Abstract
September 11 2001 and a sequence of international events involving the Middle East, especially the attacks by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, must have caused great concern about the Middle East and Islam among Japanese people. Whether such interest promoted a better understanding of the Middle East and Islam is not certain, but it might have instead strengthened a stereotyped bad image. For example, as Secretary General of JAMES at the time of September 11, I received many telephone inquiries from Japanese journalists. They often said, "I do not know the first thing about Islam, please explain to me about [such and such] briefly." Hearing such inquiries, a simple question came to me: Can they say without shame, "I have no knowledge of the Middle East or Islam, " if the matter relates to Europe and the West? They regard their ignorance of Islam as neither strange nor shameful, due to scarce and insufficient information in Japanese schools and mass media, even after the Oil Crisis in 1973. Information and studies about the Middle East increased substantially in Japan after the serious international events such as the oil shock in 1973, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the September 11 event. In spite of such development of information in quantity and quality, the image of Islam seems not to change in Japan. If so, the reasons for no change can be analyzed at the deeper level of perceptions about Islam. In this paper, I report how some present-day high school students perceive Islam, in comparison with university students, and I then discuss the causes by analyzing high school textbooks.
