Muslim prayer-in-school controversy might be solved (Will pray in back of Classroom during lunch)

Four students knelt on a classroom floor during lunch at the Albert Payson Terhune Elementary School today and performed the afternoon Muslim prayer ritual. It was the first time the students had prayed in the school during school hours. And it may end a controversy over what arrangement the district should make to ensure the children’s constitutionally protected right to exercise their religion during school hours. School parent Rola Awwad has been seeking a private place for her 10-year-old son, Adam, to pray in school since the fall. The district offered to let him pray at recess — either outside or in classroom while his classmates are there. At first, Awwad called the offer “unacceptable,” and the situation attracted attention from Muslim advocates who suggested bringing the issue to the state for resolution.

But Adam decided on his own to pray at lunch, Awwad said. He joined three friends today in a classroom with other students present. They performed the ritual in the back of a room. “If it continues like this, it will be very nice,’’ Awwad said. She said her 7-year-old daughter, Amana, also prayed in her second grade class, and she thanked the teacher for the arrangement. Her son had worried other students would make fun of him if they watched him pray, but schools Superintendent John Sico Jr. assured her the district wouldn’t let that happen. As the students prayed, classmates played games, he said.

Sico said he consulted the Imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County and felt he received support for his position. Imam Mohammad Qatanani told The Record he had had a good talk with Sico and will meet with Mrs. Awwad today “to understand the issue from her side more.”

“As far as I am concerned the issue is resolved,’’ Sico said. “We did the right thing. The kids did the right thing. No one was making fun.’’ Afsheen Shamsi, spokeswoman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, which has intervened with the district on Awwad’s behalf said the accommodation was a correct step. “It’s a question of finding the right balance and making sure the student is comfortable and the district is comfortable,’’ she said. She said CAIR had considered bringing the issue before the state Board of Education. But Awwad said she wants to wait and see if the accommodation continues to work for her children.

All students are constitutionally guaranteed the right to pray during the school day as long as it doesn't interfere with learning. Muslims pray five times a day to reaffirm their faith and submit to follow divine commandments. The prayer is said during prescribed times; in the fall, when clocks roll back at the end of daylight savings time, the afternoon prayer must be said during the school day, Awwad explained. Federal guidelines say schools can't prevent students from praying during school, but they can't sponsor religious activities or lead students in prayer. For instance, those guidelines specifically mention a student's right to quietly read the Bible during lunch. But they are not clear on what action to take when the religious expression is more demonstrative, as it is in Adam's case.

The answer in other North Jersey districts ranges from allowing a student to pray in the principal's office in Cliffside Park, to allowing a student in Passaic to pray privately in a classroom storage closet. Wayne School board Attorney Nathanya Simon said “We recognize that the federal guidelines say we must permit the exercise of religion in school. However, it does have a limitation.’’ She said the district believed that elementary students must always be supervised. “Right from the beginning, we were never going to ban it,’’ Simon said. “It was just a matter of how we were going to implement it and make it available.’”

There certainly seems to be a double standard as well as a mental block when it comes to the Muslims. There are Christian schools where parents can send their children to be brought up among similar thinking individuals. The ACLU has been attacking the smallest separation of church and state ‘offenses.’ But they are totally quiet here. Liars and cowards they are. The Muslims know that they could send their children to Muslim schools where they could pray all day if they wanted to. But they don't. The whole idea is to infiltrate and destroy, it is not complicated. Why we don't do anything about it is fear and we hide behind political correctness to keep us from doing what will eventually need to be done. The plane and simple fact is that,for the Muslim, there is no separation between church and state, none, Zilch, nada, zero. Each and every Mosques is an establishment of a fort, on American soil, of a foreign government. No government office, school, city, county should allow the establishment of any mosque. It places the citizens of this country in great danger. The way of life of a Muslim is 180 degrees away from the rule of law or the Judeo-Christian society our country need to survive. I say that because the Founding Fathers were totally anti strong, big, powerful whatever you want to call it, government. And, one of the most important lines in the Declaration of Independence is “We hold these truths to e self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these right, Governments are instituted among Men,..” Here we see that the only way the Founders could protect those rights for the citizen was to take them out of the reach of men in power. The Muslims have no such protection and frown on such a belief. We, the people of America, blinked once, I pray we don't do it again.

Any student has the right to pray, so in that light there are no special rights.

If they let Muslims disrupt the classroom for prayer - well that would be granting a special right and I am sure the ACLU is not speaking up because that is a biased, fraudulent institution. Let’s see how it shakes out.

Kids don’t want their peers making fun of them. >>

judging from what the school administers said in the article, the muslim students are not being made fun of by their peers.

this kid is practically lying prostrate on the floor with no worries about what his classmates are thinking.

could it be that Christians are week? they seem to be more into the gang banger, MTV, ghetto culture than religion.

And who would be the peers making fun of Christians praying in school, none other than their brother Christians.

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