Textbook
Lies About Islam
by Raymond Ibrahim
Pajamas Media
April 5, 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2113/textbook-lies-about-islam
In recent House hearings dedicated to examining Islamic
extremism, I stressed that the fundamental stumbling block to effective
policy-making is educational and epistemological. What people are taught
about Islam needs a serious overhaul before we can expect to formulate
strategies that make sense.
Worth heeding is former top Pentagon official William
Gawthrop's 2006 lament that "the senior service colleges of the
Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a
systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a
consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the
war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today
by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be
countered."
Three years later, the situation appears worse. After the
War College published something of an
apologia for the terrorist organization Hamas, defense analyst
Mark Perry concluded, "It's worse than you think. They have curtailed
the curriculum so that their students are not exposed to radical Islam.
Akin to denying students access to Marx during the Cold War."
Why, at a time of war, are students at top U.S. military
schools denied an objective treatment of Islam's
war doctrines? A report by the American Textbook
Council sheds light by showing how these academic failures have
much deeper roots.
After reviewing a number of popular textbooks used by
American junior and senior high schools, the report found that, due to
political correctness and/or fear of Muslim activists, "key subjects like
jihad, Islamic law, [and] the status of women are whitewashed." Regarding
the strikes of 9/11, one textbook never mentions Islamic ideologies,
referring to the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers as "teams of terrorists" — this
despite the fact that al-Qaeda has repeatedly articulated its hostile
worldview through an Islamist paradigm, with a stress on hating "infidels"
and waging holy war (see The Al Qaeda Reader).
Speaking of jihad, one seventh-grade textbook explains,
"Jihad represents the human struggle to overcome difficulties and do
things that are pleasing to God. Muslims strive to respond positively to
personal difficulties as well as worldly challenges. For instance, they
might work to be better people, reform society, or correct injustice." By
not informing students that all these aspects mean something different for
Muslims — killing an apostate is considered "correcting injustice" and
spreading Islamic law is "reforming society" — the textbook misleads by
projecting Western interpretations onto Islam.
Compare this textbook's definition of jihad with that of an
early (non-PC) edition of the venerable Encyclopaedia
of Islam. Its opening sentence simply states, "The spread of
Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general. … Jihad must
continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam. …
Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare
to spread Islam] can be eliminated." Muslim legal manuals written in
Arabic are even more explicit.
The report finds other disturbing aspects regarding Islam's
whitewashing in textbooks: the well-documented Muslim military conquests
demarcating most of what is now known as the "Islamic world" are glossed
over or distorted; Islam ambiguously "spread" or was "brought."
Well-defined aspects of Islamic law — the subordinate status of women and
non-Muslims, execution of the apostate and homosexual, and other issues
that appear almost any given day in headlines — are either ignored or
obfuscated. History is distorted to portray Muslims as tolerant and
progressive, Christians as intolerant and backwards.
In my testimony
to the House, I wrote: "It should be acknowledged that educational
failures exacerbate epistemological ones, and vice versa, leading to a
perpetual cycle where necessary knowledge is not merely ignored, but not
even acknowledged as real in the first place. When American universities
[or high schools] fail to teach Islamic doctrine and history accurately, a
flawed epistemology permeates society at large. And since new students and
new professors come from this already conditioned-towards-Islam society,
not only do they not question the lack of accurate knowledge and
education; they perpetuate it."
This report demonstrates the validity of this vicious cycle.
In fact, every last one of those flagrant textbook errors indoctrinating
America's youth is an indisputable "fact" for many of America's Islam
"experts," particularly those advising the government. The effects are
dramatic. For instance, far from objectively examining Islam, the
government is now pushing to ban
Arabic words connotative of Islamic ideology from formal analysis
— such as "mujahid," "umma," "Sharia," "caliphate" — asking personnel to
rely primarily on generic terms, such as "terrorists."
The greater irony is that not only do children's textbooks
in Muslim countries openly teach
hatred and hostility for non-Muslims, or "infidels" — those same
people fervently trying to whitewash Islam in the U.S.— but so do Muslim
schools operating on American soil.
At any rate, from American junior high texts obfuscating the
motivation of 9/11 to censored intelligence analysts who cannot prefix
more meaningful adjectives to the word "terrorist," until Islamic
ideologies are addressed forthrightly, the U.S. — leadership and lay alike
— will remain philosophically unprepared against the threat of radical
Islam. Objective knowledge — properly taught and disseminated — is the
first step to formulating any long-term strategy. When knowledge is
unshackled from the bonds of political correctness and wishful thinking,
strategies will naturally present themselves as common sense.
Bottom line: if children are sheltered from ugly truths
today, how can they ever be expected to confront them as adults
tomorrow?
Originally published at: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/textbook-lies-about-islam/
Raymond Ibrahim is the associate director of the Middle East Forum and the
author of The Al Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts
and propaganda.
Related Topics: Academia, Dhimmitude | 
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