| Islamonline and other news agencies have reported from Tehran that Iran is planning to ‘Islamise’ humanities studies following complaints that Western teachings make students question religion and promote secular ideas. "In our country a large part of the syllabus... is not in line with our Iranian-Islamic culture,” Hamid Reza Ayatollahi, the head of the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, said Sunday, September 6 .The revision comes after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei criticized human sciences taught in the Iranian universities."If we teach a copy of what Westerners have said and written to our young people, then we are conveying to them both doubt and disbelief in Islamic principles and in our values," he said during a meeting with academics last week."Most human sciences are based on materialistic philosophies that see the human being as an animal," he said. The humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition.The science uses methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences.Humanities cover ancient and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy, religion, visual and performing arts.Additional subjects sometimes included in the humanities are technology, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and linguistics. Several Iranian scholars also lashed out at universities promoting secular ideas, particularly the Tehran-based Islamic Azad University, according to The New York Times.“This university must once again be purified,” Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi said.“This purification must occur at the management level and other levels.Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a purge of liberal and secular academic staff in 2006, a year that saw a number of lecturers forced into early retirement from leading universities. We appreciate the Iranian initiative.This is the Task the Muslim Ummah has undertaken through several international conferences.The International Institute of Islamic Thought has undertaken this task for the last thirty years.To this end, several Islamic universities have been established in Malaysia, Pakistan , Bangladesh and elsewhere as laboratory. The main aim is to disconnect education from materialistic, atheistic and secular roots and base education, particularly the humanities on the truths and values received from the Creator.The movement is going ahead everywhere. At this moment, unfortunatrly, the education commission in Bangladesh has proposed changes which will end effectively religious education in the primary and secondary education.In secondary stage, religious education (sembelence of it) has been made optional. Religious studies can be taken as a subject to be chosen out of 16/10/8 subjects , depending on whether it is humanities or science. In primary level, religious education will be imparted through stories and life-accounts which mean really nothing. .It has also downgraded Madrasah courses, it has made most of the Madrasah courses optional which means Madrasas can no longer produce Islamic scholars.We hope Bangladesh government will reject these recommendations.In fact religious courses should increase to save the people from materialism and immorality which has spread its tentacles everywhere to the detriment of humanity. . |
