When I first began homeschooling my children, I told myself the biggest hurdles would be teaching them about slavery in America and teaching them about the holocaust of WWII.
All the time I've been weighing my options for broaching these most unpleasant topics -- because, as any of my long-time readers know, I disdain historical revisionism or the selective teaching of only the "good" parts -- I've been unaware of a growing struggle within my own heart and mind.
It has surfaced with the beginning of our new school year and our first forays into the Middle Ages because, as part of their studies, my children will come face to face with the birth and rise of Islam.
Islam. For most of my life it was just a word, a descriptor for an exotic-sounding religion centered in an exotic and far-off part of the world. I knew it existed, just as I knew about Buddhism, animism, and other faith traditions not common to the little slice of south Texas where I grew up, but its existence was nothing that concerned me.
I knew there was a book, the Koran. I knew there was a venerated prophet, Muhammad. I knew there was a city in Saudi Arabia, Mecca.
And those things were all I knew.
See, I went to public school so I never learned about the Crusades or the clashes between Muslims and Jews. My public education did a good job of compartmentalizing those peoples -- Christians in one box, Jews in another, Muslims in yet another, and everyone else lumped together in the "they're small and weird and don't really matter" category.
Life was easy because my thoughts were unencumbered, untroubled by the complicated relationships between groups of people so dedicated to their respective faiths that they warred against each other for control of land they'd all designated as holy.
I never paid attention to the nightly news, nor did I fully understand the analogy between hell freezing over and achieving peace in the Middle East.
In short, my teachers did a damn lousy job of laying out for me the current events of the day -- why WAS it so important for President Carter to meet with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Israel's Menachim Begin? What were the Camp David Accords and why did they matter?
Fast forward to September 11, 2001. I'm sitting in my living room, two months pregnant, wanting to plan a home birth, and waiting to interview my chosen midwife for the first time. My mother is upstairs with my toddler and calls down to me that an airplane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. I'm nonplussed, self-absorbed in my last minute preparations before the midwife arrives. Small planes periodically crash into tall buildings, right? I remark on this to my mother and she replies that this was a passenger jet. My curiosity is piqued, but I'm still focused on my impending visitor. My mother calls down to me again -- this time her voice is tinged with urgency -- to turn on the downstairs television and I do it just in time to see a smoking skyscraper begin to crumble. I begin to read the ticker tape scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen and then I start to shake.
Running upstairs to my mother's room and her much bigger television screen, I ask over and over again, "What is happening? What IS happening? Where is the president? Is this an attack?"
At that point, the media doesn't know where President Bush is and they also don't know how many other planes we can expect to come hurling in like lightning bolts. There is talk of a missing plane. Is it headed for the White House? The Capitol Building? The Washington Monument? Later, of course, we'd learn about the nosedive into the Shanksville, PA field and the bravery of the passengers on that plane.
In the wee hours of that night and the next and the next as I lay awake listening to the radio with its live coverage of rescues and recoveries at Ground Zero, and as I tried to tend to my daughter with one ear while listenening to the talking on the television with the other, I began to learn about Islam and to craft an understanding of it within the context of terror and pain and death.
I kept waiting for American Muslims to take to the streets in loud and forceful denouncement of the 9/11 catastrophe. Where were their voices on talk radio? Why weren't they demanding hours and hours of airtime to distance themselves from the evil that infiltrated our society, lived alongside our citizens, shopped in our stores, ate in our restaurants, drank in our bars (ironic), and attended our schools -- all of it in preparation to attack and kill?
When those voices came few, small, weak and altogether unconvincing, what had begun as a growing uneasiness about Islam grew into a full-blown dislike, and I caught myself by surprise as I struggled to reconcile this anger with what my Christian faith had always taught.
Love thy neighbor as thyself. We are all the children of God.
I don't think I can. I'm not sure this is true.
That's what I told myself back then.
That's what I told myself a couple of months later when I saw a woman shopping at Target dressed in a black burqa from head to toe with only her eyes visible, her children trailing along behind her and her husband leading the parade. Seeing her, seeing that burqa, I felt my face getting hot and my jaw began to clench.
How could I be so angry at a total stranger? How could I be so angry, period?
Nothing has happened in the intervening years to substantially alter my opinion of Islam, although I admit that time has made me more rational when it comes to realizing that just as all Christians shouldn't be painted with the same broad brush, neither should Muslims. There is a difference between regular and radical, but it's hard to remember this sometimes.
I give in to that reality grudgingly, though, and this tells me I'm still conflicted about Islam and its place in my country and in the education of my children.
What to do?
We won't tackle Islam for another couple of weeks, so I have some time to decide whether I want to add books to our home library about the subject or whether I'll just piece together some basic information from internet websites and make handouts for my children's notebooks. They need to know what Islam is, how it was founded, what Muslims believe.
Can I remain neutral as I share this information with them? Should I?
I'll let you know what happens.
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