Aioyesha Ghani

Jaime Gutterman

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FACING HISTORY AND OURSELVES was organized 25 years ago to train teachers and students in middle and high schools to examine racism, prejudice and intolerance. The two-semester elective is taught in about 300 New York schools. For more information, contact:

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As they boarded a school bus to visit the mosque at the Islamic Center of Westbury, a few of the 42 students from Plainview Old-Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School said they felt a little apprehensive and fearful.

But hours later, after the visit, the consensus on the bus was that they were much less anxious.

The field trip by the seniors to visit the center and meet with its spiritual leader, Imam Hafiz Ahmad, and other mosque officials, occurred a few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It was one of a number of activities organized by the school for a humanities studies program called Facing History and Ourselves. The elective course encourages students to study and confront issues of religious and racial prejudice and to understand their responsibility in dealing with them.

The trip to the mosque had stirred fears among those eligible to make it. Some students’ parents would not grant permission, and other students decided on their own not to board the bus.

“Many of my friends were saying, ‘Why would you want to go there? Aren’t you afraid?’” said student Jamie Gutterman, 17. After Sept. 11, she said, “there had been a few anti-Muslim remarks made by kids.”

During the visit, Al-Haaj Ghazi Khankan, director of interfaith affairs for the center, spoke about the history of Islam and took questions from the students. He cited the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad as the true sources of Islam.

Student Ryan Kase asked Khankan about the concept of jihad, which often is said to mean holy war. “Jihad means individual struggle of good over evil. It does not mean holy war,” said Khankan. “In fact, there is no word equivalent to ‘holy war’ written in the Quran or the teachings of Muhammad.”

The acts of terror that Osama bin Laden preaches, Khankan said, are against the teachings of Muhammad and are not Islamic.

This was reassuring to Kase, 17, who is Jewish. “Look! What these terrorists were doing was against their religion,” he said. “Many of my friends were saying, ‘What’s the point of going to this mosque?’ What I got out of the visit was the exact opposite.” Those who believe in Islam, he said, “have a different religion but are the same as everyone else.”

After the session, the class then joined 600 members of the Islamic community in a Friday noon prayer service led by Imam Ahmad.

“I didn’t know much about Muslims, and many of us held them responsible for the attacks on Sept.11,” said Gutterman, who is Jewish. “Attending the mosque and finding out more about Islam made us less fearful, and we saw how much more we have in common with them.”

But another student, Aiyesha Ghani, 17, was somewhat skeptical of what the visit might have accomplished. Just 10 days earlier, she recalled, a group of boys in the school hallway taunted a student who is a Sikh (a follower of a religion that has its roots in the 15th century in an area that is now Pakistan and northern India) by incorrectly calling him “Taliban” (“Taliban” - a reference to the Islamic militants who had power in Afghanistan until recently).

The incident shocked her, said Ghani, a Muslim. “I was very insulted and took it personally. Students here are supposed to be above openly displaying prejudice,” Ghani said. “But it exists. They don’t outwardly say something, but you feel it. It’s in the back of their minds.

“Seeing some of my Christian and Jewish friends come to the mosque was a good effort,” Ghani said. “I don’t know if this class is going to change anything. People will only change when they want to change.”

Another student, Joshua Alexander, 17, said he had also witnessed intolerance toward Sikhs. Shortly after Sept. 11, said Alexander, who is Jewish, he was on the way home on the school bus when a student next to him started screaming obscenities as the bus passed a Sikh temple. “I asked him why, and he told me, ‘they’re Muslims and they’re responsible for all of this,’” Alexander said. “The student didn’t seem to care whether the temple was Muslim or not. People want to find a scapegoat, and they go with it. In this case, he didn’t even have the right people.”