In what country’s public schools are 7th graders forced to learn the Five Pillars of Islam and taught that Jesus of Nazareth was a criminal? Iran, Syria, some other country in the Middle East? Nope, try the good old U S of A. Maybe you haven’t been taught the Five Pillars of Islam and were never made aware that Jesus was a criminal, but odds are your 7th grader has been led down this path of belief right in his or her public school classroom.
Needless to say I was quite surprised last week when my 7th grader asked me to check his social studies homework and I found out that he was being forced to learn the Five Pillars. For those that don’t know much about the Five Pillars the textbook on page 275 provides some context: “The Quran presents the Five Pillars of Islam, or the five essential duties that all Muslims are to fulfill.” Essentially the Five Pillars are parallel to the Ten Commandments in the Bible.
My immediate reaction to learning the above was that I know a public school won’t teach my child the Ten Commandments, so how can it teach him the Five Pillars? The first thing I did was to flip through the text to see what it was teaching about Christianity. Then I found the section on Jesus of Nazareth. About half of page 172 talks about Jesus, it closes with this:
“In about A.D. 33, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate arrested Jesus as a political rebel and ordered that he be crucified-hung from a cross until dead. This was a typical Roman way of punishing criminals.”
At this point I was curious as to who exactly wrote this textbook. It turns out the lead author is Mounir A. Farah. Farah is from Syria, he currently is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Arkansas. He also was a consultant to the Ministry of Education in Jordan and the past president of the Middle East Outreach Council.
The book itself is:World History, The Human Experience, The Early Ages. Published by Glencoe/McGraw Hill copyright 2003.
Let’s recap the facts:
• A textbook written by Mounir A. Farah from Syria includes a 22-page Chapter titled Islamic Civilization that highlights the Five Pillars of Islam as taught by the Quran.
• The textbook also at a minimum leads students to infer that Jesus of Nazareth was a criminal.
• The textbook is being used in public schools in Ohio.
Next steps:
There is a strong likelihood that my child’s school district is not the only one in Ohio using this textbook. My personal next step is to follow the process provided by the local school district, object to the use of the textbook and formally demand its removal. I am also contacting various leaders in Ohio to make them aware of this issue and to discuss possible remedies for parents as a whole throughout the state.
My initial intent is simply to make others aware of this issue. Where we go from here is TBD, but I felt an obligation to point out this issue in hopes of generating a dialogue, followed by action, and ultimately a solution that protects our children from exposure to the line of thinking advocated by this textbook.
