It is good to see that the Muslim students themselves have complained. It will be interesting to see how this doth fadge, or, in the modern parlance, how this shakes out. After all, the idea of equating unbelievers as filth is endorsed and propagated by no less an eminence than Ayatollah Sistani. How will these students be able to stand up to the likes of him? Especially since the full article notes the school’s close ties with Iran. Sistani’s doctrine, as the Al-Hilli text makes clear, was not invented by Sistani. It is traditional Shi’ism. How will these students reject that in a school with such close ties to Iran? And why, by the way, is a school with such close ties to Iran operating freely in a country Iran clearly regards as an enemy? How many National Socialist schools were operating in Britain during World War II?
“Muslim students ‘being taught to despise unbelievers as filth,'” from the Times Online, with thanks to all who sent this in:
MUSLIM students training to be imams at a British college with strong Iranian links have complained that they are being taught fundamentalist doctrines which describe nonMuslims as “filth”.
The Times has obtained extracts from medieval texts taught to the students in which unbelievers are likened to pigs and dogs. The texts are taught at the Hawza Ilmiyya of London, a religious school, which has a sister institution, the Islamic College for Advanced Studies (ICAS), which offers a degree validated by Middlesex University.
The students, who have asked to remain anonymous, study their religious courses alongside the university-backed BA in Islamic studies. They spend two days a week as religious students and three days on their university course….
The text that has upset some students is the core work in their Introduction to Islamic Law class and was written by Muhaqqiq al-Hilli, a 13thcentury scholar. The Hawza Ilmiyya website states that “the module aims to familiarise the student with the basic rules of Islamic law as structured by al-Hilli”.
Besides likening unbelievers to filth, the al-Hilli text includes a chapter on jihad, setting down the conditions under which Muslims are supposed to fight Jews and Christians.
The text is one of a number of books that some students say they find “disturbing” and “very worrying”. Their spokesman told The Times: “They are being exposed to very literalist interpretations of the Koran. These are interpretations that would not be recognised by 80 or 90 per cent of Muslims, but they are being taught in this school….
80 or 90 percent of Muslims? Really? Then why isn’t this overwhelming majority rising up and repudiating Sistani and those who are even less “moderate” than he supposedly is?
Mohammed Saeed Bahmanpour, who teaches in both the Hawza and the ICAS, confirmed that al-Hilli text was used, but denied that it was taught as doctrine. He said that, although the book was a key work in the jurisprudence class, its prescriptions were not taught as law. When he taught from it, he omitted the impurity chapter, he said….
Of course. Everything on the up and up here. We don’t even read the chapters of Mein Kampf having to do with the Jews. We just read it for the economics. Move along.
“The idea is not to teach them jurisprudence because most of the fatwas of Muhaqiq are not actually conforming with the fatwa of our modern jurists. The idea is that they would be able to read classical texts and that is all.”…
THE DOCTRINE
“˜The water left over in the container after any type of animal has drunk from it is considered clean and pure apart from the left over of a dog, a pig, and a disbeliever”
“˜There are ten types of filth and impurities: urine, faeces, semen, carrion, blood of carrion, dogs, pigs, disbelievers”
“˜When a dog, a pig, or a disbeliever touches or comes in contact with the clothes or body [of a Muslim] while he [the disbeliever] is wet, it becomes obligatory- compulsory upon him [the Muslim] to wash and clean that part which came in contact with the disbeliever”
From the al-Hilli text