Once Britain is fully Islamized, perhaps we’ll be treated to a revised Hamlet in which he wanders around muttering about To Teach or Not to Teach Jihad. “The Public Debate on Kuwait’s School Curricula: To Teach or Not to Teach Jihad,” from MEMRI, with thanks to Twostellas:
The terror attacks that occurred in Kuwait this year have
intensified the public debate in the country on the extremist nature of the school curricula and on the need for curricular reform. Kuwaiti educators and intellectuals claim that Kuwait’s curricula include extremist messages encouraging terrorism, and that members of the Muslim Brotherhood movement
who emigrated from Egypt to Kuwait played a central role in devising the country’s Islamic education curricula.Other educators, who occupy positions in the Kuwaiti Education Ministry, argued that blaming the Kuwaiti curricula for extremism and terrorism is not only false but is part of an overall attack on Islam.
At the center of this debate is the question whether the subject of Jihad should be part of the state Islamic education curricula, and the extent to which teaching it contributes to extremist ideology.
The Kuwaiti government has not taken a clear stand on the matter. While Kuwaiti Education Minister Dr. Rashid Al-Hamad has stated many times that the school curricula include no message of extremism, Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sabah Al-Ahmad and the Kuwaiti cabinet have called for reexamining the curricula, acknowledging that they do include extremist content that they consider contradictory to the nature of the Kuwaiti state. The following report reviews the public debate currently underway in Kuwait.
Example:
Al-Zalzala’s findings showed that “11 of the Islamic education textbooks preach in some places to takfir and extremism” and that in certain materials there is “takfir to some individuals,” and that “a large segment of Muslims is presented as polytheist.” He says, “Because there are jurisprudent schools of thought that differ in their interpretations, Education Ministry officials must reexamine some of the curricula.”
Al-Zalzala presented several examples of the extremist messages found the textbooks: “The Koran study material for the 11th grade includes great confusion regarding the term ‘infidels.’ Anyone reading it is likely to think that most of the people in the world are infidels. Similarly, Booklet No. 74 of the text Studies in Islamic Law for High School calls for a one-ruler [system] and one caliph now. Kuwait is but one of many Islamic states- and there is not one but many Islamic states, [but] the book nevertheless calls for the establishment of a single caliphate and a single Islamic state and demands that every Muslim bear arms [in order to achieve this goal]. On page 63 the book says: ‘This weakness will not exist on the day when all the Muslims are in a single country under a single ruler’. Then it quotes the Koran, praising ‘a group from my nation [which] is still fighting for the truth, until Judgment Day’ – that is, all the Muslims are required to fight for the establishment of a single Islamic state.”