Uh, Muslim art is highly involved in the calligraphy of their religious precepts.
I suppose all of the people objecting to this lesson are in full support of the morons who are making threats which have required the entire school district to shut down every fucking school?
I wonder if the Christianity part of the class involved the religious art of the Middle Ages?
Isn’t this comparative religions, not world geography?
I wonder if they had to write out the Lord’s prayer in calligraphic Latin as part of that section of the class?
context is key.
If that were the assignment, no problem. But to ask the students to write out a profession of faith, just to demonstrate calligraphy, seems inappropriate. Both because some students may have a problem professing faith in the prophet Mohammed, and because it seems to make light of a serious religious statement. That is, I think both Moslems and followers of other faiths have a legitimate gripe with this lesson.
That being said, it’s more on the level of “ask the teacher to pick a different text next year” than “refuse to send you kid to school” or “threaten people” level of gripe.
That sort of puts a damper on all of the self righteous defense of this lesson.
So, now that it wasn’t a class about fucking religion, is the fucking calligraphy making kids declare a belief in god justified still somehow? I mean it wasn’t even when you were claiming it was a religion class. But, that was a major crux of your (unhinged) argument.
Nobody made the kids declare a belief in jack shit. It was a bit of calligraphy-not a magic spell that bound their souls to the words they were assigned to write. Do you honestly believe the teacher was trying to trick them into professing belief in another religion??
Surely there is some value in being able to recognize this particular piece of calligraphy, which is fairly common in art and popular culture throughout the Islamic world (which has a not insignificant overlap with the entire world).
Also, to the question about the value of Arabic calligraphy in a World Religions class: the prohibition on representative art (esp. human figures) has meant that Islamic art does a lot more with calligraphy and abstract art. This is pretty important in understanding a big chunk of human art, and can also be tied into iconoclastic movements in Christianity under the Byzantines and early Protestants.
A declaration in a belief in god is actually, literally, what the shahada is. I would think, at the very least, it is offensive to Muslims to have it declared by non believers.
Making high school football players pray before a game doesn’t bind their souls. Having a moment of silence to thank the lord before class doesn’t bind their souls. The teacher making the kids pray to Jesus for the school lunch they are about to eat doesn’t bind their souls. All of them are wrong in the school.
As Khatt is a highly developed art and has the specific and often taught forms, it is safe to speak for all arabophones as well as anyone who is not so unlearned to confuse ordinary signs with the arts of the calligraphy.
So no, restaurant signs themselves are not calligraphy en grosso modo.
yes I think so.
could be contaminated to do so…
it is not offensive. I would not have maybe chosen it, rather than the basmalla, but it does not offend.
ETA: Thank you Ramira, yes, that is a good example of an alternate phrase that would be more widely accepted. (Plus then you can link also to how it gets referenced in rock music…)
This. A thousand times this. Religions class, history class, geography class, art class, whichever the context, *“maybe pick a more innocuous example next time?” *is the level of reaction that normal people apply when objecting to something like this. Making the district shut down? Moronic, and it’s an insult to hillbillies to associate them with it.
Oh and fer cryin’out loud no, displaying examples of religions’ practices and creeds is NOT the same thing as organizing prayers. The rule is not that schools are religion-free zones.
None of those are the equivalent of what she asked those kids to do. If this was supposedly so offensive to Muslims, why are we not hearing about any protests from Muslim groups? I’m sure, though, that they find your “concern”…touching.
Yes, I went to school in England in the 50s, same deal. I remember RCs and others could opt out and several did. We’d sing a hymn in assembly and there was a short prayer, I think, but most of the assembly was secular. England of course has an established church so there was no problem with prayers in schools, although I’m sure they’ve created one now.
England always feels left out if we don’t have the same problems as the States.
I have a simple, two-part test for teaching of religious beliefs in a public school setting:
Teaching children the fundamentals of world religions so they can understand other cultures and peoples, teaching about schisms in Christian thought to understand European history, and teaching about Abrahamic prohibitions on human imagery to understand early-Protestant era iconoclasm or Islamic art all pass this test. Opening class with a prayer does not, and neither does copying the phrase “Jesus loves me” 50 times to practice handwriting.
As for this issue, the context of the lesson is rather unclear. If the intention is purely artistic, than a secular message would have been a better choice. If it’s to understand something deeper about the interaction between religious belief, art, history, and culture, then it’s fine, but I don’t know how you’d accomplish that without even translating the phrase.
We’ve all seen it claimed: Your “anonymous” communications aren’t as anonymous as you think they are. With sufficient effort, your calls can be traced. With sufficient effort, your on-line comments can be traced. Well, at least a lot of time.
But we never see law authorities putting all that much effort into it.
With the ever-growing amount of hate-speech flying around these days (especially on-line), reaching such a crescendo that schools are being shut down because of it (and we’ve seen several instances of this lately), you would think the authorities would be losing their sense of humor about this.
This isn’t protected by any Amendments that I know of. It’s become a big enough problem that it shouldn’t just be shrugged off any more. The kind of hate crimes going on here, as discussed in this thread, should be prosecuted and more than a few asses’ asses thrown in jail for a while.
So, it is clear that the lesson was not doing anything resembling trying to convert the kids to Islam.
If the course included having the kids write the Shema in Hebrew, ‘[symbol]o Cristos [/symbol]’[symbol]o Kurios[/symbol] in Greek and similar statements from other religions in the original alphabets, it might have dampened the objections.
The Pledge of Allegiance didn’t specify WHICH deity. That’s the issue here.
This statement that they were asked to copy endorsed a religion, and even though I’m a Christian, I would be just as offended if they had been asked to write out John 3:16 in Arabic, or any other language. :rolleyes:
Why couldn’t they have been asked to write out the name of their school, or the date, or some other non-offensive-to-anyone phrase? 
p.s. I saw a TV show where some American kids at a Muslim parochial school said “one nation, under Allah…” I’m OK with that, because it was in the proper context.
War on Christianity.