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.
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."
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