On Friday, the Republican-dominated Texas State Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum framework by an 8-4 vote, following hours of public testimony from hundreds of stakeholders. The new standards, which will impact roughly 5 million public school students across the state when new textbooks are fully phased in for the 2030-2031 academic year, have sparked fierce national debate over religious bias and educational accuracy.
Under the revised guidelines, Bible passages will become required reading for students, with curricular materials instructed to highlight Christianity’s positive contributions to global and American history. By contrast, early Islamic military campaigns will be explicitly labeled “brutal” — a designation that is not applied to equivalent periods of violent expansion waged by Christian powers. Local Texas outlet Fox4 Dallas-Fort Worth confirmed that units on early Islamic history will also be framed exclusively through the lenses of slavery and the captivity of women, a framing that critics say erases the religion’s centuries-long cultural, scientific and social contributions. The 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by Saudi hijackers and planned by the al-Qaeda network, will also be taught as being rooted in “radical Islam” rather than any political motivation or agenda, a narrative that historians widely reject as oversimplified.
The decision drew immediate condemnation from civil rights groups, lawmakers and education advocates, who argue the framework promotes selective, biased history that targets one religious community. “Selective history is not education. Texas students deserve history that is accurate, complete, and fair,” Salman Bhojani, a Muslim member of the Texas State House, wrote on social media platform X ahead of the final vote.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, led coordinated opposition to the changes. In a pre-vote statement, the group clarified that it does not oppose teaching the full history of global religions in public schools — but takes issue with targeting Islam for unfair negative framing. “What public schools should not do is force teachers and students to single out and denigrate a particular religion, in this case Islam,” CAIR said. The organization added that it would object just as forcefully to any curriculum that framed Christianity as inherently responsible for historical atrocities ranging from the genocide of Indigenous populations to the transatlantic slave trade and modern domestic terrorism by white Christian extremist groups.
Supporters of the new curriculum, however, have defended the change as a push for honest education. Longtime anti-Islam advocate and Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz praised the board’s decision, writing on X that “students deserve to know the truth about Islam.”
The controversial curriculum change aligns with a years-long pattern of anti-Muslim policy actions from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, who has repeatedly targeted the state’s growing Muslim population — a community that now numbers more than 400,000 across the state. Just last month, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport scrapped plans to build a dedicated ablution station for Muslim travelers, used for ritual cleansing before prayer, after Abbott threatened to withhold hundreds of millions in state grant funding from any airport that moved forward with the project.
Last year, Abbott amplified far-right anti-Muslim disinformation to push for a federal investigation into a planned 1,000-home residential development with a mosque and school outside Dallas. After far-right agitator Amy Mekelburg falsely labeled the project “Sharia City” and claimed it would implement Islamic law, Abbott shared the false claim to his own social media, framing the development, led by the East Plano Islamic Community, as a threat to Texas. A Texas judge ultimately ruled in favor of the developers in May 2024, ordering the state to honor its pre-existing contractual agreements with the project.
Also in 2023, Abbott issued a proclamation designating both CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal enterprises. The designation bars the groups from purchasing or acquiring land in Texas, and grants the state attorney general broad authority to bring legal action against them. CAIR has forcefully rejected the unsubstantiated allegations, and the Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational movement with no official headquarters or centralized operations based in the United States.
Critics have also noted that the new curriculum violates the core principle of separation of church and state enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of an official state religion and bars public institutions from promoting or elevating one religious tradition over others.