Willamette Week Goes Inside Islamic School
By AAN Staff
december 14, 2001 07:10 pm
Are American Muslims harboring terrorists or seeking peace? To answer the question raging on talk radio, Willamette Week peeks behind the curtains at Portland's Islamic Academy. WW's Chris Lydgate interviewed students, teachers and parents, reviewed textbooks and sat in on classes and prayers. "What we discovered was neither the conservatives' paranoid nightmare of fanatics sharpening scimitars nor the liberals' wishful daydream of Unitarians in headscarves. Instead, we developed a far more nuanced image. We found a deeply conservative faith determined that its children not lose their way in a me-first society--and a group of believers scrambling for sanctuary in a newly suspicious nation," Lydgate writes.