World Affairs Board - View Single Post - Abuse of History in Pakistan: Bangladesh to Kargil

indianguy4u · 11-01-2005, 00:31 AM

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Jehad And The Curriculum

By Beena Sarwar

03 April, 2004
www.countercurrents.org

Pakistan's so-called religious parties are up in arms at the rumour
that references to Jehad are to be removed from Pakistani textbooks -
biology, for example. Never mind the relevance of jehad (and that too,
a particular kind of jehad) to biology; the Pakistan government's
policy of appeasement continues. "I am a fundamentalist," declared
Federal Education Minister Zubeida Jalal in a television discussion
recently ('Capital Talk', Geo TV, March 25, 2004), meaning that she
believes in the fundamentals of Islam.
"But I am not a terrorist." Good for her. However, the point is not
what her personal beliefs are, but what kind of beliefs the Pakistani
education system is inculcating.

Those who blew themselves up at the Quetta Imambargah, taking dozens of
innocent lives with them, would also undoubtedly affirm that they are
devout Muslims, and deny that they are terrorists. But actions speak
louder than words, and those who think that by killing others they are
participating in a jehad, obviously have a very narrow and distorted
view of Jehad, its principles and its true spirit. Where does this view
come from?

The idea of Jehad was incorporated into the Pakistani Curriculum after
the start of the Afghan war. This "is not a coincidence", as Pakistani
academic A.H. Nayyar notes. At that point it suited Washington, and its
most allied of allies, Pakistan, to encourage and glorify the
"Mujahideen", or holy warriors, in the war against the Soviets - and an
American institution of higher education was asked to formulate
textbooks for Pakistani schools accordingly, says Dr Nayyar. "The
institution was University of Nebraska at Omaha, which has a center for
Afghan studies which was tasked by CIA in the early eighties to rewrite
textbooks for Afghan refugee children. The new books included hate
material even in arithmetic. For example, if a man has five bullets and
two go into the heads of Russian soldiers, how many are
left, kind of stuff. This was exposed in a research thesis from the New
School, New York in about 2002."

Since the Soviets are no more, the "Mujahideen" have not only mutated
into "Taliban" but have also outlived their usefulness, the same
American university has been given an additional grant to "re-re-write
textbooks, taking out material on jehad, etc", as announced by none
Laura Bush, wife of US President George W. Bush in early 2002, adds Dr
Nayyar. "But the funny thing is that the books of early eighties were
very acceptable to the Taliban, except figures and pictures. So they
continued with them, only blackening the pictures. After the rout of
the Taliban, because the new books could not arrive in time, the Karzai
government (read the Americans) was forced to use the earlier books
already available, but perhaps now perhaps the newer books have arrived
in sufficient quantity to make the older books redundant."

Meanwhile, Ms Jalal is vehement in her denial that the Pakistani
curriculum is being changed at the behest of either Washington, or
because of a recent study titled The Subtle Subversion: The State of
Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, co-authored by Dr Nayyar and Ahmed
Salim (text available at www.sdpi.org). The point is not who is behind
the changes being discussed, but the urgent need for such changes,
which the government of Pakistan itself is cognizant of.

In the same TV talk show, columnist Ataul Haq Qasmi argued that if
references to Jehad were removed from textbooks, then all Islamic
references might as well be discarded. This again is not the point,
especially since no one is advocating the removal of all Islamic
references from our curriculum. But it is clear that what has been
propagated since 1979 is a very narrow view of Islam, taught with the
specific aim of getting the youth to follow a certain path. The result,
says the Subtle Subversion study, is that our children have been
"educated into ways of thinking that makes them susceptible to a
violent and exclusionary worldview open" to the "sectarianism and
religious intolerance" that President Musharraf identified as a major
crisis facing Pakistan even before the attempts on his life.

Opponents of the report have taken issue with its focus and tried to
divert attention from its findings by questioning the 'agenda' of its
authors. But there is no arguing with the facts and findings it
presents in great detail, including textbook references and their page
numbers. Going through the study, it becomes clear that it is not just
some madrassahs that are spreading hatred, sectarianism and religious
bigotry, but also the prescribed government textbooks.

Those who are opposed to the SDPI study would do well to examine
previous such studies that have been undertaken, most notably the
historian K.K. Aziz 's 'Murder of History' (Vanguard Books, Lahore,
1992). Based on the scrutiny of 66 textbooks used in the schools and
colleges of Pakistan by students of classes of 1 to 14, one of the
chapters was published as a series of 11 lengthy articles in The
Frontier Post, in April and May 1992.

`The cumulative effect of these shoddy textbooks, as summed up by Mr
Aziz, is horrifying and stunning. The inbreeding from these repetitive,
incoherent and subjective books compulsorily prescribed in all schools
and colleges of the country generates hypocrites, blindfolded zealots,
fundamentalists, intriguers, time servers and ignoramuses with the
highest degrees," wrote one Professor M. I. Haq in a letter to the
editor (The Frontier Post, May 11, 1992).

This was by no means the last such study until the SDPI work. Dr Rubina
Saigol in her book Locating the Self (ASR, Lahore, 1994) has
scrutinized how Pakistani textbooks construct India and Hindus as
enemies, and incite hatred, bigotry and alienation with our eastern
neighbour. It is another matter that similar activities are being
carried out in India, where the Sangh Parivar is busy re-writing
history to the extent of leaving out the religious identity and
political affiliation (RSS) of Mahatama Gandhi's assassin.

Government bodies in Pakistan have not always turned a blind eye to
such slanting of history. As Zubeida Mustafa pointed out in a recent
article, the National Committee on Education, constituted under the
chairmanship of the federal education secretary, in 1999 prepared a
report National Curriculum 2000: A conceptual Framework, "calling for a
paradigm shift in order to produce 'involved, caring and responsible
citizens'. This report was stored away in the minstry's records on some
dust-laden shelf." (Curriculum of hatred, Dawn, March 31, 2004)

Nor is on just on issues of communal and religious intolerance that one
can fault our textbooks - they fare no better on gender issues, as
Ruqaiya Jafri 's study, "Gender Bias in Pakistani School Textbooks"
(presented at the SPELT seminar, Karachi, 1993) found. More recently,
The Subtle Subversion's chapter 'Gender Biases and Stereotypes in
School Texts' alleges that the producers of Pakistani textbooks "are
actively resistant to the idea of women's rights and believe in the
preservation of the status quo". It cites the 1959 Report of the
Commission on National Education, in which women are viewed not as
individuals and equal citizens in their own right, but as wives and
mothers only, disregarding all other categories.

Do later textbooks reflect the increasing participation of women in the
public and professional spheres over the years? The Gender Biases
chapter says not. A 1985 study found that girls were shown most often
in passive roles, enforcing traditional stereotypes. Matters have not
improved over the years - a "gender biased division of roles is woven
into almost all the exercises and stories in these books, thus we have
constant references to men performing active and/or heroic roles and
women engaged in passive, often frippery activities".

This mindset is obvious in the Federal Curriculum Wing's recent refusal
to incorporate the late journalist Najma Babar's article 'Madam
Chairman, Sir', in a proposed Class Ten English textbook submitted by
the Sindh Textbook Board. The article is about the young Najma going to
work, while her husband got the children ready for school and looked
after them, since she had a job and he didn't. The reason given for
censoring this article from the proposed
textbook, was that it goes against the values of Pakistani society!

Obviously, the Curriculum Wing officials don't believe in moving with
the times, or allowing texts to include views that do not reflect the
dominant ideologies and traditions. But how else are our children to
learn that there are other ways of thinking and seeing?

Little wonder then, that "Instead of being able to acknowledge
diversity in points of view, they (students) are likely to look at the
world in oversimplified, uncritical 'black and white' and 'us versus
them' terms and to develop single dimensional, exclusivist mindsets".
(The State of Education, Annual Review, 2002-2003, Social Policy and
Development Centre, Karachi).

The English course has not changed in over forty years. Many children
struggle with English as a second language, which they know is still
the language of power in this country. Accordingly, the senior English
language teaching (ELT) experts, who were commissioned by then Sindh
Education Minister Prof. Anita Ghulam Ali to formulate new English
language textbooks for Classes 8-12, tried to include material in these
new textbooks that would make English learning more interesting,
accessible and student-friendly.

However, the Federal Curriculum Wing rejected much of the new material
and provided a list of topics that the new English textbooks should
include -- like drug abuse, traffic rules, festivals of Pakistan and so
on. Topics which are hardly likely to excite the imagination of most
students.

But it is the material that was removed from these proposed English
textbooks that is of particular concern. Besides Najma Babar's article,
a poem by Khalil Jibran was also censored, apparently on the grounds
that he is Jewish. Even if he was, should the religion of a great poet
and philosopher be reason enough to remove his work?

Similarly, an essay by Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's daughter Dina
Wadia about her father was removed. The reason given was that he had
disowned her, and in any case she is not a Muslim. Are these reasons
valid? Dina Wadia was recently given the status of a State Guest when
she visited Pakistan for the first time since her father's death. She
has stayed away all these years because, as she has said, she didn't
want to be didn`t want to be appropriated by anybody for political
purposes. One wonders how she would feel about being censored for
political purposes.