Another battle in the textbook wars is being fought not in editorial offices but in state capitals. Curricula must often pass muster with state boards and educational bureaucracies. Their mandates influence textbook publishers. As are state legislatures, appointed officials are responsive to local political pressure.
The state of Massachusetts, for example, spent 2001 and 2002 revising its 1997 state history framework. On the subject of the Middle East, later designated Central Asia in the framework, this is the nation's most detailed state curriculum. Draft guidelines originally published in December 2001 were criticized by friendly critics as obscure, vague, complex, or cryptic. But the Massachusetts scope and sequence review process provided a unique opportunity to craft a detailed world history program. The state's educational leaders and board of education sought a strong history-centered approach. In the final curriculum framework, approved in October 2002, language and concepts were strengthened, but the essential content of the earlier draft remained intact, largely because the state's commitment to honest history was not blunted by pressure groups that have been spectacularly successful in other states.
During the process the Massachusetts world history curriculum came under attack from activists who protested the Islam-related draft content, calling it racist and biased. Remarkably, the pro-Islamists were not Muslims but were led by Barbara Brown of the Boston University African Studies Center and Barbara Petzen of the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The seventh grade section (7.32-7.35), specifically the section entitled Two Worlds Meet: Christianity and Islam (600 AD to 1492 AD), offended them. So did high-school level WH15, 57, and 64. What follows were three principal complaints registered to Massachusetts during the public review process and the state response, printed in italics.
(1) The first concern is that the standards in grade 7 generally present Islam in a warlike manner -- that the focus is on violence and the clash between Islam and the West, and not on cultural and economic interaction. This concern is misplaced. The standards refer to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and to the trade routes that connected East and West, as well as the influence of Islamic civilization on science, philosophy, and math. But the standards also, appropriately, refer to Islamic military expansion and to the enormous and important conflict between the Christian world and Islam. One can avoid these subjects -- and the subject of the unique origins of Islam as both a religious and a political/military movement – by inflicting inaccuracies on history.
(2) A second, more specific concern, is with high school standard WH15. This standard has been attacked as being insensitive and even racist. But it is nothing but accurate and it comes right out of Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong? One could say that the Islamic world was more interested in abiding by the Koran than it was in "keeping pace" with Europe. But one can not argue that the Islamic world experienced anything like the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Even the French historian Fernand Braudel wrote that Islam failed to "keep pace" with Europe, that it has dropped "two centuries behind Europe" economically, and that it "has to modernize. . . ." (see Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, Chapter 6).
(3) A third concern is with the contemporary Middle East, particularly WH57 that refers to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and to WH64 that refers to the "increase in terrorist attacks against Israel." This is an issue of intense political debate. Some individuals do not think it is appropriate to refer to suicide bombers as terrorists (they are, instead, "freedom fighters"). These same individuals want to ignore the long and well documented resistance to Israel on the part of Arab states -- despite Israel's many efforts to establish peace (most recently at Camp David in 2000).
Massachusetts teachers or the public did not share pro-Islamic concerns. These positions were, instead, expressed by a small, militant but loud group of educators more interested in promoting a marginal political agenda than in promoting truth or improving the curriculum. Historians and state officials in Massachusetts resisted these ideological assaults. But from Sacramento, California, to Richmond, Virginia, wherever significant school-level history reform movements have surfaced, such pro-Islamic initiatives have played out, reworking classroom views of Islam and plaguing the teaching of Western civilization.
Why Textbooks Changed
During the last decade, for good reasons, world history textbooks have rapidly expanded their coverage of non-Western civilizations. European political history, educators agree, is not a sufficient curriculum. State frameworks from California to Massachusetts have acted as incentives to improved scope and sequence. But what constitutes the right balance between Western and non-Western lessons continues to vex curriculum experts. Multicultural activists, academic scholars, and textbook editors, in the words of UCLA historian Gary B. Nash, are determined to "redistribute historical capital" and politicize historical content. As a result of revisionist demands made during the 1990s, students today are likely to obtain a rose-colored version of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian history. Textbook editors routinely adjust perspective and outlook to advance the illusion of cultural equivalency and demonstrate cross-cultural and global sensitivity.
Multiculturalism's universal appeal at the beginning of the 1990s lay in its pledge to broaden the nation's understanding of the past and improve the balance of old and new history. A dozen years later, social studies curricula may present Western civilization, the American nation, and industrial democracy as negative and exploitative historical forces. Constitutional values such as government by consent, rule of law, a loyal opposition, separation of church and state, and human rights go unnoticed or are shown up for their lapses, even as most American parents, voters, and school boards still believe the nation to be a sentinel of opportunity and freedom.
A large part of Islamic political action in the U.S. involves the symbolism of contemporary victimization, using "discrimination" and "abrogation of civil rights" as chips. Lecturing other Americans on the historical evils of xenophobia and racism is a versatile and reliable political tool. Organized Muslims assert they are persecuted, mocked and ridiculed, stereotyped, subjected to smear campaigns, and victimized by hate crimes. Anti-Muslim "McCarthyism" is in the air, according to the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a view echoed by Stanford historian Joel Beinin, president of the Middle East Studies Association. Historians and foreign policy specialists who describe dire aspects of Islam risk ad hominem attacks as Zionists, imperialists, and bigots.
The Council on Islamic Education, based in Orange County, California, rides the diversity movement in social studies. It presents itself as a mainstream Muslim organization, linking itself to established educational associations, and it claims to act as Islam's liaison to the nation's public schools. The Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service roster of recognized tax-exempt organizations (501c3) does not list the Council on Islamic Education. No Form 990 is on record. The Council on Islamic Education is funded by domestic Islamic donors perhaps aided by foreign support. The self-declared "resource center" is in fact a political advocacy organization.
The Council on Islamic Education's board members make no bones about their view of United States history: "American children need to know that genocide was part of the birth of this nation," wrote board member Ali A. Mazrui of the State University of New York at Binghamton, commenting on the New York state social studies curriculum in the early 1990s. "The Holocaust began at home." Council on Islamic Education founder and director Shabbir Mansuri declared in a 2001 interview that he took calls for improved American history and civic education after 9/11 to be a personal attack. He boasted that he is waging a "bloodless" revolution, promoting world cultures and faiths in America's classrooms. The Council on Islamic Education has staged displays of Muslim prayer for television cameras at California textbook hearings. It has warned scholars and public officials who do not sympathize with its requests that they will be perceived as racists, reactionaries, and enemies of Islam.
The Council on Islamic Education is part of the textbook terrain today, a content gatekeeper with virtually unchecked power over publishers. It advises activists in schools to generate grass-roots teacher support, to leave a paper trail, to affect cordiality, and to insist on meeting with educational officials. The Council similarly "works with" publishers to ensure they meet a certain standard of sensitivity -- the Council on Islamic Education standard.
The Council on Islamic Education is an agent of contemporary censorship. It demands "ground rules upon which interaction with publishers can take place." It warns that it may "decline requests for reviewing published materials, unless a substantial and substantive revision is planned by the publisher." For more than a decade, history textbook editors have done the Council's bidding, and as a result, history textbooks accommodate Islam on terms that Islamists demand. This is all the more disturbing since the Council has a curious view of the nation and world whose history it wants to rewrite.
Since its creation in 1989, the Council has repeatedly allied itself with academics and journalists who take an antagonistic view of the U.S. and Western civilization. Empowered by them, it pushes to make changes in textbook content in the name of inclusion, diversity, restitution, expiation, and other public virtues unique to the non-Muslim world. In the spirit of cultural democracy, credulous first amendment organizations likewise believe they should include Muslim representatives as "stakeholders." They enable the Council on Islamic Education faute de mieux, not considering the contradictions with their own principles.
High-profile publishers and editors at Houghton Mifflin, Scott Foresman, Glencoe, and Prentice Hall asked for the Council on Islamic Education imprimatur between 1987 and 1997. Sympathetic and willing to listen, even endorse, on the record, when they were in charge of producing first-edition textbooks that are now well established in the nation's classrooms, including textbooks whose revised editions were adopted by the state of Texas in November 2002: Sue Miller, executive editor, Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Abigail Jungreis, editorial director for social studies, Houghton Mifflin; Judith Glickman, editorial director at Macmillan McGraw-Hill; Anne Falzone, editorial director for Prentice Hall; and Sharon Barton, executive director for Scott Foresman.
School publishers' response to Islamic pressure -- and domestic identity politics in general -- is co-operative and acquiescent. According to one Prentice Hall editor who objected to policies on Islam-related content, opposition is "silenced" and Islam is given a "free pass." Publishers fear that the label of xenophobia, racism, nativism, or ethnocentricity may affix to their products and reputations. Almost without thinking, or thinking solely in venal terms of political expediency, sales and adoptions, social studies editors are giving American children and their teachers a misshapen view of the past and a false view of the future.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Gilbert T. Sewall is Director of the American Textbook Council, a former history instructor at Phillips Academy and an education editor at Newsweek. The American Textbook Council is an independent New York-based research organization established in 1989. The Council reviews history textbooks and other educational materials. It is dedicated to improving the social studies curriculum and civic education in the nation's elementary and high schools.