CULTURE-USA: Who Will Teach the Teachers about Muslims?

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 16 1997 (IPS) - After the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, one California teacher came up with a fresh approach to further the words in the vocabulary of her seventh-grade students. She decided to teach them the verb “to bomb” by using it in the sentence, “Muslims bombed Oklahoma City because Allah told them to do so.”

Of course, Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of the April 1995 bombing and sentenced to death in July but, then again, the teacher was making a point about language, not current history.

As the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found in its recent monitoring of U.S. schools, other educators also have peculiar ideas about Islam. One Board of Education official in South Carolina called Islam a “cult ” which worships Lucifer, the Christian (and, for the record, the Muslim) devil.

Matters are worse for Muslim students who wear traditional Islamic dress, such as ‘kufi’ skullcaps for boys and headscarves for girls, CAIR argues. One Florida boy was threatened with expulsion if he did not remove his kufi, while Muslim girls from New Jersey to California reported being harassed if they wear headscarves – or even assaulted by other students trying to remove the scarves.

For CAIR, which lobbies against anti-Muslim discrimination, the situation calls for a guide to teach the teachers, so that Muslims will feel comfortable in the classroom. Accordingly, they have come out with a 16-page booklet, called ‘An Educator’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practises’.

“As the Muslim population in schools grows, educators will need accurate information about Islam in order to deal with issues of religious accommodation,” says CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. “We must find a balance between the needs of school systems and the religious obligations of Muslim students.”

To that end, the CAIR booklet provides basic information about the everyday lives of Muslims: dietary laws governing ‘halal’ (licit) and ‘haram’ (illicit) foods; the five-times-a-day schedule of prayers; and explanations about controversial clothing requirements, like ‘hijab’ covering for women.

Some typical student concerns, like worries about eating pork (forbidden in Islam) or the need to observe Muslim holidays, lead CAIR also to recommend other steps to improve classrooms. School cafeterias should clearly mark food with pork in it, the booklet advises, perhaps by labelling the item with the picture of a pig. Major exams should not be held on the same days as the twice- yearly ‘Eid’ holidays, CAIR adds.

In terms of fostering better understanding with the six million American Muslims, the guidebook offers relatively modest steps.

Some Muslim teachers in New York have tried other ambitious ventures, including the creation of private Montessori (or independently taught) schools for Muslims, which focus on Islamic history and lessons on the Holy Quran, the religion’s key text.

The recent events represent a sea change from previous years, when Islam was either largely omitted from school texts or presented, as one standard U.S. history textbook put it, as a “religion spread by the sword.” Groups like CAIR and the American Muslim Council now examine textbooks to check for anti- Muslim bias, and derogatory references about Islam are being dropped. The teachers are learning a few new things, after all.