Georgetown University Educates U.S. Teachers About Arab World, Islam

By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer

Outreach program encourages respect for other points of view

Washington -- Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., is engaged in an educational outreach effort to replace American stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims with accurate information about the Arab World and Islam to students from kindergarten through high school.

"We're trying to give objective, accurate information about the Arab world and Islam," said Zeina Azzam Seikaly, the community outreach coordinator of Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. "We're trying to show that it's not a monolithic kind of place. Not all Arabs are the same."

Seikaly said many Americans view the Middle East as only a region of conflict. "I also try to show that it's a place of thriving culture. We have an incredible literary tradition. We have music, arts, a lot of other stuff that people are not really looking at," she said.

The outreach program, established in 1983, brings the expertise of Georgetown scholars to teachers from kindergarten through grade 12 in the Washington, D.C. region.

Seikaly organizes workshops for teachers on the Georgetown campus and sends Georgetown scholars to classrooms in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia during the school year. She organizes five-day summer workshops called "Approaches to Teaching the Middle East" that include experts from different academic disciplines such as literature, anthropology and political science. This summer, Seikaly plans to lead 15 teachers on a two-week tour of Turkey and Syria.

She said the point of the initiative is to give educators a feel for the diversity of the people of region and break down the stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims depicted in the United States.

"There's a diversity across religion, across class lines, across languages, across values and political orientation. You have conservative Arabs and you have very liberal Arabs," Seikaly said. She said the outreach programs challenge the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims not only in popular American culture, but also in textbooks and novels.

The most recent workshop took place on March 13 at the Georgetown campus and drew about 140 educators for a day of lectures, discussions and a documentary film dealing with the topic of women in Arab society.

One of the speakers, Yvonne Haddad, a history professor in the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, talked about the misleading impressions of Muslim women conveyed by National Geographic magazine, which is widely used for social studies throughout the United States.

She said a new book just published by National Geographic, The World of Islam, contains 116 pictures of women and all but four of the photos depict women in veils. She said the four photos of unveiled women were of women engaged in some form of violent activity, such as a Palestinian woman throwing a rock.

She said in the United States, the veil is seen as a symbol of oppression of Muslim women, but that is misleading, and that high political office could just as easily be used as a symbol for Muslim women.

"There are four women who have been head of state or government in four Muslim countries and we in the United States haven't even elected a vice president who is a woman," Haddad said. The four Muslim countries that Haddad referred to were Bangladesh, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan.

As for Muslim women in the United States, Hadded said they are similar to American women of other backgrounds.

"Like Christian, Jewish and Hindu women, they also suffer from domestic violence. Like other American women, if they get divorced, they end up with the children. They suffer from reduced income. They worry about their children getting into the wrong groups, into drugs, into pre-marital sex. They come in different shapes. There are wealthy, professional women and there are very poor women who are part of the refugees, the asylum seekers, the dispossessed," Haddad said.

Haddad said the freedom and economic opportunity of the United States have affected Muslims in the same way as other Americans.

"Like all Americans, they have come to the United States in search of political freedom, religious freedom and economic opportunities, but they also crave freedom from fear, freedom of speech, freedom of expression to be oneself, to find oneself, to make a fool of oneself, freedom to choose. They want to be free to be American," Haddad said.

Mary Thomas Newsom, president of Systems III, an educational consulting firm, said the workshop makes a contribution to helping people broaden their minds.

"In the evolutionary process of each generation, people open up a little, maybe not to the degree that we feel is necessary, but at least a little bit to a variety of points of view, and giving respect, true respect to those points of view," she said.

Rhonda Johnson, an eighth grade language arts teacher in Manassas, Virginia, had high praise for the workshop and said it would help her give her students a better appreciation of Islamic- and Arab-related subjects.

"From this, I hope to take back some of the discussion, some of the different opinions. This is very educational and controversial, too," Johnson said.

"I hope I can make my students aware that you can't just say, 'It's this one group of people that is poisoning the whole world,'" Johnson said. "Hopefully with that, we can better educate the children and even better educate ourselves as adults."

Joy Jones, an educator in cultural diversity in Washington, said the workshop helped her counter narrow-minded thinking.

"One of the least attractive features of human behavior is that we tend to think that our way is the best way, and we try to justify that by trying to convince other people that we're the ones who are right," Jones said.

Seikaly said demand for education on Islamic matters has grown exponentially since September 11.

"Schools are asking for speakers who are Muslim to talk about Muslim women, jihad and other topics. People really want to know," Seikaly said.