WASHINGTON: A controversial expansion proposal from the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) received unanimous approval from the Fairfax County Planning Commission in Virginia this week.
Thursday night’s consensus came after weeks of fierce community debate about the ISA. Commission Chairman Peter Murphy and other commission members said they were sidetracked by the uproar over allegedly anti-Semitic and anti-American teachings at the school.
They said they ultimately decided these issues were not part of the planning commission’s duty, and that the school’s request for a zoning exemption to allow construction of the classroom building will have to be voted on by the county Board of Supervisors.
The brouhaha began when, about a year ago, the academy officials requested county permission to erect a new classroom building and move hundreds of students from a sister campus on the other end of Fairfax County, Va.
The proposal from the academy, which a school spokeswoman said was the only school financed by the Saudi government in the United States, ignited a noisy debate and exposed the school’s uneasy relationship with its neighbors.
Many pointed to the academy’s curriculum, saying it espoused a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. A leaflet slipped into mailboxes in early spring called the school “a hate training academy.”
The ISA’s director general, Abdul Rahman Al-Ghofaili, told reporters yesterday that the accusations are “completely false.”
School officials and parents say they are puzzled and discouraged by such attacks against the ISA.
The academy is no different from other religious schools, they say, and educates model students who go on to top schools, teaches Arabic to American soldiers, and no longer uses texts that drew criticism after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“I would like to invite anyone who has any concern to come to the school to see what kind of education we offer our students,” said Al-Ghofaili.
A date for a public hearing about the ISA before the board of supervisors has yet to be set.
The Islamic studies books are the ones that are being questioned, said Kate Chanard, the circular specialist at ISA, told Arab News. “The rest of the books are part of a standard US curriculum, like most private or public school in the US.”
Chanard explained that, as a result of the attacks, the ISA hired a team of Arab experts to examine the content of their textbooks.
“We had two independent Saudi scholars, Dr. Eleanor Doumato from Brown University, Rhode Island, and Gregory Starrett from the University of North Carolina, examine the books — in Arabic. They did a very thorough reading of the books and presented a very comprehensive report that said there was “absolutely nothing” in these books that was “negative toward any culture or peoples.”
Chanard said that, quite the opposite, the text books in question “contained the same core values of all the world’s great religions.”
“There are parents who send their children to Catholic, Hebrew, or Islamic schools all for the same reasons: to give their children a faith-based education and to teach them universal human values,” said Chanard.
