States Weaponize School Curricula

Texas’s new social‑studies rules require teachers to foreground violent and slavery aspects of early Islam and to teach jihad as a driver of conquest; the state has paired this curricular change with legal and administrative moves (designating CAIR under state law) and inflammatory political rhetoric aimed at immigrant communities. This is not an isolated school‑board fight but a coordinated state‑level strategy to recast a religious minority as a civic threat. — If states use curricula and administrative labels to delegitimize a religion tied to immigrant communities, it creates a durable infrastructure for exclusion that can spread beyond Texas and reshape national debates on immigration, religion, and civic belonging.