From Education News and ADF:
Islamic Schools and American Civic Culture
March 8, 2011 2:14 am 8 comments Share this Article
This article on the growing influence of Islam on American charter schools will appear in the forthcoming "Islam in Scholarship and Education" issue of Academic Questions
M. Zuhdi Jasser – Having grown up in northeastern Wisconsin, I am a product of K–12 and undergraduate public education in the heartland of America. In my youth, I mostly learned the rules of my Muslim faith from my family, and from weekend school at the mosque. But I gained the foundations of my appreciation for the sanctity of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights through the Wisconsin public education system. For example, I recall participating in the American Legion Constitution contest—an annual competition of Wisconsin high school students testing their ability to memorize the U.S. Constitution. Permeating my educational experience was appreciation for America’s rule of law, based in individual liberty and superior to all collectivist and authoritarian systems, from communism to fascism to theocracy. I was taught the value of criticizing authority and defending my ideas in the public arena.
Islamic schools operating on U.S. soil will have Koran memorization contests—an admirable practice—but do they also have contests on the U.S. Constitution? Do Islamic schools teach their students to question thoughtfully the authority of their imams or teachers? How do Islamic schools teach the ideals of the Enlightenment, as compared to those of Islamist theocratic governance? More important, do their civics classes teach primary allegiance to our Constitution over the Koran as the guiding document of our government?
These are questions that must be asked, now, because in the nearly ten years since the attacks by Muslim terrorists on 9/11, we have seen an exponential growth in homegrown radical Islam, or Islamism. Insufficiently recognized and acknowledged, this metastasis has produced its natural, deadly effects: jihad against American citizens on our own soil—most recently the attempt by Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old Somali-born U.S. citizen, to detonate what he believed was a van full of explosives, with the intention of blowing up thousands of people celebrating a Christmas tree lighting in Portland, Oregon.[1]
Some analysts cite “the narrative” as the driving cause behind rampant radicalization, at home and abroad. The narrative exploits the virulently anti-American propaganda being spread across the world in Muslim communities, from Miami to Mumbai, from Detroit to Dubai.[2] That narrative drives a rapidly escalating fervor of discontent against the West in general and America in particular, which serves to radicalize Muslims who view us as their mortal enemies and the cause of all the maladies that afflict Muslims worldwide. With images of Abu Ghraib and other exaggerated embarrassments that twist the reality of our mission in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamists garner recruits and begin the radicalization process—on foreign soil, and our own.[3]
http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1849
Islamic Schools and American Civic Culture
March 8, 2011 2:14 am 8 comments Share this Article
This article on the growing influence of Islam on American charter schools will appear in the forthcoming "Islam in Scholarship and Education" issue of Academic Questions
M. Zuhdi Jasser – Having grown up in northeastern Wisconsin, I am a product of K–12 and undergraduate public education in the heartland of America. In my youth, I mostly learned the rules of my Muslim faith from my family, and from weekend school at the mosque. But I gained the foundations of my appreciation for the sanctity of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights through the Wisconsin public education system. For example, I recall participating in the American Legion Constitution contest—an annual competition of Wisconsin high school students testing their ability to memorize the U.S. Constitution. Permeating my educational experience was appreciation for America’s rule of law, based in individual liberty and superior to all collectivist and authoritarian systems, from communism to fascism to theocracy. I was taught the value of criticizing authority and defending my ideas in the public arena.
Islamic schools operating on U.S. soil will have Koran memorization contests—an admirable practice—but do they also have contests on the U.S. Constitution? Do Islamic schools teach their students to question thoughtfully the authority of their imams or teachers? How do Islamic schools teach the ideals of the Enlightenment, as compared to those of Islamist theocratic governance? More important, do their civics classes teach primary allegiance to our Constitution over the Koran as the guiding document of our government?
These are questions that must be asked, now, because in the nearly ten years since the attacks by Muslim terrorists on 9/11, we have seen an exponential growth in homegrown radical Islam, or Islamism. Insufficiently recognized and acknowledged, this metastasis has produced its natural, deadly effects: jihad against American citizens on our own soil—most recently the attempt by Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old Somali-born U.S. citizen, to detonate what he believed was a van full of explosives, with the intention of blowing up thousands of people celebrating a Christmas tree lighting in Portland, Oregon.[1]
Some analysts cite “the narrative” as the driving cause behind rampant radicalization, at home and abroad. The narrative exploits the virulently anti-American propaganda being spread across the world in Muslim communities, from Miami to Mumbai, from Detroit to Dubai.[2] That narrative drives a rapidly escalating fervor of discontent against the West in general and America in particular, which serves to radicalize Muslims who view us as their mortal enemies and the cause of all the maladies that afflict Muslims worldwide. With images of Abu Ghraib and other exaggerated embarrassments that twist the reality of our mission in Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamists garner recruits and begin the radicalization process—on foreign soil, and our own.[3]
http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1849
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