What the Textbooks Say
The coverage of Islam in world history textbooks has expanded and in some respects improved, offering students a detailed look at the Muslim world through the centuries, one that explains its origins and tenets, including the difference between the Sunni and Shiite sects, and one that dwells on the splendors of Islamic art and architecture, learning and science, medicine and knowledge through the ages. But on significant Islam-related subjects, textbooks omit, flatter, embellish, and resort to happy talk, suspending criticism or harsh judgments that would raise provocative or even alarming questions.
Slavery
On the subject of Islamic slavery, world history textbooks steer around a controversial subject, also failing to make any connection between slavery and jihad. Glencoe's The Human Experience ignores the subject. Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Continuity and Change alludes obliquely to Muslim slavery:
Included among East African exports were ivory, which was highly prized in many countries; wooden mangrove poles, used for building houses around the Persian Gulf, and small quantities of gold, copper, shells, leopard skins, and coconut oil. They also exported slaves captured in the interior. . . . after about A.D. 1100, Ethiopia once again began to export gold and ivory to Egypt, and myrrh, frankincense, and African slaves to the Arab world.
Prentice Hall's Connections to Today is more specific: As in Greece and Rome, slavery was a common institution in the cities of the Muslim world. Slaves were brought from conquered lands in Spain, Greece, Africa, India, and Central Asia. Muslims could not be enslaved. If non-Muslim slaves converted to Islam, they did not automatically gain their freedom, but their children did. A female slave who married her owner also gained freedom.
Like the boys, non-Muslim girls from Eastern Europe were brought to serve as slaves in wealthy Muslim households. There, they might be accepted as members of the households. Some of the enslaved girls were freed after the death of their masters.
Such passages beg for more commentary, which might include perhaps a focus on the origin and role of concubines and eunuchs in Muslim society, lessons that would surely excite student interest but that are taboo in the classroom, partly on account of sexual content.
In McDougal Littell's Patterns of Interaction, as in other world history textbooks, slavery is presented as essentially a European and American event. It assumes a central position in the history of the Atlantic world after 1500 and is an integral part of the highly contestable "Three Worlds Meet" concept in which American history begins as an encounter of Europeans, Africans and Indians, each equally significant in the development of the nation and culture.
Patterns of Interaction does address the subject of Muslim slavery with facts and details, which no other widely adopted world history textbook does. The following passage introduces "The Atlantic Slave Trade" and antecedes a long special section that explains Three Worlds Meet:
The spread of Islam into Africa during the seventh century, however, ushered in an increase in slavery and the slave trade. African rulers justified enslavement with the Muslim belief that non-Muslim prisoners of war could be bought and sold as slaves. As a result, between 650 and 1600, black as well as white Muslims transported as many as 4.8 million Africans -- mostly prisoners of war and criminals -- to the Muslim lands of Southwest Asia. Once there, these enslaved Africans worked primarily as domestic servants.
In most African and Muslim societies, slaves had some legal rights and opportunity for social mobility. In the Muslim world, slaves even occupied positions of influence and power. Some served as generals in the army. Others bought large estates and even owned slaves of their own.
These statements are not exactly inaccurate but they are highly misleading. Scholars agree that those millions who were enslaved by Muslims were accorded many more legal protections under Islamic law than they were in the Americas. But these representations stress the exception, not the rule, and they omit any references to the downside of Muslim enslavement. These reductive passages give the impression that Muslim slavery was a benign institution, simply a part of economic life, even a route to influence and power, illustrating the inconsistencies and double standard of multiculturalized world history.
As world history textbooks would have it, slavery is a Western, European and American institution. By contrast, Islamic slavery does not exist or is presented as benign. In fact, by some accounts, from the tenth to the nineteenth century, a larger number of enslaved Africans moved north and east into the Muslim world than into the entire Western Hemisphere from the beginning of the Portuguese slave trade.
Slavery was a central part of Islamic civilization, and it may be said that Arabs invented the African slave trade. Child tribute among Christians in the Balkans for centuries provided recruits for the Ottoman janissaries. The number of enslaved Africans transported to Muslim lands between the seventh and nineteenth century has been estimated to be as high as 14 million, a much higher figure than the one used in Patterns of Interaction. This compares to an estimated 11 million Africans shipped to the Western Hemisphere after 1650. Slavery in Africa and the Middle East did not disappear with the 1834 British imperial abolition but lasted into the twentieth century. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina remained strongholds of slavery and the slave trade throughout the nineteenth century.
Status of Women
On the one hand, world history textbooks contort themselves to include women in history and amplify their accomplishments, never failing to mention or invent obstacles to their progress and achievements. On the other, textbooks try to explain away or recast any inconvenient detail concerning the treatment of women in the Islamic world that would be considered backward, unacceptable, or even revolting in the West. Human Heritage, a world history textbook designed for seventh and eighth grade use, covers the subject in insipid, florid language: Islamic society produced some women of great knowledge and power.
At the time of the birth of a Muslim baby the call for prayer was recited into the baby's ears. By doing this, the child was brought into the life of Islamic culture. Reciting and memorizing the Quaran was an important requirement in education.
But such patter is not confined to elementary and middle schools. Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Continuity and Change, a high school textbook, states:
Although men had most of the power in Arab society, women had some freedom. For example, women could own and inherit property. Women contributed to the group through such activities as spinning and weaving. A woman's primary role, however, was that of mother.
The points made in Glencoe's The Human Experience conform to Islamist prescriptions, mixed with vague propositions and false claims:
Islam did, however, improve the position of women. It forbade the tribal custom of killing female infants and also limited polygamy, or the practice that allowed a man to have more than one wife. A Muslim could have as many as four wives, but all were to be treated as equals and with kindness. Also, a woman had complete control over her own property. If she were divorced, she could keep the property she had brought with her when she married. A woman could also inherit property from her father and remarry.
Most women's lives revolved around family and household. Other roles, however, were available to Muslim women, especially among the upper classes. Scholarship was a prominent way for women to win recognition, and many important teachers of Islamic knowledge were women. Women often used their control over property for investment in trade and in financing charitable institutions. The lists of Muslim rulers include a number of prominent women, both as members of the court and as leaders in their own right.
Prentice Hall's Connections to Today provides another example of the treatment of women in the Islamic world:
Before Islam, the position of women in Arab society varied. In some communities, women took a hand in religion, trade, or warfare. Most women, however, were under the control of a male guardian and could not inherit property. Furthermore, among a few tribes, unwanted daughters were sometimes killed at birth.
Islam affirmed the spiritual equality of women and men. "Whoever does right, whether male or female," states the Quran "and is a believer, all such will enter the Garden." Women therefore won greater protection under the law. The Quran prohibited the killing of daughters. Inheritance laws guaranteed a woman a share of her parents' or husband's property. Muslim women had to consent freely to marriage and had the right to an education. In the early days of Islam, some Arab women participated actively in public life.
Though spiritually equal, men and women had different roles and rights. For example, the amount of an inheritance given to a daughter was less than that given to a son. A woman could seek a divorce, but it was harder for her to get one than for a man. . . . As Islam spread, Arabs sometimes absorbed attitudes from the peoples they conquered. In Persian and Byzantine lands, Arabs adopted the practice of veiling upper-class women and secluding them in a separate part of the home. There, they managed the affairs of the household but seldom ventured out.
Still, as in other cultures, women's lives varied according to region and class. Veiling and seclusion were not so strictly followed among lower-class city women. In rural areas, peasant woman continued to contribute to the economy in many ways.
Much of this passage can be disputed. But facts aside, does no editor at Prentice Hall have an eye for the callousness of the last sentence? Or is this what editors call "even handedness"?
Connections to Today continues, mixing fact and fiction, fogging the wretched, exploited condition of women in many parts of the Muslim world:
Conditions for women vary greatly from country to country in the modern Middle East. Since the 1950s, women in most countries have won voting rights and equality before the law. They attend schools and universities in growing numbers. Middle- and upper-class women have entered professions such as law, engineering, and medicine. The changes have taken place at different rates in different places. In Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, many urban women gave up long-held practices such as wearing hejab, or cover.
On the other hand, conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran have opposed the spread of many western secular influences among women. In recent decades, many educated Muslim women have returned to wearing hejab. For some women, the movement symbolized resistance to unpopular governments or a refusal to imitate western culture. "I think of Muslim dress as a kind of uniform," one Egyptian student said. "I can sit in class with men and there is no question of attraction and so on--we are all involved in the same business of learning." Most important, women who elected to return to hejab saw it as an expression of sincere loyalty to Muslim values and practices.
Still, some women in Muslim countries were dismayed. They argued against social and political forces that put severe limits on their lives. Under Sharia law, women traditionally held powerful positions in the family and played important economic roles. In some countries, though, laws and traditions emerged that limited women's right to vote, work, or even drive cars. Many Muslim and non-Muslim women spoke out on the need for women to realize their full potential and contribute to national life.
Not in one textbook but in many, teachers and students read about obscure figures such as Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, a Sufi poetess of the eighth century (Continuity and Change, 258; Connections to Today, 263); Shajar (Human Heritage, 341), a thirteenth century freed slave who is said to have become ruler of Egypt; Maisuna (The Human Experience, 283), a Bedouin poetess who is presented as a proto-feminist; and Tansu Ciller (The Human Experience, 965), the first female prime minister of Turkey. Textbook editors' relentless search to find such historical figures deforms and cheapens world history. But such gender conventions are embedded in the history textbook editorial and design process across all civilizations and centuries.
What is missing from world history textbooks? That Muslim women today are seen by many men to be not much more than chattel; that, for these men, women are fit to be servants and breeders; and that a wife's autonomy is interpreted as a sign of female disobedience and disrespect. Patterns of Interaction includes a two-page four-color folio of photographs with "educational" captions of "Wedding Rituals Around The World." (Remember the kind of light, pictorial subject matter that textbook editors incline toward in the first place.) A bridal fair among Berbers in Morocco is presented as a happy quirk of local custom in which courtship lasts three days.
What goes unsaid is that such "bridal fairs" are essentially places where marriages are arranged and where fathers negotiate dowries (essentially selling their daughters). Grooms take home brides sheathed in burkas, henceforth to serve and obey and breed. Here is one more example of textbook unwillingness or inability to confront profound questions regarding the status of Muslim women, sidestepping the issues with the exotic and picturesque.
In Part Four I will discuss the case history of the State of Massachusetts which fought and survived attacks from activists who protested the Islam-related draft content, calling it racist and biased.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Gilbert T. Sewall is Director of the American Textbook Council, a former history instructor at Phillips Academy and an education editor at Newsweek. The American Textbook Council is an independent New York-based research organization established in 1989. The Council reviews history textbooks and other educational materials. It is dedicated to improving the social studies curriculum and civic education in the nation's elementary and high schools.