Islam and Muslim Civilization: A Supplementary Social Studies Unit for Sixth Grade This unit is intended to provide upper elementary and junior high school students With an introduction to Islam and the civilization which Muslims built. The scope of the materials offered here make H possible to substitute them for typical textbook units on Islam and Muslims, which are generally inadequate and faulty in many ways. The guiding objective of this unit is that the students acquire basic familiarity with Islam's major tenets and the progress and contributions of Muslims who carried Islam onto the world stage. Its essential objective is to provide historical context to the emergence of Islam, and to deal with a broad range of historical issues surrounding the rise of Islam in an intellectually satisfying manner, by citing historical evidence. Chronologically accurate placement of the unit is following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and its continuation as Byzantfum. By placing units on Islamic, African and East Asian civilizations in random sequence, textbook treatments of world history ohen fail to show that civilizations outside of Europe contributed to gradual and interdependent global development toward the modern world. Civilizations of China, India, Africa and the Near East or~ fixed in students' minds as "also-rans'' of history. Current historical scholarship recognizes ,that Europe's Renaissance and later dominance would have been unthinkable without direct cross-pollination from other parts of the Old World. Over a period of more than a thousand years, Muslim rulers were a major factor in the poli tical equation of the Old Wodd. Islamic civilization was a crucible of technological and scientific knowledge from the known wodd up to its time. In trade, it formed a hinge between East and West. New studies ore still uncovering evidence of influence on Europe from Muslim and other non-Western sources. Susan Douglass has an M.A. in Arab Studies from the Georgetown…