Hijackers, both of aviation and of theology, have combined to displace biology as the most dangerous subject in American schools, putting in its place social studies, as practiced by seventh- graders in bathrobes.
We turn to the Byron Union School District in northern California, out where the cilantro grows high and the dudgeon grows higher, because, according to some feverish reports, children in the middle school are being taught Islam, how to pray to Allah, and how to conduct jihads as a class project.
The truth, as ever, is regrettably dull. This is seventh grade social studies, after all. The school, following a state-mandated world cultures course, includes a chapter in its curriculum on the historical impact of all major religions -- Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist and Muslim. It's part of a curriculum on medieval history, and the Middle Ages were a time when church was government.
Schools are proscribed from suggesting any is the one, true religion, but the truth of religion's impact on history is as real as the teachings of Confucius and as deep as a certain pile of rubble in Lower Manhattan.
Neither the law nor the ACLU opposes the mention of religion or the exploration of religious cultures in public schools, because that doesn't advocate a particular theology any more than the teaching of the Greek classics requires a belief in the divinity of Zeus.
This was lost on the Rev. Austin Miles, a former circus ringmaster who, in the 1980s, made a lateral career move as aide de camp for Jim Bakker. After blowing the whistle upon finding Bakker romping naked in a hot tub, Miles moved on to create his own religious news service.
Miles got word from Elizabeth Lemings, a science teacher at the middle school, that her son had brought home study sheets announcing that the children would now be Muslims.
Miles hastened to the scene and quoted Lemings thusly: "We could never teach Christianity like this. We can't even mention the name of Jesus in the public schools, but over there they teach Islam as the true religion, and students are taught about Islam and how to pray to Allah."
The students, of course, are not taught to pray to Allah. They are taught how Muslims pray to Allah which, on last examination, proved to be the Arabic word for the same God as that of Abraham and Christ.
"They are not taught to pray," says Nancie Castro, principal at the middle school. "As part of the simulation of Islamic life in the Middle Ages students could choose to dress in the time period -- not religious clothes, just what everyday people wore. And they could go by an Arabic name. Few chose to do so and since no one had authentic clothing, the few students who did dress up simply wore a bathrobe over their clothes for the class period."
From seventh grade through my college career, I have often risked showing up for class in a bathrobe, but mine was a Christian bathrobe and would have done no harm.
In his dispatch, the Rev. Miles explains the difference.
The name "Allah," he writes, is actually taken from the name of an Arab moon god. Mohammed married an underage girl. And, "Islam promises its followers that those who become suicide bombers, killing themselves and others, will go directly to Allah's paradise where they will be given 72 virgins for unbridled sexual pleasure for all eternity."
Bathrobe optional.
That last slander is much like saying that a Methodist believed the teachings of David Koresh because each read the Bible.
The inevitable happened. A talk show host in San Francisco grabbed onto it, demanding to know why Islam was being taught in public schools. Newsmax, the conspiracy-shilling Web site run by the same man who popularized theories that Vincent Foster was murdered, ran two items, one headlined "California Decrees Students 'Will Become Muslims.' " The Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times weighed in with a version that took out the most egregiously bigoted details. This week, the sanitized version reached Pittsburgh's radio airwaves, where the morning host on the reliably right-wing KDKA demanded to know where the ACLU was on this one.
This is how urban legends are created. It's also how lynchings get started.
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