointed to the other as the deciding agent, and one principal thanked the unhappy parents for their support. School districts receive all kinds of complaints about textbooks, of course, some of them “fringy” along those of merit. So in Lodi and Scottsdale official indifference and hostility to parental complaints prevailed. Parents claim the school districts brushed them off or labeled them as racists.

In Lodi some unhappy parents sought relief by bringing their complaints to the attention of national television news reporters; others were just trying to get local educators to recognize there was a problem. While some parent protests were ill informed or self-promotional, by no means all of them were. The complaints were not confined to Lodi. “I am concerned at the subtle hostility being directed my way now from officials at the school and school district, and am also afraid that it is creating an adversarial situation that will negatively impact my own child,” said a parent in Marin County, California, who objected to the content of lessons on Islam in the seventh-grade Houghton Mifflin volume.

To what extent were these parents justified in their concerns, not about one book but several? To answer this question it is necessary to review a new generation of textbooks purchased by junior and senior high schools since 2003, asking these questions:

• How do today’s history textbooks characterize Islam’s foundations and creeds?
• What changes have occurred in textbook material written before 2001? What additions have been made?
• What do the textbooks say about terrorism? What do they say about the September 11 air attack on the United States? About weapons of mass destruction? Do textbooks highlight Islamic challenges to global security? Do they describe and explain looming dangers to the United States and world?

There is surely no more perplexing an aspect of the history curriculum than Islam. For good reason. Views and definitions clash as in no other textbook subject. The propositions that inform the work of John Esposito, Albert Hourani, Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Edward Said, some of the most prominent Middle East historians and experts of our age - constitute an oeuvre of stunning, often hostile, polarities. Crafting accurate and meaningful lessons for teenagers and their teachers in a few words is a daunting task for editors, especially when political differences run high. California’s guidelines for evaluating instructional materials for social content forbid “adverse reflection” on religion as well as many other aspects of human life. Whatever “adverse reflection” is, such a mandate may be conceptually at odds with historical and geopolitical actuality.

Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade. Willingly, they adjust the definition of Jihad and sharia or remove these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths that the editors fear activists will contest. Explicit facts that non-Muslims might find disturbing are varnished or deleted. Textbooks pare to a minimum such touchy subjects as Israel and oil as agents of change in the Middle East since 1945. Terrorism and Islam are uncoupled and the ultimate dangers of Islamic militancy hidden from view.

None of this is accidental. Islamic organizations, willing to sow misinformation, are active in curriculum politics. These activists are eager to expunge any critical thought about Islam from textbooks and all public discourse. They are succeeding, assisted by partisan scholars and associations. It is not remarkable that Islamic organizations would try to use ready-made American political movements such as multiculturalism to adjust the history curriculum to their advantage. It is alarming that so many individuals with the power to shape the curriculum are willfully blind to or openly sympathetic with these efforts.

These distortions and biases about Islam in history textbooks could not prevail were it not for the all-important bridge between Islamist activists and multicultural organizations on and off campus. Both are eager to restrict what textbooks say about Islam. Multiculturalists are determined that social studies curricula do not transmit “Eurocentric” or “triumphalist” presuppositions about Western history and society. Middle East centers on campuses promote an uncritical view of Islam, often with a caustic anti-Western spin. Historians actively interested in taking world history curricula in this direction are prominent in textbook authorship. Encouraged to do so by reputable authorities, textbook publishers court the Council on Islamic Education and other Muslim organizations - or at least try to appease them. This legitimacy is bestowed in spite of longstanding questions about sources of funding and degree of control over publishers.

* * *

There are differences among the textbooks reviewed. Among the five mass-market seventh-grade world histories adopted by California and examined here, the Prentice Hall volume is easily the best designed and most visually coherent. That does not mean its content on Islam is somehow superior. To describe medieval Spain, in a glaring and anachronistic modern construct, the book labels Islamic Andalusia a “multicultural society.” The Glencoe volume’s comic book-like graphics and abbreviated content make it a substandard text overall, but its relatively neutral treatment of Islam does not fall into the fawning excesses of the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute’s History Alive!

On terrorism and U.S. foreign policy, American history textbooks for high school students exhibit less variation than world history texts. All the texts reviewed cover September 11 and U.S. policy in the Middle East more sharply than world history textbooks do. When it comes to high school world history textbooks, McGraw-Hill’s Modern Times - the California version of the flagship high school world history text, World History - is better organized than Pearson Prentice Hall’s The Modern World, which itself is a spin-off of World History: Connections to Today, the dominant world history textbook for high school students nationwide. Each textbook covers terrorism and Middle Eastern conflict. Major variations of quality are apparent in both texts, and general appraisal is impossible: some passages are solid and others unacceptable.

Even under the best circumstances, compressing and simplifying complicated content for students and their instructors in world history courses is a challenge. The results are often a disaster. The Modern World, for example, describes the Wahhabi sect in one word, “strict.” Take the complexities that lie at the center of the Sunni and Shiite schism. Textbooks cannot convey the subject in a sentence or two, and even if they could, the student audience does not have the background or maturity to grasp the significance of the split.

But even when all this is taken into account, the misinformation surrounding Islam in textbooks is disturbing, more so because much of it is intentional. Although publishers have developed new world and U.S. history textbooks at three different grade levels since 2003, they did not use the intervening five years to correct factual information or right the imbalances. They have allowed the errors to remain or have removed controversial material. Instead of making changes, they have sustained errors or, in deliberate acts of self-censorship, have removed controversial material. Deficiencies are more evident at the seventh-grade level than at the high school level. Why?

The next part in this series will cover Islam’s foundations and past.

Family Security Matters » Publications » Islam in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us: Part One of Five

An Islamist and a Muslim could be parallel.

“An Islamist is also a Muslim but Muslim is not an Islamist,” Tarek Fatah tells me.

Sadly, many Canadians cannot distinguish between a Muslim and an Islamist.

For them, these two are synonymous, but they are not — as is shown in Fatah’s 400-plus-page book, Chasing A Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, on shelves tomorrow.

Fatah, 58, founder of Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), a secular Muslim organization — and host of the weekly television show, The Muslim Chronicle — has written extensively about Muslims in Canada and elsewhere. He wants to help Canadians understand how radical Muslims have given a black eye to the entire Muslim community.

“Not many Canadians know that 90% of Muslims in Canada are not associated members of any mosque or a Muslim organization and yet they don’t have any access to Canadian policy makers. We moderates believe in parliamentary democracy and secularism,” asserts Fatah. He claims that “those who hate Canada and hate its institutions have an open door to all three political parties.”

In his book, he says that after the terrorist bombings in London in 2005, former prime minister Paul Martin arranged a hurried meeting with Muslim leaders.

To his dismay “all 19 men (invited to the meeting) were heads of mosques and imams, most in full mosque regalia, with not a single woman present.”

An ordinary law-abiding Muslim “doesn’t carry his his/her religion on a sleeve,” says Fatah. “Canadian politicians think if you don’t dress up, you are not a Muslim.”

The fact that Canadian politicians don’t listen to both sides, Fatah claims, amounts to “racism of lower expectations, as, in their point of view, the only good Muslim is a Muslim who wears his/her religion on a sleeve and doesn’t accommodate Canada.”

The MCC doesn’t claim to “represent the Muslim community as we just represent our 300 odd members,” says Fatah. “What we say is we resemble most Muslims. We demand strict separation of religion and state as the Koran didn’t prescribe that Islam should take on a political form — an entity that is the Islamic State.

“We respect people’s religious beliefs and strongly urge Muslims to understand that public law, public policy and legislation cannot come from religious institutions. These have to come from Parliament and legislatures, and the best example of this is India … where 12% of the population is Muslim and they thrive, but next door in Pakistan and Bangladesh — both Islamic States — Muslims suffer.”

Fatah reminds Canadian Muslims “to understand that their future lies in models based in India, South Africa and Canada.”

Members of MCC, he says, are “very complacent with the responsibility that we carry to ensure that Canadians understand most Muslims are fed up with Islamists — whether from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan. These are the four experiments that are disastrous failures and only imams in mosques take inspiration from any of them.”

Fatah repeatedly tells Canadian politicians “please don’t be fooled by the deceptive nature of Islamic discourse as Islamists want to blackmail us into silence by accusing any one who criticizes them (of being) either racist or an apostate.” He’s also not soft on alleged “home grown terrorists,” a group of young Muslims who were accused in June 2006 of being part of a terror cell.

In his book, Fatah argues that “Islam has been hijacked by radicals who falsely invoke the Koran (their holy scripture) and name of their prophet for their own political purpose that offends the spirit of Islam.”

A troubling question to him is how money from Saudi Arabia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, etc. can be injected into the local Muslim religious institutions while being hidden from public scrutiny. He says he has repeatedly suggested to Canadian politicians of all stripes “this money can come to Canada but it has to be transparent and the best way to ensure that is it should come through is via a cheque or a credit card.”

Religious institutions, are “charitable organizations” and so under their mandate, they can’t be allowed to mix politics with religion.

“Islamist motive is very clear. It is written in their books that are distributed widely in Canada by a number of Islamic organizations that call for Jihad against non-Muslims,” according to Fatah.

Because of his writings and comments, Fatah is constantly under threat from Islamists. He disregards such threats as proved by the release of his book.

“(An) Islamist is someone who believes in invoking Islam for a political agenda, but a Muslim on the other hand uses Islam as a moral compus for his own betterment and betterment of his family,” concludes the author and broadcaster.

He’s set to fearlessly stand by the side of his publisher tonight inside Atelier — 510 King St. W. — to release his book which denounces “the duplicity of imams who decry the West for the ills that affect Muslims.”

TorontoSun.com - Canada- The Muslim misconception

* By Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sedat Laciner
The US naming the religionist terrorists ‘Islamic’, ‘Islamist’ or ‘Jihadist’, includes many innocent Muslims into the terrorists networks. ‘Islamic’ for example means ‘something according to Islam’, or ‘something has no problem with Islam, OK for the Islam’. If you name Al Qaeda ‘Islamic’, you lose the vital public support against terrorism, because ‘Islamic’ covers all the Muslims yet Al Qaeda is a marginal group. The US has to separate very well the terrorists and the ordinary Muslims. Even ‘Islamist’ is a name of a group which is bigger than terrorists. Islamism is a political movement and all members of the Islamist group are not violent or terrorist. ‘Extremism’ or ‘radicalism’ also cannot reflect the real threat. A Muslim could be radical or extremist in one dimension of the religion yet he has not to be a terrorist or violent.

Likewise ‘jihad’ is not the right word for naming the terrorists. What the US does not know that ‘jihad’ is a good term for almost all Muslims and does not mean ‘armed war’. ‘Jihad’ according to Islamic sources means ‘struggle against the evil’’ and this struggle could be done by any tools, peaceful tools or arms. Even when it is used as ‘armed conflict’ it means ‘legitimate war’ not terrorism. The US and its allies have to name terrorists ‘terrorist’ without mentioning any religion. This will be the first step in overcoming terrorism. Otherwise the front would be enlarged. In Turkey, Turkish security authorities name terrorists as terrorist and blame them of abusing religion. They cannot get support from the mosques and respected religious authorities. Turkey has tried to get public Muslim support in its fight against the religionist terrorists.
Second, the US’ terrorism combat is mainly based on fear caused by 9/11, and the struggle became a ‘revenge campaign’ in the eyes of many experts and layman. Many Americans told me that “the US would not have occupied Iraq and Afghanistan if there was no 9/11”. It means that the terrorists can harm anyone but the Americans. If the terrorists declare that they will not attack the Americans but the others, we understand that the US will not fight against terrorism. It is unfortunate that the perception of the US among the Muslim peoples is not good enough to get their support in fighting against global terrorism.
Third, the US security forces do not respect enough the holly Muslim places in operation areas. They arrogantly enter the mosques and houses of the Muslims. Each terrorist killed or arrested in these holly and special places by the US soldiers create more and more terrorists. In Turkey’s struggle against religionist Hezbollah case however the Turkish police decided not to make any security operation in the holy places, like mosques. No police was allowed to enter the mosques even to arrest or capture Hezbollah members, although the police officers time to time knew some of the militants hid among the cemaat (mosque community). The aim was not to alienate the ordinary religious people from the State and security authorities. The Hezbollah was propagandizing that Turkish State was atheist and against Islam, and an operation in a mosque would may strengthen this propaganda. The police was careful not to be seen as anti-Islam during these operations. Unfortunately the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan provide abundant evidences to be abused by the Al Qaeda. When some of the American politicians suggest to occupy the holiest Muslim places like Mecca and Medina, Al Qaeda need no more poof to prove the US’ anti-Islam stance.
Fourth, the US has no close partner in the Muslim world in its combat. Strangely the US politicians do not give enough importance to the ideas of the legitimate Muslim leaders. As a result, US is alone in its combat and its anti-terror campaign has been perceived as an anti-Islamic attack against the Muslim peoples. As a matter of fact that Al Qaeda foremost challenges the Muslim states including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt etc. There is no Islamic State in the world has good relations with the Al Qaeda. So, if the US cannot find a close partner in this picture, it means that there is some problem with the US anti-terror strategy.
Another problem is that the US aims to change the borders, leaders and regimes in the Middle East, heart of the global terror according to the US. However the main target should have been the terrorists’ ideological challenge and the environment causing terrorism. The Iraq case vividly showed that changing the leaders do not put an end to terrorism, but nourishing and spreading terrorist movements.
The US needs a combat philosophy and internal partners in its struggle. Turkish Islam provides the needed ideological tools and the Turkish security forces could be the insider partner for the Americans in their global terror ‘war’. Even Muslim Turkey searched partnership of the religious authorities. For instance one of the measures taken by the police against the religionist terrorists in Turkey was co-operation with Turkish Department of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). The religious experts analyzed the Hezbollah’s claims and prepared the anti-dote of these arguments. All these documents were put on the educational web sites of the Diyanet. The imams were trained to face the Hezbollah challenge. No Hezbollah name was mentioned in the anti-Hezbollah training materials.
Fundamentals of political democracy (separation of Mosque and State, and the political sovereignty of the people) have roots in some Muslim countries. The Muslim intellectuals in Istanbul, Damascus etc. have long struggled to co-exist Islam and modernity. Progressive political reform is actually within the tradition of the whole region. But encouragement and co-operation between the US and the Middle Eastern countries needed for success stories. In order to encourage the moderate and peaceful Islam the security men have to be in co-operation with the religious authorities and they should get internal support.
Turkey also may lead the anti-terror campaign at institutional level too. Turkish security forces, in co-operation with the US, may train the police and special departments in other Muslim countries. As a matter of fact that Turkish, Egyptian, Pakistani etc. police can overcome the terrorist movements if the Western financial and technical supports are provided. The leading actors in combating terrorism should be the Muslim police not the ‘Christian American soldiers’. Turkey attempts to open police offices in Pakistan and Afghanistan, yet the financial problems slow down the initiative. Turkish Police Academy and security institutions also give training and anti-terrorism courses to high-ranked police officers from the Balkans, Middle East and the Central Asia. However the financial limits again do not allow greater projects on combating religionist terrorism.
* slaciner@gmail.com

JTW News - Lessons from the Turkish Experience for the US’ Fight against ‘Global Terrorism’

HRT

Azizah al Hibri (left, photo M. Fahsi) and Asma Lamrabet (photo ©)

14 May 08 - Islam is a victim of patriarchal interpretations of the Koran which date back to bygone days and don’t correspond to the original egalitarian message. This is the concept promoted by two Muslim experts, one a Moroccan and the other American Lebanese who are examining the condition of women in Islam

Magda Fahsi/Human Rights Tribune, Brussels - « It has become banal to present Islam as one of the main brakes on modern day life, on women’s rights. The result is that we Muslim women spend our time justifying ourselves and covering ourselves in confusion about the situation of Muslim women whether in Nigeria, Sudan or Afghanistan”. Asma Lamrabet, doctor in the children’s hospital in Rabat, Morocco, co coordinator of a group of research and reflection on Muslim women and author of books on this issue willingly criticises the “simplistic media political” debate of some in the West, prompt to call Islam “retrograde” and to say that “the Muslim woman has become a cultural icon of oppression in the name of religion”.

If she freely admits that the situation of Muslim women is far from being ideal, it is not, she believes, the religious texts which are responsible. “No where in the Koran does it say that men are superior to women”. A belief that Azizah al Hibri, professor of law at the university of Richmond in Virginia in the United States and president of the Karamah Association of Muslim human rights lawyers. The Koran says that “men and women were created from the same soul and have the same spiritual and human nature. The prophet himself said that women were half of man. You see that is far from the vision of Eve created from the rib of Adam!”

According to Azizah al Hibri, the Koran recognises a series of women’s rights. She says it is “wrong to say that they can not work. The Prophet for example regularly consulted women on affairs of State and he intended that they should play a major role in the community as well as in the family” As for female genital mutilation, honour crimes and forced marriages, they have nothing to do with Islam. “No marriage is valid in Islam without the free and clearly expressed will of the couple. Honour crimes are considered crimes”

Asma Lamrabet and Azizah al Hibri have never met (the interviews were done separately). One is from Morocco, the other is a Lebanese American. One wears a scarf, the other not. But they do have many similar views. For them, the problem stems from the fact that the first lawyers interpreted the religious texts in the context of the patriarchal and traditional society that they lived in. “These interpretations have been taken up by successive generations of lawyers and have ended up by becoming immutable laws” explains Asma Lamrabet. “You have to distinguish between the religious jurisprudence texts. It is this ossified case law that has not evolved for centuries where you find the worst discrimination against women”

As time passed, the gap between the spiritual message and reality widened. It is like this says Azizah al Hibri “that over the centuries a patriarchal culture created around the religious texts a framework of truncated interpretations which reduce the status of the Muslim woman to that of an inferior being”.

Bearing testament to the current flourishing interest in Islam, the two experts are examples of a growing trend that tries to find a third way between conservative rigour and what Asma Lamrabet calls the “nihilist vision” of certain modernisers who want to sweep under the table Islamic tradition. This third way is leading to a current contextualised reinterpretation of the religious texts.

In other words in order to fight the internalised beliefs of the supposed superiority of man and to free Muslim women from their crutches, you must, says Azizah al Hibri « go back to the original texts and rediscover what Islam teaches on these issues ». Asma Lamrabet adds that “loyalty to the Koran is just about knowing how to read it in context and with renewed inspiration”.

Translated from French by Claire Doole

A call to end patriarchal Islam | Human Rights Tribune - www.humanrights-geneva.info

Triggering a state of Islam

Tarek Fatah, National Post  Published: Tuesday, May 13, 2008

 

Andrea Comas, ReutersMuslims often ignore the poverty in their midst.

In this the first of four edited excerpts from his new book, Chasing the Mirage, Tarek Fatah explains why he is challenging fellow Muslims to be honest with themselves about the current state of their faith and their place in the world.

The phrase “state of Islam” defines the condition of a Muslim in how he or she imbibes the values of Islam to govern personal life and uses faith as a moral compass. In contrast, the “Islamic state” is a political entity: a state, caliphate, sultanate, kingdom or country that uses Islam as a tool to govern society and control its citizenry. At times, these two objectives overlap each other, but most often, they clash. Islamists obsessed with the establishment of the Islamic State have ridden roughshod over Quranic principles and the Prophet’s message of equality. However, Muslims who have striven to achieve a state of Islam have invariably stepped away from using Islam to chase political power, opting instead for intellectual and pious pursuits. These were the people responsible for what is glorious about our medieval heritage and Islam’s contributions to human civilization.

My book is an appeal to those of my co-religionists who are chasing the mirage of an Islamic State. I hope they can reflect on the futility of their endeavour and instead focus on achieving the state of Islam. Islamists working for the establishment of an Islamic State are headed in the wrong direction. I hope to convince my fellow Muslims that clinging to mythologies of the past is the formula for a fiasco. I would hope they stand up to the merchants of segregation who have fed us with myths and got us addicted to a forced sense of victimhood. Conventional wisdom in the Muslim world dictates that to move forward, we need to link to our past. Fair enough, but in doing so, we have all but given up on the future, labelling modernity itself as the enemy.

In 2002, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released a scathing report slamming Arab countries for oppressing women, subjugating citizens and failing to provide adequate education.

The report, written by distinguished Arab intellectuals and presented by Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, the former deputy prime minister of Jordan, accused the Arabs of squandering oil wealth and gave them a failing grade on virtually every measurable human index from education to economy, development and democracy. Hunaidi suggested that only Arabs can address what she called “some very scary signals,” and she summed up by concluding: “The three main deficits are freedom, gender and knowledge.”

Reaction to the UNDP report was predictable. Soon after it appeared in a Canadian newspaper column titled “Tough Report Says Arab World Stuck in Dark Ages,” a prominent Egyptian Canadian responded by accusing the newspaper of running a “racist” headline. Instead of reflecting on the report and worrying about its findings, the writer went on the defensive, making the outlandish claim that “there is more freedom of the press in Egypt today than in Canada.” It is this inability to face the truth that has become systemic among Muslim opinion leaders. This attitude is cause for serious concern. For it is far more difficult to acknowledge our mistakes than to blame them on a foreign conspiracy.

Acknowledging the unspeakable, to wash some dirty linen in public, is to say to my Muslim brothers and sisters that we are standing naked in the middle of the town square and the whole world is watching. If we do not cleanse ourselves with truth, the stench of our lies will drive us all mad.

My book is also aimed at the ordinary, well-meaning, yet naive non-Muslims of Europe and North America, who are bewildered as they face a community that seemingly refuses to integrate or assimilate as part of Western society, yet wishes to stay in their midst. Liberal and left-leaning Europeans and North Americans may be troubled with the in-your-face defiance of radical Islamist youth, but it seems they are infatuated by the apparently anti-establishment stance. This book may help these liberals understand that the anti-Americanism of the radical Islamists has little to do with anti-imperialism. In fact, the anti-Americanism of the Islamist is not about the United States, but reflects their contempt for the liberal social democratic society we have built and its emphasis on liberty and freedom of the individual itself. My hope is that Chasing a Mir-age may also reach the neo-conservative proponents of the so-called war on terrorism. I hope to make them realize that their warmongering has been the best thing that happened to the Islamist proponents of a worldwide jihad. The invasion of Iraq was manna from heaven for al-Qaeda. Bin Laden could not have asked for anything more. I hope that the conservative Republicans in the United States and their neo-conservative allies in the West will realize that in the battle of ideas, dropping bombs helps the foe, not the friend.

I hope non-Muslims realize that deep inside the soul of all Muslims lives a Rumi, an Averroes, and a Muhammad Ali. Equity and social justice run through every fibre and gene of the Muslim psyche. Poetry, song, and dance are as much a part of our culture as piety, modesty and charity. Challenging authority, even the existence of God himself, has been part of our heritage, and some Muslims have even lived to tell that tale.

I write in the same tradition. I hope my provocative invocations may trigger a spark, an iskra, that may lead us to do a serious self-examination about the direction in which we are heading. Can we end the catastrophic lack of honesty that so many of us have become accustomed to? It is my dream that Muslims, including my naysayers — and trust me, there are plenty of them — will read what I have to say and attempt to answer a few questions in the privacy of their solitudes, when they need not be on the defensive and have no fear of being judged. - Reprinted with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & sons Canada. Copyright Tarek Fatah, 2008.

Triggering a state of Islam