Dear Dawg: Snort here. Rip Snort. Intrepid Reporter and Friend of the Truth. Dawg, we have uncovered a shocking scandal right here in our local high school. Students are being pressured to convert to Islam. In fact, they are being required to profess belief in Islamic tenets right in the middle of the school day! Due to an anonymous but unimpeachable source, your Intrepid Reporter has obtained a copy of a school assignment in which students were required to profess that:
“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”
In America. This is happening in America. Children, driven by our compulsory attendance laws, a captive audience, away from their parents, being required by government paid teachers to say such things. Thought you ought to know! SNORT.
DEAR SNORT: Settle down, old friend. There is a bit more to the story. That school assignment you’ve got was part of a five day study of “The Muslim World,” part of the high school world history class. The curriculum called for study of “formation of Middle Eastern empires including the basic concepts of the Islamic faith and how it along with politics, culture, economics and geography contributed to the development of those empires.” Thus it is not surprising that the teacher introduced the students to the Five Pillars of Islam, and the common Islamic profession of faith in Allah and his messenger, Muhammad.
The matter has already been considered by the 4th Circuit. A student, supported by the Thomas More Law Center, filed suit, claiming that the school was pushing Islam as the favored religion.
Nope. The court had the good sense to view this particular assignment in context, noting that “academic freedom would not long survive in an environment in which courts micromanage school curricula and parse singular statements made by teachers.”
You are not well educated in the 21st Century if you don’t know a few things about all of the world’s major religions. The students were learning about Islam. No one was pressuring them to accept its teachings. That’s a fundamental difference that the Thomas More Law Center does not seem to understand.
Sorry, Snort. This is not a big story.
The case is Wood v. Arnold, decided by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on February 11, 2018. We found it at 2019 WL 507543.
DAWG BONE: TEACHING ABOUT ISLAM IS NOT PROMOTING ISLAM.
Tomorrow: He used to be the A.D.