We Need a Hot Line Teachers Can Call About Islamic History Textbooks

Before September 11, 2001, history and social studies teachers had already been trying to learn more about a religion and a part of the world that most knew little about. After September 11, it is clearly urgent to teach K-12 students about Islamic history and culture. It is also crucial for their teachers to have suitable instructional materials that do not inadvertently promote some person’s or group’s religious or political agenda. What is needed is an independent, funded site, managed by a trustworthy history organization, that history or social studies teachers can contact to report problems they find in supplemental materials they have been given or have purchased or to obtain answers to questions about Islam or other sensitve history topics, much like a Consumer Hotline, a citizen information service, or a Better Business Bureau. For, I discovered, we have no way to ensure that public funds are not being used to disseminate a stealth curriculum on Islam.

One example of the difficulty we face in ensuring the academic quality of professional development for our K-12 teachers came out of a set of workshops on Islamic history and culture funded by the Massachusetts Department of Education in 2002. These workshops came to my attention when I reviewed copies of the proposed lesson plans prepared by the 20+ teachers who had just attended them. According to these lesson plans, the workshops taught teachers about “the Prophet Muhammad’s life events,” “when and where he received his first revelation,” and “some of the most important teachings in God’s revelation to Muhammad.” Historians would be puzzled for two reasons. Very little is actually known about Muhammad’s life. And his revelations—what he thought, or is reported as thinking, God told him—cannot be empirically corroborated or independently documented. They can be discussed in a public school only as matters of faith. Imagine the uproar if public school students were taught about Moses’s life events or reincarnation as historical fact.

Historians would also be surprised by the contents of the highly recommended set of materials that these teachers were given and that hundreds elsewhere have been exposed to since 1989, called The Arab World Studies Notebook, published jointly by the Middle East Policy Council and AWAIR (Arab World And Islamic Resources and School Services). Certainly, members of the Algonquin Nation were surprised. One article co-authored by the editor of the Notebook claims not only that Muslims from Europe were the first to sail across the Atlantic and land in the New World, but also that they reached Canada where they intermarried with the Iroquois and Algonquin nations so that, much later, English explorers met “Iroquois and Algonquin chiefs with names like Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik." In November 2003, the Quebec-based Algonquin Nation Secretariat issued an “alert” requesting an apology for, and correction of, “such nonsense.” A spokesman for MEPC told a reporter in April 2004 that the article with this bogus history had just been pulled from the Notebook, but its editor left unanswered how the 1200 teachers who have received copies of it in the past decade would be notified.

Unfortunately, the flaws in this and other “professional development” workshops I have examined fly under the radar, far from public scrutiny, allowing unethical pedagogical practices as well as blatant errors in fact and judgment to make their way directly into classrooms. Teachers in the workshops on Islam were apparently encouraged to teach their students about the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims by building classroom mosques, making prayer rugs, listening to tape recordings of the Koran being chanted, learning how to make a hajj, memorizing the Five Pillars of Islam, and dressing up as a Muslim from a country of one’s choice for a class presentation. No public school teacher would dare teach about Christianity or Judaism in this way, and parents would be startled by such activities if they only knew about them.

It is doubtful that university-based centers for Middle Eastern studies are helping to fill in the gaps in teachers’ knowledge about Islamic history and culture. They have already been sharply criticized for failing to base explanations of recent developments in that part of the world on facts. And in fact, the Massachusetts teachers had just listened to a weeklong series of lectures by eminent scholars of Islamic history and culture at workshops co-directed by two graduate students at Harvard, one the Outreach Coordinator at its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. To judge by the teachers’ lesson plans, they seemed to have absorbed nothing about some real and important phenomena in Islamic history, such as the role and status of women in Islamic societies, the1300 year-old trans-African slave trade to the Middle East, and the economic, military, and domestic functions served by slaves in Islamic societies.

Why do we need an independent “consumer hotline” on Islamic history (and on many other topics as well)? At present, there is no such resource. The National Council for the Social Studies has no mechanism for responding to complaints from its members about errors they find in the teaching materials they use, or for informing members of errors reported to it. And it seems that many Islamic sources themselves confuse matters of faith with matters of fact, abusing them both. Our teachers must have at the least an independent and authoritative resource to which they may report questionable material. Low quality professional development could cost us more than wasted tax dollars—our children’s education is at stake as well.