The popular notion that the victor in a conflict gets to write history is probably true. If so, the report Islam and the Textbooks documents a quiet coup that has occurred in America’s history textbooks. Produced by the American Textbook Council, the report claims to detail a systematic “sanitizing” of Islamic history and practices.
“One man’s jihad can be another man’s mission of distortion,” syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields says. Jihad is used to justify the bombing of schools and schoolchildren, as well as buses, stores, and other public places, she writes. Although the destruction and mass murder at the World Trade Center was a ‘jihad,’ according to the perpetrators, American students might never see that word in connection with the terrorist killings.
A blind eye to the less-benign aspects of political Islam is attributed by Islam and the Textbooks to the Council on Islamic Education. The council is a self-declared liaison between public schools, textbook publishers, and the Islamic world. As a result of the council’s threats of racism and bias, American publishers of history texts have “circumvent[ed] unsavory facts that might cast Islam past or present in anything but a positive light,” according to the report.
Textbooks explain jihad
The American Textbook Council report examines seven textbooks, all widely adopted in the U.S., for content on Islamic life and beliefs. Web-based materials on Islam, especially those designed for the classroom, are included in their review. For comparison, the authors reference Islamic scholars, historians, articles, essays, bulletins, and standard sources such as the Koran.
Three of the texts examined are adoptions aimed at the seventh to ninth grades. They are Human Heritage, from Glencoe; Across the Centuries, from Houghton Mifflin; and A Global Mosaic from Prentice Hall. High school texts include Patterns of Interaction, from McDougal Littel; Connections to Today, from Prentice Hall; The Human Experience, from Glencoe; and Continuity and Change, from Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Traditional sources identify jihad as a concept that “embodies the element of friction that exists between many Muslims and nonbelievers – Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist – enmity grounded in Islamic desire for political and territorial power.”
Bernard Lewis, a Middle East scholar, said the jihad was historically “perceived as unlimited” and “a religious obligation that would continue until all the world either adopted the Muslim faith or submitted to Muslim rule.”
Students read schoolbook definitions of jihad, however, that range from “a struggle in the cause of God,” which can include trying to quit smoking, or controlling one’s temper, to “ a struggle to introduce Islam into other lands.” Textbook publishers, under the advice of the Council on Islamic Education, have adopted a presentation that paints jihad as virtually any personal struggle. They have “defanged and oversimplified” a serious objective of Islamic culture, the report states.
Islamic law for American students
Other aspects of Islam receive similarly ‘rosy’ treatment in world history and culture texts. Sharia, Islamic law, is discussed as though it represents an alternative legal system or lifestyle. Bernard Lewis said sharia is the whole of the law in Islam. “There is…no distinction between canon and civil law,” he said. Religious and civil law are one and the same, and regulate every aspect of commercial, legal, and personal life. No group or activity is exempt from that law, Lewis said.
The version of sharia adopted by textbooks at the behest of the Council on Islamic Education veils the power of sharia over Islamic life. Connections to Today says that sharia “provides guidance on all aspects of life.” Continuity and Change says sharia “guided the personal conduct of all Muslims,” in explaining its historical role. Human Experience summarizes sharia as “the way legal scholars organized Islamic moral principles into a body of law.”
The American Textbook Council calls these explanations “textbook happy talk.” They emphasize that sharia is not a variation on law as it is understood in the West. Sharia, they explain, can justify ”religion-based behavioral control” in society. Under sharia, ”certain crimes are punishable by stoning, flogging, amputation, and beheading.”
Western legal systems emphasize adjudication of disputes, establishment and enforcement of rights, and punishment when necessary. The Islamic system of sharia enforces punishments ”intended to inspire subjection and fear.” Nothing suggesting this appears before students in textbook discussions of Islamic law.
Cultural equivalence
Islamic states engaged in slavery and slave trade, but in an effort to establish cultural equivalence, Islam and the Textbooks argues, slavery in the Muslim world is usually mentioned in the same breath with Greek, Roman, or American practices of slavery.
The report gives examples of textbooks that portray enslavement by Muslims as a step up in the social and cultural ladder. Connections to Today mentions living in wealthy households, and possibly gaining freedom, by marrying the master. A female slave might gain freedom for her children, if not for herself, by bearing children for her master.
Patterns of Interaction gives some detail about the number of slaves imprisoned, sold, and traded by Muslims.
It also glosses over the involuntary nature of slavery by emphasizing that “slaves had some legal rights and opportunity for social mobility.” Numbers of Muslim-enslaved captives and prisoners of war range as high as 14 million between the seventh and 19th centuries. And Ronald Segal, in Islam’s Black Slaves, describes Mecca and Medina as “strongholds of slavery and the slave trade throughout the nineteenth century.”
Islam and the Textbooks argues that world history texts “contort themselves” to offer positive examples of women’s accomplishments inside Islam, while ignoring “inconvenient details” about the treatment of ordinary women in that society. Quotes from various texts highlight women with exceptional power, knowledge, or freedom. The point is , according to the American Textbook Council, they are amplified and exaggerated, and notable because they are most definitely exceptions in Islamic society.
Ordinary women, even today, are viewed by many men in Islamic society as servants and breeders, according to the authors. Connections to Today offers praise for the “spiritual equality of women and men.” They also mention traditional cultural disparities. Wives and daughters inherited less than men from their families, had more difficulty exercising legal rights such as divorce, and traded the additional freedom from veiling and seclusion for the right to work as a peasant in the economy.
In exploring the question of what life in a Muslim world would be like, textbook publishers broadly misrepresent the traditions of Islam, the American Textbook Council states, arguing that publishers have been cowed by threatened charges of racism and intolerance from the Council on Islamic Education.
“In the American classroom, it is complacency, not anti-Americanism, that is ascendant. Students and teachers alike are sedated by textbook happy talk,” they say.
Palasek is assistant editor at Carolina Journal.