VIRGINIA – A teacher’s lesson on Islam in Virginia’s Bible Belt sparked an angry meeting of outraged parents that mushroomed into a national denunciation of the educator in the form of thousands of angry emails and social media postings.

An estimated 10,000 students in Augusta County’s public school system got a one-day jump on the Christmas break as a precaution following the backlash. 

Students in a world geography class at Riverheads High School had been asked to try their hands at copying a passage known as the Shahada, or declaration of faith in Islam. The work sheet distributed to students on Dec. 11 said: “This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy.”

Some of the tens of thousands of emails and Facebook posts “posed a risk of harm to school officials” and threatened protests.

Augusta County Sheriff Randall D. Fisher said the emails slowly began arriving, but picked up in volume and vitriol after a national conservative radio personality discussed the lesson.

But some parents accused the teacher of trying to convert their children to Islam, inciting an angry outcry in the largely rural district nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. 

The Shahada is recited as part of daily prayer, and translates to, “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Speaking the Shahada before witnesses is an important step in converting to Islam.

The complaints were further fueled by the teacher inviting female students to wear a head scarf, as many Muslim women do. The number of angry calls and emails to the district increased sharply as this week wore on, fueled by growing media coverage of the controversy.

The district said the class included similar hands-on exposure to other religions and cultures, not just Islam. And it said that despite the outcry, it would continue to educate students about the world’s religious diversity as required by state education guidelines but that “a different, nonreligious sample of Arabic calligraphy will be used in the future.”

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In an email to parents on Friday, Dr. Bond wrote that “Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion.” Students were not told what the writing meant, or asked to recite it, he added, and “the scarf used in the activity was not an actual Islamic religious hijab.”