WASHINGTON, May 14: Senator Edward Kennedy has introduced legislation in the senate that would increase United States funding for exchange programmes with the Muslim world.

The proposed legislation, submitted by Kennedy, who is a Democrat, along with a bipartisan coalition of senators, “would authorize $75 million above current appropriations in fiscal years 2003 through 2007 to expand the activities of the State Department’s existing educational and cultural programmers in the Islamic world.”

It would also authorize “$20 million in fiscal years 2003 through 2007 for the Department of State to establish a new high school student exchange programme to enable a small number of competitively selected students from the Islamic world to study in the United States at a public high school for an academic year.”

Kennedy points out that less than 10 per cent of participants in the department’s cultural and educational programmes in fiscal 2000 came from Muslim countries.