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Syria’s new authorities has triggered outrage after introducing an overhaul of the training curriculum that critics argue will impose an Islamist agenda on faculty college students.
Anger unfold after the ministry of training this week revealed 12 paperwork itemizing changes and omissions to the schoolbooks of matters together with Arabic, historical past, sciences, social research and faith.
Most adjustments concerned eradicating references to the regime of ousted president Bashar al-Assad and his late father Hafez, who between them dominated with an iron fist for 5 a long time, similar to pictures and mentions of the military and nationwide anthem.
However authorities additionally alarmed many by eradicating references to pre-Islamic deities — and even the phrase “deities” itself — and scaling again criticism of the Ottoman Empire. Additionally omitted have been the textual content for Syria’s citizenship legislation, a piece on the evolution of vertebrates’ brains, and point out of Zenobia, a famed pre-Islamic queen of the traditional metropolis Palmyra.
Critics feared the adjustments symbolize a slippery slope wherein the Islamist insurgent faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which dominates the brand new authorities, would search to impose their spiritual worldview on what has lengthy been one of many Center East’s most secular nations.
“The erasure of the defunct regime’s glorification is comprehensible, however deleting historic details and occasions from our individuals’s battle, and milestones of historic civilisations . . . [is] not a coincidence,” Rima Flihan, a Syrian author and human rights activist, wrote on Fb. “Therein lies the hazard.”
Bassam al-Kuwatli, president of the anti-Assad opposition Syrian Liberal Occasion, or Ahrar, stated the caretaker authorities shouldn’t be decreeing such huge, non-urgent adjustments to implement “one thing that fits it ideologically”.
Whereas eradicating Assad’s legacy “shouldn’t be controversial”, he stated, the reforms ought to be undertaken by committees staffed with specialists.
Following rampant anger over the amendments, training minister Nazir al-Qadri stated on Thursday that, whereas the outdated curriculum will stay in place till the formation of committees to audit schoolbooks, he had ordered some adjustments to delete “what glorifies the defunct Assad regime” and substitute the outdated Syrian flag with the opposition flag.
He added authorities would additionally modify “a few of the incorrect data . . . within the Islamic training curriculum”, together with the interpretation of Quranic verses.
Qadri was beforehand training minister within the HTS-backed de facto authorities of Idlib, which dominated the north-western nook of Syria for years earlier than ousting Assad in a sweeping, largely cold marketing campaign final month following a brutal 13-year civil conflict.
Spiritual research, a compulsory matter in Syrian faculties, teaches two books, one for Muslims and one for Christians. One of many changes, made in a first-grade Islamic Research schoolbook, added an interpretation of a Quranic verse mentioning “those that have earned [Allah’s] anger” and “gone astray” as a reference to “Christians and Jews”.
Within the first-grade science guide, “nature’s bounty” was modified to “Allah’s bounty”, whereas in a Twelfth-grade historical past guide, a sentence mentioning an notorious 1916 mass execution of Arab nationalists underneath the Ottomans — marked as a public vacation in Syria and Lebanon — was eliminated.
By legislation, Syria mandates that personal and public faculties educate the identical curriculum, with inspectors dispatched to non-public faculties underneath Assad to make sure the government-published schoolbooks have been being taught.
The Assads ran a pseudo-secular state that usually villainized conservative Islam, with Hafez’s supporters within the Nineteen Eighties generally ripping headscarves off girls’s heads within the streets. Public prayer rooms have been allowed when malls opened within the 2000s, however rapidly shut down.
Each conservative and non-conservative Syrians criticised the current amendments, piling feedback on the ministry’s announcement submit on Fb. “What is that this clear training of incitement?” stated one commentator of the reference to Jews and Christians. “Who gave you the appropriate to delete Syria’s historical past?” stated one other.
Kuwatli, of Ahrar, warned that the unilateral change “creates societal rifts”. “That is the very last thing we’d like on this interval when we have to unify Syrians and convey them collectively and get them to simply accept to disarm,” he added.
