Author: John J Miller
Publication: The National Review
Online
Date: February 7, 2003
We're losing the war on terrorism
in America's classrooms. That's the sobering conclusion of the American
Textbook Council, which Friday releases a report on how our schools' most
popular world-history books fail to grapple honestly with the problem of
militant Islamism.
"History textbooks accommodate Islam
on terms that Islamists demand," writes Gilbert T. Sewell in his 35-page
analysis. "On controversial subjects, world history textbooks make an effort
to circumvent unsavory facts that might cast Islam past or present in anything
but a positive light. Islamic achievements are reported with robust enthusiasm.
When any dark side surfaces, textbooks run and hide."
Textbook content is especially important
because the Muslim world is so alien to many Americans. "Few teachers have
at their disposal anything more than a faint knowledge of Islam," writes
Sewell. "But state mandates expect or require them to teach something about
Islam." Teachers need books they can trust; unfortunately, many of their
textbooks are not trustworthy on the subject of Islam.
Take the concept of jihad, which
Bernard Lewis, our most gifted interpreter of Arab culture, defines this
way: "The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic law."
Throughout history, of course, many Muslims have sought to achieve this
goal with swords, guns, and bombs. Students reading Across the Centuries,
a seventh-grade textbook published by Houghton Mifflin, however, receive
a sanitized version of this reality. Jihad, according to this book, is
merely a struggle "to do one's best to resist temptation and overcome evil."
There's an element of truth in this definition, insofar as militant Islamists
think anybody or anything not subscribing to their strict theology is "evil."
But the book gives students no way of appreciating this larger context.
To them, jihad must seem like a useful tool to suppress their urges to
pass notes in class, run in the hallways, and stick chewing gum under their
desks.
One popular textbook, Prentice Hall's
Connections to Today, also whitewashes jihad: "Some Muslims took on jihad,
or effort in God's service, as another duty. Jihad has often been mistakenly
translated simply as 'holy war.' In fact, it may include acts of charity
or an inner struggle to achieve spiritual peace, as well as any battle
in defense of Islam." This is basically a dodge, and lays the onus for
mistaken translations upon the presumed cultural insensitivities of Westerners
- without acknowledging that the West, for perfectly understandable reasons,
sometimes has difficulty understanding how the religion of peace distinguishes
between "holy wars" and "any battle in defense of Islam." Another favored
textbook, Houghton Mifflin's Patterns of Interaction, sidesteps this uncomfortable
subject altogether; it doesn't even mention the word jihad. Like Connections
to Today, it was recently approved for use in Texas, whose statewide textbook-adoption
policies influence the textbook market all over the country and drive much
of its content.
The ATC's report discusses similar
problems with other concepts. The slave trade is an especially touchy subject
for the modern multiculturalist, because it requires taking one of the
great sins of the West and minimizing its role elsewhere. Patterns of Interaction,
for instance, claims that the Muslim world exported fewer than 5 million
slaves from Africa between 650 and 1600. This is much smaller than historian
Raymond Mauvy's estimate that 14 million blacks slaves have been sold to
Muslims since the 7th century. (For comparison's sake, 10 to 11 million
Africans were shipped in chains to the New World between 1650 and 1900;
the vast majority traveled to Latin America and the Caribbean, and only
about half a million went to British North America and the United States.)
The status of women is also a tricky
topic for multiculturalists, because nowhere are women more oppressed than
in the societies they want to celebrate. Connections to Today engages is
what can only be called a lie: "Conditions for women vary greatly from
country to country in the modern Middle East. Since the 1950s, women in
most countries have won voting rights." That's right: the freedom to vote
for Saddam Hussein as president. Textbooks are dotted with references to
obscure proto-feminists, who are held up as the fruits of Islamic culture.
"Textbook editors' relentless search to find such historical figures deforms
and cheapens world history," writes Sewell.
A chief culprit in all this is the
Council on Islamic Education, a group that consults with publishing companies
on how textbooks portray Islam. Anything that strays from the Islamist
line is denounced as xenophobic, ethnocentric, and racist - labels which,
if broadcast widely, are sure to depress book sales.
The ATC study concludes with positive
suggestions on how to teach about Islam in ways that "take Muslims' justified
sensitivities into account, without capitulating to them and rewriting
the historical record in a misguided attempt to compensate for past inaccuracies."
It's a dose of commonsense that
won't be found in many of the books our children are reading.
