Fifteen-year-old Habiiba Quresh recently went before the Texas State Board of Education to protest the way its new history standards describe Islam.
“I shouldn't have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote,” she told the board.
The board voted in June and September to overhaul what Texas public schools teach in social studies, from the earliest grades through high school. It also approved a required reading list for English classes. The decisions will eventually reach more than 5.5 million students and change which periods children study, how much time they spend on Texas and the wider world, and which parts of religious history the state singles out for instruction.
Supporters argue that the new curriculum gives students a coherent account of America and the traditions that shaped it. To critics, the state is putting its preferred version of history into the requirements that guide lessons, textbooks, and tests.
Taken together, the series of decisions that have snowballed into this overhaul could have tremendous consequences for the civic understanding of young Texans.
What Texas Put on the List
The adopted reading list and the high school history standards are separate decisions. Together, they require schools to cover the following:
- Bible passages in English class. The new required reading list includes biblical stories and teachings at multiple grade levels. Seventh graders are assigned the Beatitudes, Jesus’ blessings for the merciful and peacemakers, as well as the 23rd Psalm. Their list also includes Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, a poem by Jewish resistance fighter Hannah Szenes, and The Outsiders. We covered the Bible reading vote when it happened in June.
- Christianity’s influence on society. World history students must study medieval Christian monastic communities, missionaries, hospitals, and orphanages. They must also learn how abolitionist William Wilberforce’s Christian faith informed his campaign against the slave trade. U.S. history students are asked specifically to examine the biblical imagery in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
- Early Islam through conflict and captivity. The standards direct students to learn about Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes,” the normalization of slavery, and female captives as “harem slaves.” Another requirement links jihad, a word with spiritual and sometimes military meanings, to the conquest of Christian lands. In U.S. history, students must identify the September 11 attacks as “motivated by radical Islam.” On the other hand, lessons covering Muslim scholars’ contributions to algebra and astronomy were dropped.
- Israel’s founding in 1948. High school students must identify the year the modern State of Israel was established in what the standards call the Jews’ “ancestral homeland,” and learn that President Harry Truman recognized the new state. That new requirement says nothing about the Palestinians who were living there or what happened to them as a result of Israel's establishment.
The changes extend beyond religion. The board also eliminated the existing sixth-grade "World Cultures" course as part of a new sequence that puts greater weight on Texas state history. It calls the larger project a chronological story of Western civilization and the development of American self-government. These decisions establish which history every district must find time to teach.
Why Is Texas Doing This Now?
Texas periodically revises its learning standards, but the last sweeping social studies rewrite was in 2010. Another attempt faltered in 2022 amid disputes over how schools would teach race and American identity. In 2024, the board formed a committee to plan a new approach. It approved the course framework in 2025 and the new standards this year. The high school history standards discussed here are scheduled to take effect in 2033–34.
State laws helped set the work in motion. A 2023 law required a literary work for each grade’s reading list. Earlier legislation called for instruction in “informed patriotism,” while 2025 laws added particular civics and history requirements. Lawmakers did not write the contested sentences about Muhammad or choose the phrasing “ancestral homeland” to describe Israel. Board members made those choices during the revision.
The board’s stated ambition is much larger than updating dates and names. Chair Aaron Kinsey says students will “finally get the full story” by following events in chronological order. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group that supported the overhaul, argues that the previous courses separated Texas, American, and world history and failed to explain America’s moral foundations. Its preferred framework connects those subjects into a single account of national development.
Critics see the same structure very differently. The American Historical Association says the revision gave teachers and historians too little meaningful input and narrowed the time available for world history and cultures. Its concern reaches beyond religious content: now that the government has laid out its preferred central story, people and events outside of that narrative become easier to leave out.
The Fight Over a Few Words
At the board’s September meeting, member Brandon Hall opposed removing the word “brutal” from the description of Muhammad’s campaigns. He argued that the change would gloss over a consequential part of history. Fellow member Will Hickman pointed out that the standards used no such adjective in describing any other wars.
Andrea Hutchison, a curriculum coordinator appointed to advise the board, found another problem with the wording. “Harem slaves,” she wrote, applies a term from a much later Ottoman context to seventh-century Arabia. She proposed language that still covered Muhammad’s teachings, military campaigns, and conquest. The board kept its version. Other appointed advisers also questioned the historical support for the description.
Then there is September 11th. Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks, and its leaders invoked their interpretation of Islam. The Texas standard names “radical Islam” without naming al-Qaeda. “When you use such broad terms, people don't see ‘radical,’” Sameeha Rizvi of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told ABC13. “What they're going to see is ‘Islam.’”
At the September protest, Austin student Abdelrahman Azami described what people have said to him: “Oh, you’re a bomber. How many bombs did you drop today?” He was born ten years after the September 11 attacks.
That is the class Quresh was imagining. A teenager could find herself explaining a state-approved description of her religion to other teenagers. The omitted algebra and astronomy requirement matters in that setting: students are required to study Muslim slave raiders, but may never get to learn about Muslim mathematicians.
One Year, Two Histories
Texas’s final U.S. history requirement tells students to identify 1948 as the year the modern State of Israel was established “in the ancestral homeland of the Jews,” and President Harry Truman as the first world leader to recognize it. A world history requirement also calls the land the Jewish people’s “ancestral home.” Neither requirement mentions Palestinians.
Jewish history has deep roots in the land. The question is what students will understand from the state’s description when they are given no account of the Palestinian Arabs who lived there, many in towns and villages their families had known for generations.
In 1947, the United Nations voted to divide British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian Arab leaders rejected the plan as unfair, and fighting began. Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948; Truman recognized it the same day. Neighboring Arab armies entered the war afterward.
For many Jews, Israel’s founding after the Holocaust meant refuge and self-determination. For Palestinians, the war brought the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.” About 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Many were prevented from returning, and the Arab state proposed in the partition plan was never established. Those events are absent from the history Texas mandates be taught.
That absence has immediate meaning during a period of renewed displacement. Nearly a year after the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire announcement, the United Nations was still reporting Israeli strikes, widespread destruction, and restrictions on essential supplies.
What Happens After the Vote
A state standard is not a script a teacher must recite. Districts select materials, and teachers can bring in additional evidence. But Texas’s standards shape textbooks, teacher training, and state assessments, and every required topic claims a share of limited classroom time.
That is why the board’s choices extend beyond a dispute among historians. A student may learn about Christian hospitals and Wilberforce’s faith without learning how other Christians defended slavery. She may encounter Muhammad first through a description that the board’s own advisers challenged. She may study 1948 as a homecoming, without hearing why another family remembers the same year as the loss of its home. Those are plausible consequences of the requirements Texas adopted, even though teachers may work to provide a fuller account.
The Rev. Natalie Webb, senior pastor of University Baptist Church in Austin, stood alongside Muslim families protesting the standards before the September vote. She spoke about her Baptist tradition’s own struggle for religious freedom. She warned that “no one’s religion is safe while anyone’s is being prioritized.”
At the ULC, we ordain people of many faiths and none. Our ministers may lead a wedding where two families pray differently, or a funeral where mourners disagree about what comes after death. Knowing someone’s faith only through wars, terrorists, or a list of approved heroes is poor preparation for meeting that person at the altar, in grief, or anywhere else.
The History They Will Carry
The winners of a fight over curriculum get to decide which stories millions of children meet first. Over time, those choices can pass for the whole story. Students carry them into voting booths, public office, and judgments about neighbors whose families remember the same events differently. A dispute over a few words can shape public life long after the board members who chose them have left office.
Quresh asked the adults in charge to imagine someone like her sitting in that classroom. When those students grow up and begin making decisions that affect one another, whose histories will they have learned to see?
0 comments