Reviewing a high-school book in social studies

World Cultures: A Global Mosaic
2001. 828 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-13-050191-3. Prentice Hall.
(Prentice Hall is an operating unit of Pearson Education, 1 Lake Street,
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458. Pearson Education is a division
of Pearson PLC, a British corporation headquartered in London.)

Promoting Islam in American Schoolrooms

William J. Bennetta

Viva il grande Kaimakan,
Protettor dei Mussulman.
Colla forza dei leoni,
Coll'astuzia dei serpenti, . . . .
Protettor dei Mussulman,
Viva il gran Kaimakan. (Long live the Grand Kaimakan,
Protector of the Muslims.
With the strength of the lion,
With the guile of the serpent, . . . .
Protector of the Muslims,
Long live the Grand Kaimakan!)
            chorus of Muslims in Rossini's comedic opera
            L'Italiana in Algeri (libretto by Angelo Anelli)

Although the Grand Kaimakan who appears in L'Italiana in Algeri is greeted with adulation, he isn't much of a Protector of the Muslims. He is a foolish and ineffectual fellow, infatuated by the Italian girl Isabella, and he amuses us with his antics.

The Grand Kaimakan who helps Prentice Hall to produce phony schoolbooks is nothing like the Grand Kaimakan in Rossini's opera. Prentice Hall's resident Grand Kaimakan is a diligent, dedicated liar, and the service that he renders to Muslims extends beyond mere protection: He strives to promote Islam in American schoolrooms, to make American students embrace Islamic religious beliefs, and to win converts for Allah -- and his antics aren't amusing at all.

Some of this Grand Kaimakan's work can be seen in the 2001 version of Prentice Hall's World Cultures: A Global Mosaic. In his effort to dupe students, he has disguised Muslim myths and woo-woo as history, and he has cloaked both the origin and the content of Islam in seductive lies.

The major exposition of Islam in World Cultures comes in chapter 26, and the first section of that chapter bears two substantial passages in which Muslim myths involving Muhammad and the angel Gabriel are presented as matters of historical fact. Both of those passages have been contrived to serve as instruments of religious indoctrination.

From the first passage -- on page 569 -- students learn such "facts" as these:

• Gabriel was sent to Muhammad by God, and Gabriel announced that Muhammad would become God's prophet.

• "The words Gabriel spoke to Muhammad over the next 12 years became the Koran, the holy book of Islam." (Even if we neglect the woo-woo about Gabriel, this mythical claim is still absurd and deceptive because it implies that all the material in the Koran came from Muhammad. In truth, the origins of the Koran are unknown [see note 1, below]. Scholars have not been able to learn when its various parts were written, who wrote them, or how many versions were written and rewritten before the final, canonized version was assembled.)

• Gabriel told Muhammad to "proclaim," and then Gabriel issued this order:

  "Proclaim -- in the name of your God,
       the Creator,
  Who created man from a clot of
       congealed blood.
  Proclaim! Your God is most generous,
  He who has taught man by the pen
  Things he knew not."

  (That angelic directive appears in World Cultures exactly as I have shown it here -- with quotation marks to suggest that it has been taken from some historical record! By the way: The claim that the Muslims' God created man from a clot of blood is contradicted by other notions that appear in Islamic scripture. In sura 6 of the Koran, for example, we learn that man was made from clay. And in sura 18 we read that man was made "from dust, then from a drop" -- a divine double play, apparently.)

The second passage in which Muhammad meets Gabriel appears on the very next page of World Cultures. It is a shortened version of the first passage. Prentice Hall's Grand Kaimakan evidently recognizes the value of repetition in making religious indoctrination stick.

Now consider some of the tricks that Prentice Hall's Grand Kaimakan has used for making Islam seem benign, palatable and comfy:

• On page 571: "Muslims believe that Allah is the same God as the God of the Jews and Christians." If Muslims really believe that Jews and Christians worship Allah, those Muslims are badly deluded. Muslim propagandists in America stridently promote the notion that Allah is the same God who is worshiped by the Jews and the Christians, but the absurdity of that notion becomes obvious if we read Islamic lore and see some of the things that Allah allegedly has done. Allah has told Muhammad to warn true believers against receiving Jews or Christians as friends or allies [note 2]. Allah has told Muhammad to assert that true believers must fight all the infidels (the Jews and Christians included) and must compel them to accept and acknowledge the dominion of Islam [note 3]. Allah has prepared a blazing fire for all people who do not accept Muhammad's claims [note 4]. And Allah has appointed Muhammad to be the ultimate prophet -- the figure who outranks all the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and outranks Jesus too. (I don't know any Christians whose God has placed Muhammad above Jesus. On the other hand, I do know lots of Christians whose God is a Trinity -- but Muslims deny the doctrine of the Trinity. I also know lots of Christians who hold that Jesus was an incarnation of one aspect of the Trinity, and that he therefore was divine -- but Muslims reject the doctrine of Jesus's divinity [note 5].)

• On the same page: "Muhammad accepted the original teachings of the Jewish and Christian scriptures as God's word." That is rubbish. Let me focus on the "original teachings" found in the earliest scriptures of Christianity, and let me point out that those teachings were so diverse and contradictory that neither Muhammad nor anyone else could have "accepted" all of them [note 6]. Moreover, Muhammad couldn't even have known about all of them. Well before Muhammad's time, many of those early teachings had been suppressed by the men who had taken control of orthodox Christianity.

• On the same page: "[Muhammad] called Jews and Christians 'people of the Book' because they followed God's teachings in the Bible. The 'people of the Book' had a special status as ahl al-dhimma, or protected people, and Muslims were required to treat them with tolerance." The phrase "people of the Book" certainly appears in the canonized version of the Koran, but this does not signify that the phrase can be ascribed to Muhammad. (As I have said, the origins of the Koran are unknown.) That aside, any attempt to associate Muhammad with "tolerance" for Jews and Christians is laughable. When Muhammad acquired sufficient military power to attack Jewish communities in the northern part of the Arabian peninsula, he pursued a policy of dispossession, eviction, enslavement and even annihilation. (For example: When he conquered the Jewish tribe of the Qurayza, in 627, he ordered that all the adult males should be killed, and he divided their property, their wives and their children among his followers.) Later Muhammad adopted the practice of forcing Jewish and Christian populations to give up their arms and their autonomy -- and to pay tribute to him -- in return for his "protection." Here is an excerpt from a translation [note 7] of a letter that Muhammad sent to the Jews of Maqna. The phrase "the Messenger of God" refers to Muhammad himself, of course:

  With the arrival of this letter your security is ensured and you are granted God's protection and that of his Messenger; . . . . for it is the Messenger of God himself who gives you protection from what he himself will not do to you. Your arms belong to the Messenger of God, as well as all the slaves that are with you, and the rings, apart from what the Messenger of God, or the envoy of the Messenger of God, will allow you to keep. And from now onwards you will owe a quarter of your date harvest and a quarter of your fishing yield, and a quarter of the yarn spun by your women. . . .

  Muslim propagandists in America relentlessly publicize the claim that Muhammad awarded the status of "protected people" to Jews and Christians, but the propagandists never tell that Muhammad's "protection" service comprised subjugation, expropriation and extortion.

The answer to every question is no. This book tells nothing about life in Saudi Arabia, and it contains only two fleeting references to the Saudi government. On page 592 students read that "Saudi Arabia has a king who has absolute power," and then they see a photograph of King Fahd. The caption beside the photo says: "The king, at left, holds majlis, or audiences, where his subjects can ask for assistance. . . ." Nice guy, that king -- and so much for Saudi Arabia [note 8].

Prentice Hall has been promoting Islam for some time, and all the earlier versions of World Cultures have displayed the same vices that we now see in the 2001 version -- the depiction of Muslim superstitions as history, the sanitizing of Muhammad and Islam, and the dissemination of Muslim propaganda. Prentice Hall's religious-indoctrination material is old and familiar.

So is nearly everything else in this 2001 book: Prentice Hall has made few changes in World Cultures over the years, and the 2001 version is hardly distinguishable from the 1993 version [note 9], the 1996 version [note 10], or the 1999 version [note 11]. World Cultures is still what it always has been: It is still a mindless jumble of stuff that fails to reflect any awareness of what the word culture means or any awareness of how cultures can be described or analyzed -- and it is still loaded, from cover to cover, with "information" that is false, misleading, ludicrously obsolete, or utterly inane. The Grand Kaimakan's Koran-thumping just makes it worse.

When I wrote about the 1999 version, I said that World Cultures was junk. Now, after reading the 2001 version, I affirm that appraisal. World Cultures is a book that can appeal only to the most ignorant and incompetent teachers -- teachers who know nothing about cultural studies, teachers who are unable to recognize nonsense when they see it, teachers who will swallow any woo-woo that comes their way, and teachers who will help Prentice Hall's Grand Kaimakan to recruit true believers for Islam.

I thank the historian Bat Ye'or for directing my attention to Muhammad's letter to the Jews of Maqna. Teachers who must give lessons about Islam will profit from reading Bat Ye'or's book The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, issued in 1996 by the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Notes

1. See The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book, edited by Ibn Warraq and published in 1998 by Prometheus Books (Amherst, New York). This is one of two recent books -- both edited by Warraq and issued by Prometheus -- that deserve the attention of every teacher who must give lessons about Islam. The second book is The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, issued in 2000. [return to text]

2. See the Koran 5:51 (i.e., sura 5, verse 51). [return to text]

3. See the Koran 9:29. [return to text]

4. See the Koran 48:13. [return to text]

5. In the Koran (9:30), we read that Muhammad wanted Christians to be damned by Allah because the Christians said that Jesus Christ was the son of God. [return to text]

6. See, for example, Elaine Pagels's book The Gnostic Gospels, published in 1979 by Random House, Inc. (New York City). Pagels did a magnificent job of writing history for the general reader, and The Gnostic Gospels is still a superb resource for all middle-school and high-school educators who teach about the origins and early history of Christianity. [return to text]

7. The translation appears in A History of Palestine, 634-1099, issued in 1992 by Cambridge University Press. [return to text]

8. Teachers who want solid information about the culture of Saudi Arabia should consult the section "Saudi Arabia" in 1999 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, issued in February 2000 by the Department of State of the United States. [return to text]

9. Three reviews of the 1993 version ran in The Textbook Letter for March-April 1994, with these headlines: "A Trivial, Ill-Conceived Book Telling Little About Cultures," "This Confused Book Lacks Any Clear Idea of Culture" and "It's Phony and Vicious, but It's Funny Anyway." [return to text]

10. See "Like the 1993 Version, This Book Is Worthless" in The Textbook Letter for May-June 1995. [return to text]

11. See "Same Junk, Different Peddlers" in The Textbook Letter, September-October 1999. [return to text]

William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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