By early April 2023, Wael Elkoshairi had created Family Rights for Religious Freedom, an Islamic-centric organization advocating for restoring parents’ right to opt out, with 11 other families.
“We don’t want an untrained teacher, who knows nothing about our theology, or Jewish jurisprudence, Christian jurisprudence, or Islamic jurisprudence, with a chart sent by MCPS, to manage such sensitive issues,” said Elkoshairi, whose two children are enrolled in county elementary and high schools.
Other parent associations were established and have regularly organized protests outside the school board and Maryland’s district court. Conservative groups such as the Moms for Liberty joined some protests. Family Rights for Religious Freedom has received numerous requests for endorsements from Republican and Democratic candidates but reiterated that it was an apolitical association. “We don’t do that. That’s not what we’re invested in,” said Elkoshairi.
In a statement released Thursday evening, Zainab Chaudry, Maryland chapter director of Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, said, “Until the opt-out option is restored, we plan to pursue every available legal means on behalf of families to protect their rights.”
Haroon Moghul, author of “How To Be a Muslim: An American Story,” said disputes like the one in Montgomery County are likely to happen elsewhere.
“What’s happening there is happening almost anywhere in the country where there is a substantial American Muslim community,” he said. “There are a lot of concerns about the ways in which gender and sexuality are presented in schools and public spaces and whether or not Muslim communities should weigh in, should remove themselves from such conversations, or work with allies on either side of the political divide.”
On May 23, over 100 imams and Muslim scholars signed a statement affirming that policies aiming to promote “LGBTQ-centric values among children … subverted the agency of Muslim parents to teach their children their religiously grounded sexual ethics.”
In response to this statement, many Muslim voices supporting the LGBTQ+ community were raised. For Afsheen A. Shamsi, VP of communication at Union Theological Seminary in New York, protecting LGBTQ+ rights could only benefit the Muslim community.
“Today it’s the LGBTQ community, tomorrow it will be the Muslim community … We have to be careful about who we ally with because the religious right does have a track record of discriminating against some of the community as well,” she said.
Author Wajahat Ali, co-host of the “Democracy-ish” podcast, worries that Muslim parents are being co-opted into what he called “a mean-spirited, divide and conquer movement” that uses LGBTQ+ Americans as “boogeymen” to scare parents, he said in an interview backstage at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in mid-August, where he was a speaker.
Earlier this summer, Ali wrote about the controversy in Montgomery County in an op-ed for The New York Times with the headline, “We Muslims Used to Be the Culture War Scapegoats. Why Are Some of Us Joining the L.G.B.T.Q. Pile-On?”
Over the past school year, some families have pulled their kids out of MCPS and turned to private schools. For now, Elkoshairi is dedicated to defending the parents’ rights to opt-out but doesn’t exclude this possibility. He also said before the decision was announced that he had considered homeschooling. “We have that option. Socio-economically, my wife and I can homeschool. We have homeschooled our kids in the past. We can send our kids to private Islamic school,” he said.
Bob Smietana contributed to this story. This article originally appeared here.
