A Monty Python history text

The Canadian Algonquin Nation Secretariat (peace be upon them!) has blown the whistle on a textbook so atrociously wrong that it's funny.

The Arab World Studies Notebook says that Muslim explorers began arriving in the New World in 889, that they married into the Algonquin tribe and that 17th-century Algonquin chiefs were named Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik.

The book is distributed by the Middle East Policy Council, which promotes its curriculum in 155 U.S. cities to poor, benighted history teachers who don't know how to teach complicated topics.

"How could we expect [teachers] to handle complicated and emotionally charged subjects like the Holocaust and figure out what lessons to learn about it? To escort youngsters safely through the thicket of political correctness and ethnic politics that now surrounds such benign holidays as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving?" asks Chester Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Foundation, in the foundation's scathing report on the text.

It seems to me that if they don't know how to teach Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, they would do well to learn about the holidays someplace other than the Middle East Policy Council, since that body is apparently weak, at best, on North American history.

The guide's author and editor, Audrey Shabbas, says that the two-page chapter titled "Early Muslim Exploration Worldwide: Evidence of Muslims in the New World Before Columbus" will be removed from future editions of the book. She says she's "giving careful and thoughtful attention" to notifying the 1,200 teachers who have received copies of the book over the past five years.

No word yet on whether she'll fact-check the rest of the book.

In the meantime, Sandra Stotsky, former senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, writing in the Fordham Foundation report, calls the book "propaganda" (yes, really) and says, "The idea that English explorers met native Indian chiefs with Muslim names in the middle of the Northeast woodlands sounds almost like something a Hollywood film writer dreamed up for a spoof." (Note to self: Here's an education official who can actually write a clear and interesting sentence. Another stereotype undermined.)

The book is quite a bargain, marked down $15 from its $50 list price. Not bad for a 540-page work of hardback fiction. Maybe Borders will carry it under Humor.

UPDATE: More about the book that raises revisionist history (historical revisionism? revisional historicism? ah, historical fiction) to a new level.

(Source: Dhimmi Watch by way of Allah)