In the wake of the Paris and California terrorist attacks perpetrated or inspired by Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS), it is perhaps not too surprising that a standard homework assignment on Islam in a Virginia school created such an angry backlash that it prompted officials to close every single school in the US county as a safety precaution. Social media exploded over the school lesson - a simple Arabic calligraphy drawing assignment that asked students to trace the shahada, or declaration of faith, but which some students refused to do and some parents said amounted to indoctrination. Following the storm of protest, the school said no one was trying to convert anyone to any religion, and that future classes would use a different, non-religious example of Arabic. This current climate of fear in the West of Muslims and their religion comes after Paris and San Bernardino, plus several other terrorist attacks in Europe, and as many US presidential candidates predict more attacks from domestic radicalization and Syrian refugees. But in the days following Paris, American high schools seemed to have gone out of their way to be extra controversial on Islam. A high school in Houston gave as a document-based question a homework assignment on Daesh recruiting; a teacher in the Ocean View School district forced her seventh-grade class to sing a song about Islam; and a school in Utah canceled an assignment in which ninth-grade students were instructed to craft a terrorism propaganda poster. These were utterly unnecessary assignments. In such an atmosphere of near paranoia, teachers must show some common sense. None of the assignments should have been given at this time in American schools. It's not the time, not the place. What is happening in many parts of America today is an unnatural rise in Islamophobia, rising fear, hate and discrimination which brands Islam as un-American, and demonizes Muslims as an existential threat. The perception of Muslims as the "other" – and a dangerous or suspicious other at that – persists, fueled by the acts of an extremist Muslim fringe that uses radical interpretations of Islam to justify the murder of non-Muslims as enemies of Islam. Suggesting that Muslim Americans need to be under special watch or that Muslims in their entirety not be allowed to enter the US endorses and emboldens the Islamophobic rhetoric among presidential hopefuls. This combination stirs anti-Muslim fervor on the ground in America. If the state associates Islam with threat, then surely, that will influence political and media perceptions. The same old and embedded stereotypes of Muslims are being injected into the American psyche, these days with extra force. Such attitudes link benign and routine religious, political and social activity with radicalization. Most Americans know little about Islam and, in many cases, don't know a Muslim personally. That lack of knowledge means that, with help, they look beyond the genuine contours of Islam as a faith, and instead mutate it into a political ideology, mainly violent, instead of a multi-ethnic and multi-racial religion of peace. The resulting marginalization leaves some young Muslims, even those brought up in America, vulnerable to the persuasive rhetoric of extremist leaders. As passions overflowed in Virginia and elsewhere in the US, the school was quick to point out that the study of a region's religion and language are included in their geography lessons. The lesson was intended to illustrate the complexity of the Arabic language, they said, and not meant to promote any religious system. But the current rising fear and animus toward Muslims in America ensures that anti-Muslim rhetoric overrules logical explanations. These days, reasoning does not seem able to straighten out dangerous, wayward thinking.
