Kevin Featherly: Kersten took my article and ran with it -- the wrong way

I did not write about a shady imam training terrorists. I wrote about a charter school that aims to help Muslim immigrants engage as citizens.

By KEVIN FEATHERLY

Last update: March 14, 2008 - 6:42 PM

Katherine Kersten missed the point when she used my writing in Minnesota Monthly to support her belief that Minnesota is funding an Islamist madrassa (March 9).

She portrayed my article as describing a darkly foreboding, religious ambience at Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), the charter elementary school run by Principal Asad Zaman in Inver Grove Heights. "A visitor might well mistake Tarek ibn Ziyad for an Islamic school," Kersten accurately quoted my piece as saying. "Head scarves are voluntary, but virtually all the girls wear them."

Then Kersten went in for the kill. Paraphrasing me, she noted that the school contains a central carpeted prayer space, and that "vaguely religious-sounding language is used."

Too bad she stopped there. Here's what that article said next: "At one point, a conversation with Zaman is interrupted by the intercom: 'Sister Zamia, please call the office. Sister Zamia, 2-2-1.' '[Muslims] refer to everyone as a brother or a sister,' [Zaman] explains. 'We are all children of Adam.'"

In other words, what sounded "vaguely religious" to me amounts to small talk among Muslims. So the point I tried to make is that you might well mistake TIZA for a religious institution. But you'd be wrong.

Zaman acknowledged to me this week the most damning part of Kersten's article -- that he refused to allow her to interview him or to visit the TIZA academy because of the tone of her previous columns. That was a foolish mistake.

I think he should give her another shot. Let Kersten see what I saw -- little kids being taught English and mathematics from the same textbooks that I was taught from as a child in Wisconsin. Let her see the interested teachers -- most of them white women -- intellectually engaging students, both male and female, without preference or prejudice. Better yet, let her go during Ramadan, so she can see for herself that between 40 and 60 percent of the kids in the lunch room are eating -- not being forced to fast, as her article claims.

I did not write an exposé about a shady imam training would-be toddler terrorists at taxpayer expense. I described the efforts of a hard-working Muslim activist who has made it his patriotic mission to help Minnesota's Muslim immigrants engage as citizens. "My mission is not to make [Muslims] Americans," Zaman says in the article. "They already are Americans."

If Kersten was going to use my writing to make any point at all, that should have been it.

Kevin Featherly is a freelance writer based in Bloomington.

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