Zia Left No Stone Unturned to Achieve His Mission of Islamising Education in Pakistan
By
Zubeida Mustafa
17 Jul,
2020
M.H.
ASKARI, my colleague in Dawn and an Urdu short-story writer of eminence in his
youth, wrote about his experience of joining the Anglo-Arabic School in Daryaganj
in the late 1920s. On the first day, his principal asked him, “Will you study Sunni
Deeniat or Shia Deeniat?”
Not being
aware of the sects, Askari went home and asked his father Mirza Mohammad Said,
an outstanding scholar who was widely acknowledged and had been Patras
Bukhari’s teacher at Government College Lahore. Prof Said promptly replied, “My
son will not study any Deeniat at school.”
That is how
it was in the days of yore. Religion was an entirely personal matter and
parents taught their children about their faith as they deemed it fit.
When I went
to school in the early years of Pakistan when Mr Jinnah’s ‘Muslims will go to
their mosques, Christians to their churches and Hindus to their temples’ speech
was still ringing loud and clear, I was not required to study Islamiat. I was
taught the principles of my religion in an enlightened tradition by my mother
and a master sahib who taught me more of the Persian classical poets such as
Hafiz and Saadi. Later, no one stopped me from reading books on Islam to
satisfy my curiosity.
If this
secular approach termed as ‘La-Deeniat’by the self-appointed custodians
of our faith is now out of favour, it does not discredit the rational approach
to Islam. My generation that has seen better days can claim without fear of
contradiction that in the days when religion was not a prescribed mandatory
subject much sectarian harmony prevailed, intermarriages were common and
society was more inclusive. Crime rates were lower and work ethics infinitely
better.
By the time
my daughters started school in the 1970s, religious studies was firmly
entrenched in the educational scene in Pakistan. Worse still, it was tightly
woven into a strong anti-Hindu/India sentiment. I had to work pretty hard to
neutralise this negativity and show my girls the other side of the picture.
Ziaul Haq
left no stone unturned to achieve his mission of Islamising education in
Pakistan, the wiliest move being to hand over the ministry of education to his
political partner — the Jamaat-i-Islami. Islam, which had always been
recognised as the state religion, was now described as a Mukammal
Zabta-I-Hayatand that meant every facet of life (lifestyle, dress code and
even speech) was Islamised, even education. With multiple interpretations,
traditions and even translations around, it was inevitable that different views
would emerge and they did. Unfortunately, the most obscurantist view gained
hegemony.
The
infiltration of orthodoxy in our education curriculum at all levels is
disturbing. To discuss this sensitive issue the Working Group for Inclusive
Education which brings a number of likeminded organisations under its umbrella
arranged a webinar recently on ‘Curriculum, textbooks and the rise of mandated
religion in the education system’. What triggered off a public outcry was the
Punjab Assembly’s move last month to adopt an amendment to the Punjab
Curriculum and Textbook Act, 2015, which made it mandatory for all textbooks to
be approved by the Muttahida Ulema Board.
A few days
later followed the Punjab governor’s notification making the award of all
degrees by public universities conditional on the candidate passing an exam on
the reading of the Holy Quran with understanding of its translation. The trend
had already set in with the adoption of the Punjab Compulsory Teaching of the
Holy Quran Act, 2018.
The webinar
should help focus attention on what is happening to the future of our children.
What is of
great concern is the ‘madrasaisation’ of our education, as Prof A.H. Nayyar so
aptly put it, in the name of ‘uniformity’ in the Single National
Curriculum (SNC). According to Prof Nayyar, big chunks of the Islamiat
curriculum have been lifted from the Madrasa’s Dars and inserted in our
mainstream school curriculum. That includes reading the entire Quran with
translation in Grades 1 to 5 as well as memorising a number of hadith in Arabic
with their translation.
This period
coincides with the age in the child’s life when her cognitive and language
skills are developing symbiotically.
This is the
age when it must be ensured that the child’s critical faculties are allowed to
grow by giving the child freedom to explore her environment and giving a free
rein to her curiosity. If what we hear about the SNC is true, the child will
become a good rote learner and would be discouraged from asking questions that
would in all likelihood be declared ‘blasphemous’.
There is
also the challenge of forging a consensus among the multiple fiqh and schools
of thought if fissures are not to be widened further. With this massive
Islamisation of the curricula, one can only ask, where will the non-Muslin
minorities go?
Original
Headline: Teaching religion
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islamic-society/zia-left-no-stone-unturned/d/122391
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