Civic Education in Islamic Schools

Educating Counter-Cultural Citizens: Civic Education in Islamic Schools by Charles L. Glenn with Munirah Alaboudi, Amna al-Eisaei, Richard Fournier, Katherine Meyer Moran, and Rukhsana Nazir Preface 1. The Muslim Presence in North America 1 2. Islamic Schools: An Overview 23 3. What Principals Told Us 4. What Parents Told Us 5. What Teachers Told Us 6. What Students Told Us 7. Putting It All Together 8. Prospects and Challenges for Islamic Education References 46 1. The Muslim Presence in North America Will They Fit In? We start, without apology, with the question that lurks behind much of the discussion, in the media and among academics as well, of the growing presence of Muslims in the United States and Canada. Concern is rarely expressed about African-American and other converts to Islam, who are perceived as part of the churn in religious adherence so often noted by sociologists. Indeed, Muslim institutions in urban neighborhoods are seen as a source of stability and resistance to drugs and family breakdown. No, the concern is focused on immigrants from predominantly-Muslim countries, and on their children. Will these immigrants or their children become loyal Americans or Canadians, as has occurred with other immigrant groups? Will they remain, instead, a permanently disloyal opposition? Or, in what could be called the liberal version of this concern, should they be required to abandon or adopt a radically liberalized version of Islam in order to fit in with the norms of the host society? Is Islam incompatible with democracy, or vice versa?1 Of course, as Danièle Hervieu-Léger points out, this last is a meaningless question, apart from asking how particular groups of Muslims in particular situations “live their Islam.”2 The purpose of our study has been to engage with some of these “particular situations,” the Islamic secondary schools in which some Muslim adolescents are taught to navigate between American society and a religious tradition that comes late to the discussions and accommodations that have formed Western culture. We have sought to listen attentively and, so far as possible, without preconceptions. Inevitably, however, we have done it against the background of current events and of on-going developments within American society and also within the Muslim community in North America. This introductory chapter is intended to present, in summary form, the context within which Islamic schools are functioning in the United States. A significant aspect of this context, and one of which those we talked with were very much aware, is suspicion in the general population about Islam and about Muslims. Seeking to de- bunk what he calls “the myth of the Muslim tide,” one recent author notes that it has “gradually become acceptable, in some establishment political and media circles, to assert that ordinary Muslims are the problem, that Islamic immigrants and their offspring may be disloyal, and that the religion and its followers should not be tolerated in the same way others are.”3 While this is a much less acute concern than it is in Western Europe, where the Muslim minority deriving from immigration are commonly seen as “defective” Europeans, “less rational, less capable of separating knowledge from belief and religion from politics, and less capable of 1 Heclo 2007, 6. 2 Hervieu-Léger 2000, 80. 3 Saunders 2012, 31. Page 1 valuing democracy, freedom of expression and gender equality,”4 some opinion-makers are not reassured by assurances that “Muslims are an American immigration success story.”5 The sense that Muslims are somehow different from all the other immigrant groups that have found their place in North American society, in ways that will inevitably place them in conflict with the prevailing norms, appears to be widespread. It has been said that “[i]n the perception of the Western community, Islam replaced Communism as the Evil Other.”6 For example, a survey of more than a thousand pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention found that 66 percent either somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement: “I believe Islam is a dangerous religion.”7 This concern was given its most influential expression by the distinguished political scientist Samuel Huntington in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations. While the book deals with many other matters, it is his treatment of Islam that attracted the most attention. Huntington challenged optimistic assertions that “the West does not have problems with Islam, but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”8 In fact, he insisted, the “underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”9 At a more popular level, the Pew Research Center reports that 67 percent of the American public says they are at least somewhat concerned about Islamic extremism; “15% of the general public believes that there is a great deal of support for extremism among Muslim Americans, and an additional 25% see a fair amount of support.”10 This concern is reinforced by publications that warn of the “stealth jihad” through which front groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood are said to seek to impose Shariah law on American society. One claims, for example, that “nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.”11 Such charges have led to a national movement to adopt legislation or state constitutional provisions to forbid courts from using traditional Islamic law – Shariah – in their decisions. Such a provision was approved in 2010 by seventy percent of Oklahoma voters, though it was later struck down as discriminatory on the basis of religion. As one commentator pointed out, “anti-Sharia legislation harms the social fabric by its very premise: the presumption that the 4 Mavelli 2012, 63. 5 Barrett 2007, 5. 6 Malashenko 2004, 107; emphasis in original. 7 Starnes 2014, 162. 8 Huntington 1996, 209. 9 Huntington 1996, 217. 10 Pew Research Center 2011, 67-8. 11 Shariah, the Threat to America 2010, 108. Page 2 deepest core values and convictions of religious Americans threaten the legal order by virtue of their source, without reference to their substance.”12 Nor are such concerns altogether imaginary. The North American public is subjected, almost daily, to reports of violence committed by Muslims, often against other Muslims, somewhere in the world, and of young Muslims and converts to Islam, born and raised in Germany, England, or the United States, who are seduced into joining violent movements. It may help to put a little historical perspective on this concern about Islam to remember that earlier generations of American social commentators worried in a similar way about whether Catholic immigrants could ever become good citizens;13 those doubts were nurtured in a similar way by international developments, from the opposition of the Catholic Church to 19th century republican governments in France to its support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s “Though in retrospect we regard the assimilation o[ American Catholics as inevitable, it would have appeared incredible in the 1920s or 1930s.”14 Catholics were not the only target of the widespread bigotry of the time – Jews came in for their share, not to mention African Americans and Asians – but it was Catholics who (like Muslims today) were perceived as a menace to American life: The religious life of the United States turned sour during the years following World War I. Georgia's veteran populist, Tom Watson, bounded back into politics with a campaign against Jews, Negroes, and Catholics. The Governor of Florida, Sydney J. Catts, stomped his state to warn against the Pope's plans to transfer the Vatican there. The Oregon legislature banned parochial schools. Denver's most popular restaurant attracted patrons with a big sign: "We Serve Fish Every Day–Except Friday." The Ku Klux Klan, fueled by the resurgent anti- Catholicism, spread like wildfire across the nation in the early 1920's. In a decade marred by many hatreds – against immigrants, Jews, Negroes, radicals – anti-Catholicism was probably the strongest.15 In words that one could readily find applied to Islam today, an editorial in the liberal New Republic described a conflict, in America, between a culture “which is based on absolutism and encourages obedience, conformity, and intellectual subservience, and a culture which encourages curiosity, hypotheses, experimentation, verification by facts . ..”16 An article in the influential North American Review by an apologist for the Ku Klux Klan warned, in 1926, that “there is a steady flood of alien ideas being spread over the country, always carefully disguised as American.”17 The editor of the American Standard warned that a heinous conspiracy to 12 Vischer 2012, 27. 13 The 19th century development of this prejudice is discussed extensively in Glenn 1988 and Glenn 2012a. 14 Jenkins 2007, 23. 15 Cuddy 1981, 236. 16 In Nussbaum 2008, 276. 17 Evans 1926, 41. Page 3 destroy America was afoot between Roman Catholicism and anti-Christian Jewry.18 Even in the 1940s, despite the national unity forged by war, “Catholics were proclaimed heretics from what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called ‘the democratic faith,’ one in which ‘theology and ritual . hierarchy and demonology’ would step aside for ‘intellectual freedom and unrestricted inquiry’.”19 This conviction, in elite circles, about the negative effects of Catholicism on American life persisted into the post-war period until it seems to have been wiped away by adulation of the Kennedy Administration and its fallen leader.

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