Our Ignorance and Our Interests: Why We Need to Learn More, Not Less, About Islam and the Arab World

When the Texas Board of Education passed a resolution late last month decrying the "pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias [that] has tainted... Texas Social Studies textbooks," indicating that they would "look to reject [such] prejudicial textbooks" in the future, they were basing their criticism on a biased anti-Arab review. In doing so, they took a dangerous step backward that threatens to widen the knowledge gap that has put the U.S. at risk in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

America has enormous interests in that region. In the past 30 years, we've spent more money, sold more weapons, sent more troops, fought more wars, lost more lives, had more economic and political interests at stake, and expended more diplomatic capital in the broader Middle East than anywhere else on the globe. And yet recent polling shows that two-thirds of all Americans can't point to Iraq on a map, just as many don't know the year that Israel declared its independence, the same number don't realize that Iran and Pakistan aren't Arab countries, and about one-half share prejudicial and stereotypical views of Arabs as angry, backward, violent fanatics.

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