July 03, 2002

Daftness, Bloodiness

Daniel Pipes revisits the "simulation of Islamic culture" public school curriculum that was such a hot topic on talk radio a few months back. (It's news again because a public school in California is now being sued by parents over the issue.) Pipes:

Islam: A Simulation serves as a recruitment tool for Islam, for children adopting a Muslim persona during several weeks amounts to an invitation to them to convert to Islam. (One can't but wonder did John Walker Lindh take this course?) The educational establishment permits this infraction due to an impulse to privilege non-Western cultures over Western ones. It never, for example, would permit Christianity to be promoted in like fashion ("Become a Christian warrior during the crusades," for example.)

Militant Islamic lobbying groups want Islam taught as the true religion, not as an academic subject. They take advantage of this indulgence, exerting pressure on school systems and on textbook writers. Not surprisingly, Interaction Publishers thanks two militant Islamic organizations by name (the Islamic Education and Information Center and the Council of Islamic Education) for their "many suggestions."

Americans and other Westerners face a choice: They can insist that Islam, like other religions, be taught in schools objectively. Or, as is increasingly the case, they can permit true believers to design instruction materials about Islam that serve as a mechanism for proselytizing. The answer will substantially affect the future course of militant Islam in the West.


This is probably an exaggeration. At least, I hope it is: multicultural "dress-up days" are always going to be popular at schools because they're so easy, for students and teachers. They're not going anywhere. But it's interesting to consider these questions in light of the recent brouhaha over the Pledge of Allegiance and the Establishment clause. The same intellectual culture that seriously wonders whether the words "under God" constitute an "establishment of religion" accepts with apparent equanimity a public school curriculum which, as Pipes says,
presents matters of Islamic faith as historical fact. The Kaaba, "originally built by Adam," it announces, "was later rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ismail." Really? That is Islamic belief, not verifiable history. In the year 610, Interaction goes on, "while Prophet Muhammad meditated in a cave ... the angel Gabriel visited him" and revealed to him God's Message" (yes, that's Message with a capital "M.") The curriculum sometimes lapses into referring to "we" Muslims and even prompts students to ask if they should "worship Prophet Muhammad, God, or both."

There are multiple layers of irony and contradiction here, on both sides of the cultural divide. Both cultural conservatives and multicultural "liberals" seem to have chosen public education as their preferred battleground for the contest about the proper interpretation of the Constitution with regard to civil liberties. This is in many ways inapt, since questions about appropriate methods and content of pedagogy are rarely a matter of "rights" or "liberties" in a general sense. Pundits from both ends of the spectrum appear on poli-talk shows acknowledging the rights of their opponents to their opinions, while mimicking each other's intonation of the mantra "but we shouldn't have to pay for it." (Hey-- I agree that, whatever it is, we shouldn't have to pay for it: but it's not a very realistic position in this day and age.) The issue of public funding is certainly relevant to the establishment clause, but in the practice of public debate it often functions as a red herring. Is forcing elementary school children to dress up as fundamentalist Muslims and presenting the teachings of Islam as fact for three weeks out of the year an "establishment of religion?" The question is appropriate, and certainly more relevant than the same question with regard to the mere words "under God." But whatever the answer is on level of the law, on the level of common sense it hardly matters: it's bloody daft, as my wife would say. We shouldn't be doing it.

I agree with the overwhelming mainstream opinion in this country that the impulses of the cultural conservatives happen to be right on this one. These issues are only distantly connected to civil liberties as such: as a matter of common sense, it's clear that "under God" presents a minuscule danger to society, while teaching 7th-graders the tenets of fundamentalist Islam as inarguable fact seems like a bad idea. The fact that many of our educators and school administrators (as well as their TV cheerleaders) have failed to recognize this tells us, as Brendan O'Neill might say, more about them than it does about the Constitution or civil liberties. (Not, I might add, that there isn't a great deal of disingenuousness on both sides on this issue-- I daresay there are those who would love to institute a fundamentalist Christian version of the Interaction program in public schools.) Among multiculturalists, the vague pretense of concern for limiting public expenditure fails to disguise a distinct discomfort and outright hostility to the West and its cultural traditions. For some, this hostility looms so large that no other considerations are visible. The true objection to "under God" for such people, I suspect, is not that it's "religious" but that it's the wrong kind of religious. The classic 60s-radical impulse to attack parental authority and everything seemingly associated with it as a self-justifying matter of principle seems to have refined itself into an institutional eagerness to reject the Faith of Our Fathers specifically by embracing the faith of somebody (anybody) else's fathers. Whatever else you want to say about it, it's not neutral; nor is it especially "tolerant."

The multiculturalist ethos allows its often well-intentioned proponents to indulge in anti-Western and anti-American propaganda without admitting it and, for many, without even realizing it. Here, in the name of "tolerance" (ironically, again, a Western concept) the educational establishment seems to have adopted a program of indoctrination in the fundamentalist form of a religion associated with an infamously intolerant ideology with whose adherents we are at war. I don't think this idiotic school program presents a serious danger to the republic; but it is interesting that somehow this situation failed to set off the same Estabishment clause alarms as the conventional phrase "under God." "Irony" doesn't quite cover it.

Posted by Dr. Frank at July 3, 2002 01:41 PM | TrackBack