Do they know anything about Islam? Rights and wrongs of multicultural ed.(multicultural education)

I was in Cambridge, Mass., in February of last year when I heard the latest news out of Iraq: The al-Askari Mosque, the so-called "Golden Mosque" of Samarra, had been nearly leveled in a devastating explosion.

It was a Wednesday, and that night I attended my weekly seminar on Cambridge authors, led by James Russell, a prodigious member of Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. He arrived late to class, and was not in the mood to talk about T. S. Eliot when he did. "Do any of you know what the Golden Mosque is?" he asked. Blank stares followed. Smart though they reputedly are, few Harvard undergraduates had heard of the mosque, or knew that it is one of Shiite Islam's most holy sites.

Professor Russell sighed, and his voice took on a mournful tone. "This war is something completely different than it was yesterday. The violence this is going to unleash will make the last few months look positively tranquil."

His warnings were prescient, but should not have seemed so gilded by expertise: Only the most cursory bits of knowledge about Islam and its sects were necessary to deduce the gravity of the crime and the reprisals it would inspire. But how many students had even this basic knowledge?

The answer is a sad one, especially for a university such as Harvard, which routinely trumpets its "international" character and insists its students are "generally educated": instructed not to be pre-packaged professionals, but to obtain a broad education that, supposedly, helps one understand our "global society."

Yet until the New York Times and The Economist told them otherwise, the attack on the Golden Mosque seemed a pedestrian event to my friends: one bombing in a troubled place where bombings are mundane. In the weeks after, I gently quizzed my friends and acquaintances. Did they know:

* The major theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites?