These guidelines are intended to help public schools balance the need for school safety with the need for free expression. The balance between the two is not static: It changes depending on the specific circumstances in each case, and is affected especially by the age of the students involved. These guidelines are based on current law. They do not provide guidance for every situation. But they should provide useful guidance for school officials seeking to create a safe and free learning environment.
Statement by a prominent Mauritanian Muslim jurist explaining to youth why extremism, suicide bombing, and ISIS are illegitimate according to Islamic beliefs and practices. Abdallah bin Mahfudh ibn Bayyah is a Mauritanian professor of Islamic studies at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is a specialist in all four traditional Sunni schoolsof Islamic law. Currently he is the President of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies.
In this short interview/article about Islamic Law, Dr. Intisar Rabb is an American scholar of Islamic and American law at Harvard University, is interviewed and gives very clear answers that are easy to understand.
Students investigate the ways they commonly assign identities to people based solely on their appearance. Then after listening to students in AMERICAN MUSLIM TEENS TALK describe what it feels like to have other people stereotype you and your religion, students learn strategies for overcoming stereotypical thinking through the acquisition of information and the process of dialogue. For use with video: American Muslim Teens Talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXr8vBkFpM.
This lesson uses the vocabulary and concepts commonly applied to the study of the immigrant experience in America. It begins with a look at the religious prejudice faced by other immigrant groups in America (Irish Catholics in the 1850s) as a point of comparison to Muslims. Students then choose a Muslim immigrant group to research, create an imaginary immigrant, and as that immigrant introduce themselves in a monologue before the class. For use with video: American Muslim Teens Talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXr8vBkFpM.
This lesson fosters an appreciation of America’s ethnic and religious diversity. As students explore and share their own family roots, they learn about those of the teens in AMERICAN MUSLIM TEENS TALK. Students symbolically increase the diversity of their classroom when each student writes an imaginary letter to one youth in the video, welcoming them into their school. For use with video: American Muslim Teens Talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXr8vBkFpM.
(Reproduced by permission of the author from www.rukhsanakhan.com. Rukhsana Khan is the author of seven books for children and young adults. Her complete book list can be found on the Web version of this article.)