Introduction

These headlines no longer surprise many of us who are plugged into the daily news.2 The fi rst one tells the gripping story of an Islamic school teacher from Afghanistan’s southern Helmand Province who was recruited by Pakistani militants to become a suicide bomber. The second article documents how Lashkar-e-Taiba indoctrinates young Muslims to become deadly terrorists in the 2008 Mumbai attack. The third article reports on a public-interest legal group accusing a California public school of allowing its students to be indoctrinated through its three-week intensive course on Islam.3 The last headline sounds the alarm of a perceived insidious attempt by Muslims to indoctrinate students in American public schools. It is claimed that students in one school learned during an “Islamic Awareness” presentation that “there is one God, his name is Allah”, while another school set up an “Islamic religion station” to offer its students verses from the Qur’an, prayer items, and a compass pointed towards Mecca.