“That may be your history, (but) … our history (starts) from Makkah and Medina.” Everything before the coming of Islam is, in their view, worthless trash. Jahiliyya is the pre-Islamic period of ignorance. Will the monuments of Christian Europe one day be regarded as worthles artifacts of jahiliyya also? “MMA against teaching pre-Islamic history,” by Raja Asghar in Dawn, with thanks to Twostellas:
ISLAMABAD, Feb 21: Religious parties in the National Assembly were on Wednesday up in arms against teaching Pakistan’s pre-Islamic history in schools to find Speaker Amir Hussain willing to keep the issue burning in a house committee, ignoring some dissenting voices in the ruling coalition.
Members of the six-party Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal also staged a token protest walkout over the inclusion of chapters about Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient emperor Chandragupta Maurya in the history textbooks for classes VI to VIII after a heated discussion, before a listless and inconclusive debate on the law and order situation in the absence of the boycotting People’s Party Parliamentarians, the main complainant in the matter….
Five MMA members had raised the history textbook issue through a call-attention notice, but their claim that the inclusion of chapters they considered objectionable had caused a “grave concern amongst the public” was disputed by Minister of State for Education Anisa Zeb Tahirkheli and some other ruling coalition members, who accused the religious parties of seeking to keep students ignorant about glorious periods of the sub-continent’s history such as the Indus Valley or Gandhara civilisations.
But the authors of the notice seemed unimpressed despite some interjections from the chair to justify the teaching of pre-Islamic history for the sake of knowledge and described the changes as part of what they saw as a government attempt to secularise the educational curricula.
“That may be your history, (but) … our history (starts) from Makkah and Medina,” MMA member Farid Ahmad Piracha shouted as he led his alliance’s walkout when Bushra Rehman of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, then chairing the proceedings, allowed party colleague Ali Akbar Vaince to voice his support for the chapters even after the speaker had referred the matter to a house standing committee for more discussion as he did with another call-attention notice of five PPP members regarding changes in the examination system for classes IX and X.