Saturday, February 20, 2010

Home Truths About Sharia

From the WaPo:
On a chilly afternoon in western Loudoun County [Tennessee], a group of children used tweezers to extract rodent bones from a regurgitated owl pellet. A boy built a Lego projectile launcher. A girl practiced her penmanship. On the wall, placards read, "I fast in Ramadan," "I pay zakat" and "I will go on hajj."
Welcome to Priscilla Martinez's home -- and her children's school, where Martinez is teacher, principal and guidance counselor, and where the credo "Allah created everything" is taught alongside math, grammar and science.
Martinez and her six children, ages 2 to 12, are part of a growing number of Muslims who home school. In the Washington area, Martinez says, she has seen the number of home schoolers explode in the past five years.
Although three-quarters of the nation's estimated 2 million home schoolers identify themselves as Christian, the number of Muslims is expanding "relatively quickly," compared with other groups, said Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.

They do so, he said, for the same reasons as non-Muslims: "Stronger academics, more family time, they want to guide social interaction, provide a safe place to learn and . . . teach them [their] values, beliefs and worldview."

Parents say it is an attractive alternative to public schools, with whose traditions and values they are not always comfortable, and Islamic schools, which might be too far away, cost too much or lack academic rigor...
The kid is extracting rodent bones from a regurgitated owl pellet? M'kay. I don't exactly know what that means, but it sure sounds impressive--and educational. 

In case you were wondering, Martinez is "a convert to Islam who is of Mexican descent and grew up in Texas." She says the reason she's homeschooling her kids is so they won't "get lost in the shuffle"--meaning the kafir shuffle of public school. She 'splains that
"We don't isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and sit here at home just not being attuned to our community and our identity as Americans," she said. "But we're also not sending them to school where generally speaking they would have to leave most of their identity at the door."
And now for the article's lede, which has been well and truly buried:
There are also religious reasons. "We definitely do learn from a different worldview," she said. "Everything has God as its center. We don't just study the bee, but we study what the Koran says about the bee and the many blessings and the honey. . . . We get religious studies out of it, we get biology out of it and chemistry."...
And if you include what the Koran says about the Jews and the many curses upon them, you also get zoology out of it.

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