Group Opposes Stereotyping of Muslims : Islam: Tustin organization approaches schoolbook publishing firms over pictures or statements that it finds inaccurate or demeaning.

Aasiya Mansuri was reading her sixth-grade social studies book one evening when she exploded into laughter and began rolling around on the living room floor.

“What’s so funny?” asked her father, Shabbir Mansuri.

Aasiya pointed to a passage that implied that all Muslims were Bedouins. It went on to say that Bedouins rub sand all over their faces before kneeling to pray to Allah.

That was news to Mansuri, a 47-year-old Indian-American who is a Muslim. But the Arcadia restaurateur found nothing funny about this sweeping characterization of Muslims as desert nomads.

Mansuri complained to publisher Scott, Foresman Co. that the passage in the text “Our World: Lands and Culture” was misleading and mocked his religion. After meeting with Mansuri, officials at the publishing company put their distribution plans on hold.

That experience three years ago set the stage for his current job as director of the Council of Islamic Education. Based in Tustin and funded by a group of Muslim businessmen, the organization’s primary goal is to counter Muslim stereotypes in a culture with a strong Judeo-Christian tradition. The group tries to accomplish this by providing teachers, school administrators and publishers with information about Islam.

Starting with the seventh-grade texts where children are first taught about Islam, the Islamic council officials are trying to change wording, symbols, and misleading contexts that they believe depict their religion in a negative light.

The effort is similar to that of other minorities who have pressed state and local authorities about the content of texts and curriculum.

On Sunday, at the only gathering of its kind in the country, officials from the Council of Islamic Education will meet with school officials, textbook publishers and Muslim scholars from around the nation. They will discuss the role of Islam in shaping world events and address misconceptions about the faith during a daylong series of seminars in Buena Park.

For Mansuri, the efforts have netted some results. He described Houghton Mifflin’s seventh-grade textbook, “Across the Centuries,” as one that has undergone a dramatic improvement in the last few years.

But it is far from perfect.

He objects to a likeness of Gabriel, an angel whom Christians, Muslims and Jews believe to be God’s messenger on Earth.

The book depicts the angel as having a white face. “We said, ‘You can’t give us an angel with a white face,’ ” Mansuri said. “That just perpetuates the notion that angels are white. I jokingly asked if they (the publishers) had the angel Gabriel’s picture faxed to them by God showing that he had a white face. And if they did, to please let us see it.”

Mansuri also disapproves of what he called a subtle distancing of Islam from Judaism and Christianity, leaving readers with the impression that its teachings have less validity.

“The feeling you get is that Christianity and Judaism are ‘ours’ and Islam is ‘theirs,’ ” Mansuri said. “It’s a distant approach that gives the sense that this is not something acceptable.”

But for Mansuri and other Muslims, one of the most glaring symbols of insensitivity in the textbook has come to be referred to simply as “the camel.”

At issue is an illustration of a camel used in the Houghton Mifflin text to help illustrate trading days in ancient Arabia. The photograph is in a unit titled “The Growth of Islam.”

The camel is one of seven photographs the book uses to represent “moments in time”--essentially pictures to help students visualize the lifestyle of a particular people in their era.

The other “moments in time” include a Spanish cartographer, a Congo king, a Samurai, an Austrian crusader, an English printer and a Parisian market woman.

“All of the other pictures used were human but when you get to Islam, it’s a camel,” Mansuri said. “The whole human element is completely missing here.”

Not only was the use of the camel troubling when other cultures were represented by people, but the camel evokes a stereotype that angers many Muslims. It implies that all followers of Islam are camel-riding Arab nomads. It is as offensive an image to Muslims as the stereotype that all Italians belong to the Mafia.

Mansuri said he has tried to persuade Houghton Mifflin to remove the camel. The publisher, however, has refused.

“He’s been banging on that camel for the past two years,” said John Perata, regional manager for Houghton Mifflin, which furnishes textbooks to 1,100 school districts in the state. “But what he doesn’t point out is that the camel is in a section on trade and not on the founding of the Muslim empire.”

Some publishers and educators maintain that the camel controversy stems from a larger problem.

All too often, they say, different ethnic and religious groups attempt to sanitize their histories by removing unflattering facts.

Consequently, they say, educators must guard against ethnic cheerleading that gets in the way of the teaching of history.

“History is full of terrible tragedies and wars and people taking advantage of each other,” said Glen Thomas, director of the office of curriculum framework and textbook development for the state of California. “But anybody who has a particular heritage wants it to be put in the most positive light. Striking that balance can be difficult.”

State education officials maintain that the camel accurately reflects a lifestyle in Arabia about AD 500.

Mansuri says he will continue his push to ensure that Muslims are portrayed accurately in textbooks.

“We are looking at the long-term rather than the short-term,” he said. “With all of the major changes going on in the world, social studies textbooks are going to be going through some major revisions and we want to be a part of the process,” he said.