Islamic Indoctrination 101 (Part 2)

In the first part of this piece, I recounted how I was first introduced to Islam in a “freshman seminar” course that purported to be teaching us how to participate in discussions and hone our skills in researching and writing. The topic was music in two religious traditions – Islam and Christianity. For the first part of the course, we learned some of the barest fundamentals of Islam via lectures from the professor rather than participating in class discussions, and we had no coaching at all in research or writing, given that there were no textbooks other than the professor’s own unpublished dissertation. And we were only told that music was technically prohibited within Islam after it was too late for us to drop the course and switch into another that would fulfil the “freshman seminar” requirement.

Even if the course was not a seminar in any real sense of the word, we still had plenty of opportunities to “participate.” A good part of every class session was devoted to repeated recitations by us students: of the list of the six pillars of Islam, but especially of the shahada itself in Arabic: la illaha ill’ Allah; muhammedu rasul Allah (“There is no god but Allah; Muhammed is the prophet/messenger of Allah.”) I recited it so many times that it became part of my muscle memory and still rolls trippingly off my tongue to this day. At the time, I did not realize that – according to many traditions of Islam – simply pronouncing the words of the shahada is sufficient to make one a Muslim; you do not also have to have any heartfelt belief or intention regarding the statement for it to “count.”

As I recall, we were also taught a few prayers or verses of the Qur’an (again, in Arabic) and coached through pronouncing them without being given translations or citations so as to be able to look up what we were actually saying, though we did not do as well at these. But every time we went ploddingly but correctly through the shahada, the professor would smile at us beatifically and wave his arms as if conducting a choir.

After the midterm, the professor declared that we were “behind schedule” and would have to keep focusing on Islam a while longer rather than turning to look at music in the practice of Christianity, as the syllabus had planned. I think we eventually heard a few Gregorian chants, hymns, and Gospel songs during the last one or two class periods. That was all that we learned of Christianity or Christian musical traditions.

We were also granted the “wonderful opportunity” of visiting a mosque about an hour’s drive away from campus shortly after midterm — by special invitation of the imam himself. Participating in this field trip (which was not during the scheduled class time) became a requirement that was not on the initial syllabus. Two of us (including me) rode with another student, who was one of the rare freshmen allowed to have a car on campus. The other three students in the class rode with the professor, who insisted on stopping on the way back to treat them to dinner at McDonald’s, even though all of them said they preferred not to and/or had other scheduled places to be. By this point, none of us wanted to spend any more time with the professor than we absolutely had to.

During this excursion, for which we were all encouraged to feel and express extreme gratitude, the female students (four out of the six of us) were required to wear head coverings. Of course, being non-Muslim first-year students living in dorms, we didn’t have any hijabs. So we ended up trying to cover all of our hair with jerry-rigged towels and pillowcases held together with safety pins or with our hands.

We girls were required to stand in the back of the mosque while trying to listen to the imam tell us about the history of the mosque in that city, the faithfulness of his congregation, their engagement in service to the local community, how Islam was really growing in America, and how we would be welcome to join the mosque. We were there in the off-hours, so it was just the six of us, the imam, and the professor. Before we left, the professor decided that he wanted to take that opportunity to pray. We were encouraged to join with him in praying, but all of us politely declined and just stood there rather awkwardly – females separated from the males — as the imam led the professor through the prayers that we’d seen him pray before during classes.

The professor never gave us much in the way of coaching or feedback on writing either, which was ostensibly the other purpose of the freshman seminar requirement. Shortly after the midterm paper, some of the other students and I had begun to offer more resistance to the methodology and proceedings of the class. None of us, of course, were refusing to do the work, being disrespectful, complaining to the administration, or staging protests. We were simply posing more pointed questions as opposed to more deferential ones during what were supposed to be “class discussions.”

In a mandatory private meeting with the professor to discuss the topic of my final paper, he said that he regretted giving me an A on my midterm paper, even though he found it well-organized and well-researched. Although he initially thought me “a cute girl” and a good student – especially because my Arabic pronunciation was “promising” — he had since begun revising his opinion of me. As he put it in heavily-accented English, “I start to think now: maybe you are trouble.”

I was eighteen and alone with him in the office, after hours and with the door closed. Something about what he was saying and the look in his eyes chilled me, so I hastened to reassure him that I was a good student and was not trying to make “trouble.” Satisfied that I was taking the matter seriously, he smiled again and let me go with my midterm grade intact. Later, I found out from other students that they had been similarly chastised and warned. We stopped asking any questions in classes after that, dutifully recited our shahadas, and waited for the semester to end.

What stuck with me most was the professor’s frank admission that he based our grades primarily on our agreement with him and our compliance with his agenda. He said in no uncertain terms that he wanted to give me a bad grade for what he still thought was a good paper (and potentially a bad grade for a paper I hadn’t even written yet) purely because he didn’t like the sorts of questions I was asking in class. Such a practice – or even the threat of it — constitutes a betrayal of the core values and principles of higher education.

On the last day of college classes, students typically fill out forms evaluating the course and the instructor. The professor leaves the room during this time and one of the students would collect the evaluations and turn them in to the administration, to keep the process anonymous. Most of us came that day with typewritten comments to append to the forms. We only had a few minutes to complete the evaluations before having to dash off to our next scheduled classes, but there was more to say than we could write out by hand in the space provided on the forms themselves.

My purpose in recounting all of this is not born of any personal resentment. I earned an A or A-minus in the class and went on to learn more about both religion (in which I now hold a PhD) and music. For many years, I considered the whole experience to be a “one-off” incident — a course poorly designed and poorly taught by a professor who wasn’t cut out for the job.

However, after decades of further academic work in several fields, I have come to view my early experience in this course as a harbinger of things yet to come. Today, the practices of this professor are not only more widely represented but actually predominate within higher education; I have witnessed faculty colleagues regularly employing them. Like it or not, we are in the midst of a long-term educational jihad being waged both by Islam and by other ideologies (which often support or partner with Islam) against the fundamental principles and essential methods of liberal education. Given that the justice and flourishing of democratic states are vitally dependent upon the education of their citizens in the principles and methods of reason, this amounts to an attack upon democracy itself. In responding to this, we only have two options: we can either choose to “go along to get along” and let that attack succeed, or we can oppose it and be viewed as “trouble.”