Sharia-Compliant Education

Dr. Andrew Bostom chronicles the pro-Muslim propaganda that passes for “religious history” in the testing materials used by the state of New York:

Islamophilic Indoctrination in New York High Schools

Mahmud of Ghazni, early 11th century Muslim jihadist who ravaged Hindu India during at least 17 conquering expeditions waged over 25 years.

What New York High School students are required to affirm on their State Regents exams in global history: “Wherever they went, the Moslems brought with them their love of art, beauty and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western Christendom.”

A summary description of Mahmud of Ghazni’s final expedition to Somanath by Indian historian A.L. Srivastava: Mahmud captured the place [Somanath] without much difficulty and ordered a general slaughter in which more than 50,000 persons are said to have perished. The idol of Somanath was broken to pieces which were sent to Ghazni, Mecca, and Medina and cast in streets and the staircases of chief mosques to be trodden by the Muslims going there for their prayers

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A New York Post report (published 8/24/10) by Yoav Gonen highlights the selective Islamophilia readily apparent in reading extracts from the New York State global history and geography Regents examinations. Gonen’s investigation reveals that,

State testmakers played favorites when quizzing high-schoolers on world religions — giving Islam and Buddhism the kid-gloves treatment while socking it to Christianity, critics say. Teachers complain that the reading selections from the Regents exam in global history and geography given last week featured glowing passages pertaining to Muslim society but much more critical essay excerpts on the subject of Christianity.

One unnamed Brooklyn teacher who administered the Regents exam, opined bluntly, with an obvious reference to the Ground Zero mosque controversy in lower Manhattan, about ill timing:

There should have been a little balance in there…To me, this was offensive because it’s just so inappropriate and the timing of it was piss-poor…

Interviewed by Gonen, Michael Dobkowski, Chair of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, maintained that Christianity, alone, was described in both a salutary and negative light, as opposed to the purely hagiographic assessment of Islam:

Some [essays] suggest a kind of Christian triumphalism and the desire to convert the other that is not present in the treatment of Islam. My impression is that there is certainly a divergence of approaches and impressions that should not appear in a Regents exam of this caliber.

And Gonen cited as perhaps the most disturbing passage this bowdlerized, ahistorical extract about the Islamic jihad conquests from “A World History: A Cultural Approach, “ authored by Daniel Roselle:

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Wherever they went, the Moslems brought with them their love of art, beauty and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western Christendom.

Roselle’s characterization is a grotesque distortion of historical reality. The jihad ravages of various Arab Muslim invaders, and subsequently Islamized Turks, during the identified “8th to 11th century” period, wreaked havoc — massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation — upon culturally more advanced civilizations, not only Byzantine Christian, but also Zoroastrian, and Hindu. Below are some illustrative examples of the actual brutality and cultural devastation that accompanied these Muslim conquests.

Here is a description by the medieval chronicler Michael the Syrian of the 838 CE Muslim conquest of Amorium in Byzantine Anatolia (the current Turkish village of Hisarköy) by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutasim, who ruled from 833-42 (see, pp.598-99):

The sword of the Taiyaye [Arab Muslims] began the slaughter and heaped them up by piles; when their sword was drunk with blood, the order came to massacre no more, but to take the population captive and to lead it away. Then they pillaged the town. When the king entered to see the town, he admired the beautiful structure of the temples and palaces. As news came which worried him, he set the town on fire and burned it down. There were so many women’s convents and monasteries that over a thousand virgins were led into captivity, not counting those that had been slaughtered. They were given to the Moorish and Turkish slaves, so as to assuage their lust: glory to the incomprehensible judgments of God!. They burned all those who were hidden in houses or who had climbed up to the church galleries. When the booty from the town was collected in one place, the king, seeing that the population was very numerous, gave the order to kill four thousand men. He also gave the order to take away the fabrics and the gold, silver and bronze objects and the rest of the yield from the pillage. They also began to take away the population: and there was a clamor of lamentation from the women, men and children, when children were separated and removed from the arms of their parents; they shouted and howled.

The subsequent Muslim conquests by the Seljuk (and later, Ottoman) Turks, beginning in the 11th century, completed this violent, destructive, and chaotic Islamization of the heartlands of Byzantine civilization, as summarized by the great historian Speros Vryonis (see, p.678):…

Visit Dr. Bostom’s place for the rest of his report, including the footnotes and source references. As he says, “The New York State Regents exams themselves now reflect the corrosive ‘success’ of a sustained campaign of Islamophilic historical negationism. Cultural jihadism has achieved an ominous victory to the great detriment of New York city’s secondary school children, their parents, and society at large.”