Teaching intolerence in Pakistan

Lessons in Intolerance

The textbooks that form part of the present public school curriculum are lessons in bigotry, hate and a gross misrepresentation of history.

By Massoud Ansari

"Baba, what is kari?" a young girl asks her father. He ponders over how best he can explain this barbaric ritual that involves killing women in the name of 'honour' to his young daughter, and wonders where she has heard the term. He presumes she has read of it in newspapers, where such incidents are regularly reported. Before he can muster an appropriate explanation, his daughter asks if Marvi - a romantic heroine of Sindhi folklore - was a kari. She gleaned this information from one of her textbooks in school, she says.

Welcome to Pakistani public schools, which are laying the foundations of future generations, where children are introduced to bigotry and intolerance from the primary level, and the conditioning continues throughout school. The lessons of tolerance included in the country's curriculum in the first two decades of the country's existence are being systematically replaced with lessons emphasising militancy, jihad and an ideology of hate. A case in point: recently a book was returned to its authors by the Federal Curriculum Wing for not carrying enough material on jihad.

The amount of influence school textbooks wield on students' impressionable minds is indicated by a survey of schoolchildren published recently. Almost half of those surveyed do not support equal rights for minorities. A third of them support jihadi groups. Two-thirds of them want the Shariah to be implemented in letter and spirit. Nearly a third said Kashmir should be liberated by force, and nearly 80 per cent of them support Pakistan's nuclear status.

Once a platform from which healthy, informed minds emerged, Pakistan's public school system today is a cesspool of ignorance, obscurantism and corruption. A graphic example: when a high school teacher at one of Karachi's public schools asked her class students to write an essay on any subject of their choice, one of the boys came up with a detailed and rather chilling 'Autobiography of a pistol.' The student summed up his essay with the statement, "I fall into the hands of a burglar who points me at a child, and demands ransom money from his parents in exchange for my life."

Members of the six-party alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), also voiced their protest: They walked out of a National Assembly session on the grounds that a certain reference to jihad as well as some Quranic verses had been excluded from the new edition of a state-prescribed biology textbook. Liaqat Baloch of the MMA alleged, "Under the conditionalities of the US Agency for International Development, all verses containing any references to jihad or exposing the anti-Muslim prejudices of Jews and Christians are being omitted from the syllabi." And Jamaat-e-Islami chief, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, warned that his party would move a privilege motion against government censorship in the syllabi.

Federal Education Minister Zubeida Jalal responded to these charges by stating in the National Assembly that no chapter or verses relating to jihad or shahadat (martyrdom) had been deleted from local textbooks. She clarified that the particular verse referring to jihad which the MMA was up in arms over had been 'shifted' from the biology textbook for intermediate students (Classes XI and XII) to the matriculation level courses (Class X), not omitted. The minister was visibly on the defensive when she said that the government had rejected the SDPI report because the committee she had set up to look into the report had rejected it as representing an "extremist" view.