When the Classroom Becomes a Battlefield: Texas, the Prophet, and the War Over History

Who Owns a Prophet’s Story?

Imagine a classroom in Houston, Texas, in the year 2030. A fifteen-year-old Muslim girl opens her world history textbook and reads a lesson about her own Prophet — the man whose name she whispers five times a day in prayer, the man her grandmother calls Rehmat-ul-lil-Alameen, a mercy to the worlds. And there, in the official text, approved by the state, she finds him described as a “brutal” warrior, a normaliser of slavery, a taker of female captives.

This is not fiction. This is not a dystopian novel. On 4 September 2026, the Texas State Board of Education approved exactly such a curriculum.

I have one question for the men and women who voted for it: who gave you the right to rewrite the soul of a religion you do not practise, for the children who do?

What the Board Actually Did

Let me set down the facts first, because in this column I never hide behind poetry when facts are sharper.

The fifteen-member Texas State Board of Education voted to approve a sweeping rewrite of high school social studies standards. Among the new requirements: Texas students must now “explain early Islam in terms of the Prophet Muhammad’s brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” A second standard requires them to “explain the rise of radical Islam, including Iranian proxies, terrorism, Al Qaeda, September 11, 2001, and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” — framing the deadliest attack on American soil as the product of a religion rather than of the extremists who hijacked it.

When a last-minute amendment was proposed to remove the word “brutal,” it failed. Board member Brandon Hall defended the wording as a “moral imperative,” warning against “whitewashing” history.

And here is the detail that reveals the design: the board had earlier removed a proposed standard that would have taught students about Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy — the very foundations of the mathematics and science their children now study. The same board earlier adopted statewide required reading lists heavy with Bible passages. Standards that once asked “Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy” were discarded; in their place, standards that reduce Islam to violence were enshrined. This is not balance. This is a scale with weights on only one side.

The Irony of the Experts

But here is the part of this story that should make the whole world sit up: the board’s own appointed experts told them the language was false — and the board approved it anyway.

Andrea Hutchison, a social studies curriculum coordinator, told the board the material does not “hold up to close historical scrutiny.” Robert Koons, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called the sources of the claims “not very reliable.” Yet the vote passed regardless. When a legislature is warned by its own scholars that a history is unsound and proceeds to teach it anyway, the project is no longer education — it is propaganda with a school bell attached.

And the students saw through it instantly. At the public hearing, a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl told the board she felt “attacked, as if my religion doesn’t belong.” A child of fifteen understood in one sentence what fifteen board members could not grasp in months of deliberation: a textbook that names you a stranger in your own classroom has already expelled you.

Macaulay’s Ghost Walks in Texas

And now, reader, permit me my historical mirror — for this column has always believed that the present is only the past wearing new clothes.

In February 1835, a British politician named Thomas Babington Macaulay submitted his famous Minute on Indian Education. In it he proposed, in plain and shameless language, to form “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” The purpose was explicit: education as an instrument of empire. The East India Company did not conquer India merely with cannon; it conquered it with the classroom. Rewrite what a child learns about his own civilisation, and you need not occupy his country — he will occupy himself on your behalf.

I see Macaulay’s ghost walking in Austin today. The tools have changed — where he sought to Anglicise the Indian to make him serve the empire, the Texas board seeks to stigmatise the Muslim to make him serve a different empire of ideology. But the method is identical: use the state’s textbook to decide which civilisation a child is allowed to love. Erase algebra and astronomy from the story of Islam; keep the swords. Present Christianity’s holy wars as “efforts to reclaim lands” — the curriculum’s own sanitised language for the Crusades — and Muhammad’s defensive battles as “brutal.” One man’s reclamation is another man’s brutality, depending entirely on who holds the pen.

This is the oldest trick in the book of empires, and I say to you plainly: it never works. Macaulay’s children eventually became the lawyers, poets and revolutionaries who wrote India’s freedom. The textbooks of 1835 could not keep the empire alive. The textbooks of 2030 will not keep bigotry alive either — but they will wound a generation of children in the attempt.

The Wider Assault on the Classroom

Texas does not act in isolation. As I write this, the United States Supreme Court is weighing cases over Ten Commandments displays in public schools — after Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama passed laws requiring the biblical commandments on classroom walls. A 1980 Supreme Court decision struck down a similar Kentucky law; the current court, with its expansive view of religious freedom, may not. And just this week, a venue in Tennessee confirmed it will host a pastor who publicly defends slavery and demands the repeal of women’s right to vote.

Reader, do you see the pattern? One country, one faith’s symbols on every wall, another faith’s Prophet in the textbook as a villain. This is not the neutral state teaching history. This is a state choosing its religion and then rewriting history to bless the choice.

I address myself directly to the Muslim parents of Texas: they have promised to fight. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and its Texas chapter have pledged to spend the years before the 2030 rollout working to overturn these standards, and to protect every teacher and student who refuses to teach them. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has called the standards what they are — an unconstitutional establishment of one faith over another. I address myself to the Christian neighbours of those Muslims — the Christians like Tiffany Perkinz, the board candidate who stood in an Islamic centre and called this Islamophobia a violation of her own Christian conscience. You are the answer to my opening question. You are the proof that faith does not belong to a state board.

The Verdict of History

Let me close with a warning, because this column always ends where it must: at the moral verdict.

A Prophet who has commanded the love of roughly two billion hearts for fourteen centuries cannot be diminished by a paragraph in a Texas textbook. The Qur’an does not depend on a social studies standard for its survival. No board in Austin can vote on what happened in seventh-century Arabia — it can only vote on what its own children are permitted to hear, and a child taught a lie will one day grow up and discover it. Every falsehood in a textbook is a seed of future distrust, planted by the state in its own credibility.

And to the board I say what history says to every textbook tyrant before them: the pen you use to write others out of history will be used by history to write you down. Macaulay is remembered today not as an educator but as a symbol of colonial arrogance. You are choosing the same legacy. The classroom is a sacred trust — a place where a child’s mind meets the world’s truth. Turn it into a battlefield of faiths, and the first casualty will not be the Prophet. It will be the truth itself.

Sources & References

• KERA / The Muslim Times — Texas State Board of Education approves controversial curriculum that Muslims call discriminatory (Bill Zeeble reporting, 4 September 2026)
• The Christian Post — New Texas curriculum will teach role of ‘radical Islam’ in 9/11 (8 September 2026)
• CAIR / CAIR-Texas — CAIR-Texas, CAIR Action pledge to protect teachers and students from new standards (September 2026)
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State — New Texas social studies standards favor Christianity, disparage Islam (September 2026)
• Reuters — US Supreme Court mulls immigrant detention, gambling, Ten Commandments cases (29 September 2026)
• Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks — Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education (2 February 1835)