(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Cilia Nadiyae, a Muslim student that was home schooled, vividly remembers her parents’ worries that she was suffering in public school because of her Muslim faith. Fellow students, she said, would mock her and tear off her hijab, the head scarf worn for modesty.“We were called Nazis,” she says. Her parents’ solution - to home-school their daughter - was a radical step in 1987, but one that a rising number of Muslim-Americans are embracing today, shaking off the stigma that taking their children out of the public school system would increase the community’s isolation and cultural distance from the American mainstream. “It was considered irresponsible and stupid” in 1987, Ms. Nadiyae said, but the experience was so positive for her that the Maryland woman now home-schools her own six children, who range in age from 1 1/2 to 12. A minority within a minority, she said the number of Muslim home-schoolers is growing, as are the support networks, conferences and faith-oriented curriculum to support the community. In its most recent statistics, the Department of Education put the number of home-schooled elementary and high school students in 2007 at about 1.5 million. Brian D.Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute estimates that Christian students, Protestant and Roman Catholic, make up the vast majority of all home-schooled children, while the research-based data on Muslim home-schoolers amounts to “slim to none.” But he said the anecdotal evidence within the home-schooling community suggests that the stigmas of the mid-1980s for Muslim home-schoolers no longer apply. Some still worry that the increasing numbers of Muslim home-schoolers - an option that a number of families who recently emigrated to the United States have chosen - is a double-edged phenomenon for a community that faces questions and challenges about fitting in with American life and culture.
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