Tajik Schools to Teach Islamic History
- From: "Islam Will Replace Collapsing Amerikan Empire" <islam_to_replace_amerikan_empire@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:30:09 -0500
Tajik Schools to Teach Islamic History
By Jashmid Mohammadi, IOL Correspondent
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, January 25, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) - The secular
government in Tajikistan has revealed plans to teach Islam's past history in
its secondary schools.
"The ministry has been studying a draft law that will see the history of
Islam be included in the country's textbooks," Minister of Education
Abdjabbour Rahmonov told reporters on Tuesday, January 25.
He said the move will help students to know more about Islam throughout the
centuries.
"Many parents have appealed to the ministry to teach the Islamic history in
schools," the minister added. "We want to raise the religious awareness of
the students and stand up to extremist ideologies."
Muslims are making up the majority of Tajikistan's six million population.
Sunni Muslims represent 85 percent, according to the CIA's World Fact Book.
"Overdue"
The government initiative was welcomed by leading Islamic powers in the
Central Asian former Soviet republic.
"It is a positive and necessary step," said Mohidin Kabiri, the deputy head
of the Islamic Renaissance party.
"But the move is overdue in Muslim Tajikistan given that many European
countries make religion an obligatory subject in schools," he fumed.
Critics, however, said the move will do injustice to the country's
minorities.
"This initiative contradicts the secular nature of the government, which
banned hijab in school and universities," opined Lidia Asamova, an active
member of the War and Peace Center for Strategic Studies.
Experts see the move as a bid by the secular government to calm down a
growing sense of anger among lay people over the hijab ban.
"The regime further wants to closely knit Islam and the Tajik identity to
counter Turkish and Russian influences," Motiallah Tayeb, an expert in
Central Asian affairs, told IslamOnline.net over the phone.
Rahmanov said in October that hijab represented a religious ideology and was
in "contravention of education law."
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol
displaying one's affiliations - unlike the symbolic Christian crucifixes and
Jewish skullcap.
The government had rubbed salt into the public wounds by banning teens under
16 from praying at mosques in a blatant contravention of the constitution
that safeguards freedom of religion for all Tajiks.
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2006-01/25/article05.shtml
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