Education

Ohio State Course Suggests Muslims Helped Build America

David Krayden Ottawa Bureau Chief
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A new course at Ohio State University aims to highlight role that Muslims played in making America great — from the founding fathers to the news of today. 

According to The College Fix, “Islam in the United States,” scheduled to debut in Ohio State’s spring session, will be instructed by Dr. Sabra Webber and will argue that Muslims have always been an essential element of the American experience.

The course comes at a time when some Americans are accusing President Donald Trump of being anti-Muslim or even racist for issuing an executive order that temporarily bans visits or immigration into the U.S. from seven scheduled countries because of their reputation for exporting terrorists.

Ohio State is very familiar with Somalia’s propensity for terrorism: Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the student who drove his car into a unsuspecting students before stabbing several with a butcher knife, was a refugee from Somalia.

Prof. Webber, revealed in an email that the course could not open at a more opportune time.

“The ratcheting up throughout contemporary college students’ lives of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant (notably Mexico, Syria) public discourse has led them to seek a better understanding of the background in the U.S.,” Webber said.

Webber is insistent that “Muslims have been part of American cultures for more than 500 years,” according to The College Fix.

“I start by sharing with the students something about the Muslims who came to the Americas at the beginning of the 1500s and those arriving in colonial America by the early 1600s because I have found that many assume the arrival of Muslims has been fairly recent,” the professor said.

And that’s just the beginning. Along the way, students are told that the Muslim Kingdom of Morocco was “the first country to recognize the independence of the United States” in 1777 and that a treaty signed with Morocco a decade later “remains the longest unbroken treaty relationship in U. S. history.”

Another historical rarity?  When he was sworn into office, Minnesota Muslim congressman Keith Ellison used Thomas Jefferson’s English version of the Koran.

Lest the students think that all Muslims are Arabs, Webber intends to show the geographic spread of the religion and that Muslims occupy all occupations.

The professor will also touch on the sensitive current issues such as the preponderance of Muslim extremists in world terrorism and and an examination of Sharia Law that many Muslims insist they should be subject to instead of regular U.S. law.

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