What is being taught about Islam in the United States public education system? Across the U.S. muslim history in curriculum and classroom textbooks is being revised to present a "more balanced" image of Islam in this day and age of multiculturism.

ISLAM: A Simulation of Islamic History and Culture, 610-1100 is produced and marketed by Interaction Publishers, of Carlsbad, California. This corporation, which does business under the name "Interact" (and refers to itself by that name), promotes ISLAM: A Simulation as a curriculum manual for history teachers in grades 6 through 12. ISLAM: A Simulation consists of lesson plans and handouts for a three-week program of classroom instruction in which students "will simulate becoming Muslims" and allegedly "will learn about the history and culture of Islam." The lesson plans and handouts occupy 114 printed pages, contained in a loose-leaf binder.

ISLAM: A Simulation has no educational purpose, and it can serve no educational function. From beginning to end, it is nothing but a Muslim religious publication, produced by writers who seek to exploit classroom teachers for propagating Islam.

Most of ISLAM: A Simulation is built around a religious farce in which students, directed by their teacher, pretend to be Muslims who are living during the time of Muhammad (i.e., early in the 7th century). The students adopt "Islamic" names, don "Islamic" clothing, and form six teams representing the "early Islamic cities" of Cairo, Jerusalem, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova. Then each team acquires an imaginary caravan of camels, and the six teams engage in a caravan-race from Cordova to Mecca. The race fills five days of class time, and each team's progress on each day depends upon the team's success in collecting and reciting "information" about Islam. A note to the teacher says, "Clearly, this race intensifies the rivalry [among teams] and will probably heighten enthusiasm at the same time."

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""Become a Muslim warrior during the crusades or during an ancient jihad." Thus read the instructions for seventh graders in Islam: A Simulation of Islamic History and Culture, 610-1100, a three-week curriculum produced by Interaction Publishers, Inc. In classrooms across the United States, students who follow its directions find themselves fighting mock battles of jihad against "Christian crusaders" and other assorted "infidels." Upon gaining victory, our mock-Muslim warriors "Praise Allah.""

"The Interaction unit contains many other controversial elements. It has students adopt a Muslim name ("Abdallah," "Karima," etc.). It has them wear Islamic clothing: For girls this means a long-sleeved dress and the head covered by a scarf. Students unwilling to wear Islamic clothes must sit mutely in the back of the class, seemingly punished for remaining Westerners. Interaction calls for many Islamic activities: taking off shoes, washing hands, sitting on prayer rugs, and practicing Arabic calligraphy."

"Students study the Koran, recite from it, design a title page for it, and write verses of it on a banner. They act out Islam's Five Pillars of Faith, including giving zakat (Islamic alms) and going on the pilgrimage to Mecca. They also build a replica of the "sacred Kaaba" in Mecca or another holy building."

"It goes on. Seventh graders adopt the speech of pious believers, greeting each other with "assalam aleikoom, fellow Muslims" and using phrases such as "God willing" and "Allah has power over all things.""

"They pronounce the militant Islamic war-cry, Allahu akbar ("God is great.") They must even adopt Muslim mannerisms: "Try a typical Muslim gesture where the right hand moves solemnly... across the heart to express sincerity.""

'Become a Muslim warrior' - Daniel Pipes

EDITOR'S NOTES: It is well documented that in Muslim society their is no distinction between "church and state". ISLAM IS THE STATE. So why, in this day and age, when our public schools risk being sued for displaying a Christmas Tree in December under the dubious constitutional notion of "separation of church and state", are our children being forced to "simulate" being Muslim?

Arab World Studies Notebook - Middle East Policy Council and AWAIR: Arab World And Islamic Resources and School Services

""The Arab World Studies Notebook, a publication aimed at teachers, is a big collection of readings, lists of resources, and so-called lesson plans, all contained in a loose-leaf binder. It seems to exist in at least two versions. The version that I have examined shows 1998 as its copyright date. Pages i through xxi carry an "Introduction" and some other prefatory material; pages 1 through 513 carry the readings, the lists, the so-called lesson plans and some auxiliary items.""

"On page v of the Notebook, in the section titled "Introduction," Audrey Shabbas writes: "Believing firmly that teachers are the vanguard of change in any society, AWAIR has taken as its mandate, to impact the very resources chosen and used by teachers as well as the training and sensitizing of teachers themselves." The articles in the body of the Notebook soon make clear what Shabbas's phrase "training and sensitizing" means. It means subjecting teachers to heavy bombardment with religious and political propaganda."

"The Notebook is a vehicle for disseminating disinformation, including a multitude of false, distorted or utterly absurd claims that are presented as historical facts. I infer that the Notebook has three principal purposes: inducing teachers to embrace Islamic religious beliefs; inducing teachers to embrace political views that are favored by the MEPC and AWAIR; and impelling teachers to disseminate those religious beliefs and political views in schools."

"The promotion of Islam in the Notebook is unrestrained, and the religious-indoctrination material that the Notebook dispenses is virulent. Muslim myths, including myths about how Islam and the Koran originated, are retailed as matters of fact, while legitimate historical appraisals of the origins of Islam and the Koran are excluded. Shabbas wants to turn teachers into agents who, in their classrooms, will present Muslim myths as "history," will endorse Muslim religious claims, and will propagate Islamic fundamentalism."

"Not all of the phony "history" in the Notebook consists of religious myths. There are other flights of pseudohistorical fakery as well, including a farcical article in which Shabbas and someone called Abdallah Hakim Quick disclose that Muslims reached the New World in pre-Columbian times and spread throughout the Caribbean, Central America, South America and even Canada. By the time when Columbus arrived, it seems, the New World was fairly crawling with Muslims -- and English explorers met "Iroquois and Algonquin chiefs with names like Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik." Do Quick and Shabbas cite any sources to support such claims? No, they don't. They don't even tell the names of the English explorers, let alone the titles and dates of the documents in which those explorers reported their encounters with Amerindian Muslims."

The Textbook League

World Cultures: A Global Mosaic - Prentice Hall

"On page 571: "Muslims believe that Allah is the same God as the God of the Jews and Christians." If Muslims really believe that Jews and Christians worship Allah, those Muslims are badly deluded. Muslim propagandists in America stridently promote the notion that Allah is the same God who is worshiped by the Jews and the Christians, but the absurdity of that notion becomes obvious if we read Islamic lore and see some of the things that Allah allegedly has done. Allah has told Muhammad to warn true believers against receiving Jews or Christians as friends or allies [Koran 5:51 (i.e., sura 5, verse 51)]. Allah has told Muhammad to assert that true believers must fight all the infidels (the Jews and Christians included) and must compel them to accept and acknowledge the dominion of Islam [Koran 9:29]. Allah has prepared a blazing fire for all people who do not accept Muhammad's claims [Koran 48:13]. And Allah has appointed Muhammad to be the ultimate prophet -- the figure who outranks all the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and outranks Jesus too. (I don't know any Christians whose God has placed Muhammad above Jesus. On the other hand, I do know lots of Christians whose God is a Trinity -- but Muslims deny the doctrine of the Trinity. I also know lots of Christians who hold that Jesus was an incarnation of one aspect of the Trinity, and that he therefore was divine -- but Muslims reject the doctrine of Jesus's divinity [In the Koran (9:30), we read that Muhammad wanted Christians to be damned by Allah because the Christians said that Jesus Christ was the son of God.].)"

"On the same page: "Muhammad accepted the original teachings of the Jewish and Christian scriptures as God's word." That is rubbish. Let me focus on the "original teachings" found in the earliest scriptures of Christianity, and let me point out that those teachings were so diverse and contradictory that neither Muhammad nor anyone else could have "accepted" all of them [note 6]. Moreover, Muhammad couldn't even have known about all of them. Well before Muhammad's time, many of those early teachings had been suppressed by the men who had taken control of orthodox Christianity."

"On the same page: "[Muhammad] called Jews and Christians 'people of the Book' because they followed God's teachings in the Bible. The 'people of the Book' had a special status as ahl al-dhimma, or protected people, and Muslims were required to treat them with tolerance." The phrase "people of the Book" certainly appears in the canonized version of the Koran, but this does not signify that the phrase can be ascribed to Muhammad. (As I have said, the origins of the Koran are unknown.) That aside, any attempt to associate Muhammad with "tolerance" for Jews and Christians is laughable. When Muhammad acquired sufficient military power to attack Jewish communities in the northern part of the Arabian peninsula, he pursued a policy of dispossession, eviction, enslavement and even annihilation. (For example: When he conquered the Jewish tribe of the Qurayza, in 627, he ordered that all the adult males should be killed, and he divided their property, their wives and their children among his followers.) Later Muhammad adopted the practice of forcing Jewish and Christian populations to give up their arms and their autonomy -- and to pay tribute to him -- in return for his "protection." Here is an excerpt from a translation [note 7] of a letter that Muhammad sent to the Jews of Maqna. The phrase "the Messenger of God" refers to Muhammad himself, of course:"

"With the arrival of this letter your security is ensured and you are granted God's protection and that of his Messenger; . . . . for it is the Messenger of God himself who gives you protection from what he himself will not do to you. Your arms belong to the Messenger of God, as well as all the slaves that are with you, and the rings, apart from what the Messenger of God, or the envoy of the Messenger of God, will allow you to keep. And from now onwards you will owe a quarter of your date harvest and a quarter of your fishing yield, and a quarter of the yarn spun by your women. . . ."

"Muslim propagandists in America relentlessly publicize the claim that Muhammad awarded the status of "protected people" to Jews and Christians, but the propagandists never tell that Muhammad's "protection" service comprised subjugation, expropriation and extortion."

The Textbook League

Across the Centuries - Houghton Mifflin

Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of a 7th-grade textbook called Across the Centuries, has been less discreet. Across the Centuries is freighted with Muslim religious propaganda, much like the stuff in World Cultures -- but in the case of Across the Centuries, we can infer where the propaganda originated. When we look at the list of "Consultants" shown on the book's copyright page, we find "Shabbir Mansuri, Founding Director, Council on Islamic Education, Fountain Valley, California." And when we look at the lesson titled "Muhammad and Islam," in the book's third chapter, we discover what the word "Education" apparently means to Mansuri and his Council.

The "Muhammad and Islam" lesson begins, on pages 58 and 59, with a lengthy bout of Koran-thumping. Islamic woo-woo is peddled as history, and claims such as these are peddled as facts:

    * In AD 610 Muhammad met a "being" whom he later "identified" as "the angel Gabriel, or Jibril (juh BREEL) in Arabic." (How Muhammad performed that feat of identification isn't explained.)
    * "From Jerusalem, both Muhammad and Gabriel ascended into heaven, where Muhammad spoke to God."
    * Muhammad's God, Allah, was the same as the "God of other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity." (To create the impression that Islam is compatible with Judaism and with Christianity, Muslim propagandists in America continually publicize the claim that Allah is the same God who is worshiped by the Jews and the Christians. Their claim is absurd. For more about this, see my review of Prentice Hall's World Cultures.)
    * Gabriel told Muhammad that Muhammad's God had created man "from a clot of congealed blood." (Across the Centuries thus conveys to students a claim which appears in sura 96 of the Koran. Across the Centuries doesn't disclose that this superstition involving blood is contradicted by other notions that appear in other suras. In sura 6, for example, we read that man was made from clay -- and in sura 18, we see that man was made "from dust, then from a drop.")

"Later in Houghton Mifflin's "Muhammad and Islam" lesson, the notion that Islam is compatible with Judaism and Christianity is bolstered by the deceptive claim that "Many prophets and holy people who are important figures in the Bible are also described [sic] in the Qur'an" and by the statement that "Christians and Jews are respected as 'people of the book' by Muslims, and all their prophets are revered." (Muslim propagandists in America often publicize the claim that Muhammad called Jews and Christians "people of the book" and awarded them special protection, but the propagandists never describe how Muhammad "protected" Jewish and Christian communities during his conquests: If he didn't destroy them outright, he robbed them, put them under Muslim governance, and compelled them to make regular payments of tribute to Muslim collectors. Nor do the propagandists tell about the Koran's declaration that Muslims must not accept Jews or Christians as allies or friends [Koran 5:51 (i.e., sura 5, verse 51)] -- "O believers, do not hold Jews and Christians as your allies. They are allies of one another; and anyone who makes them his friends is surely one of them; and God does not guide the unjust.")"

Near the end of the "Muhammad and Islam" lesson, a coat of whitewash is applied to a notorious Islamic expression:

An Islamic term that is often misunderstood is jihad (jee HUHD). The term means "to struggle," to do one's best to resist temptation and to overcome evil. [page 64]

By whom is jihad "often misunderstood"? Historically, the word jihad has been associated with Muslim wars against infidels, and anybody who can read a newspaper knows that some of today's most conspicuous Muslims use jihad, quite unambiguously, to signify the business of destroying disbelievers and destroying the disbelievers' institutions. These Muslims understand what they mean by jihad, and so do we. Resisting temptation isn't what they have in mind.

The Textbook League