Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2015 at 8:58am

A senior educationist and member of the government-appointed advisory committee for curriculum and textbooks reforms has left the country ‘fearing for life’ after receiving threatening calls and facing a ‘hate propaganda campaign’, it emerged on Monday.

Dr Bernadette L. Dean, director of VM Institute for Education and former principal of St Joseph’s College for Women and Kinnaird College, in an email sent to her friends and colleagues first said ‘sorry’ that she had not been able to contact them in recent days and then described reasons for that. She said she had to leave Pakistan fearing for her life on the advice of family, friends, colleagues and police.

She said a political party was instrumental in unleashing the ‘hate campaign’ against her for writing textbooks as a member of the advisory committee. “This campaign started a few months ago with threatening phone calls to members of the advisory committee on curriculum and textbook reform and Sindh Textbook Board, visits of religious leaders from the Punjab and Sindh to the STBB to complain about me and the work I am doing with respect to textbook writing, a vicious letter accusing me of being a foreigner woman who has single-handedly made changes to the curriculum and textbooks that made them secular and called me an enemy of Islam.”

With her email, she also attached multiple files. One of them included a letter to the Karachi police chief from a civil society organisation appealing for the removal of banners against her put up by the political party.

She also referred to the ‘All-Parties Conference’ held at the Karachi Press Club in April where she had been blamed for carrying out such amendments to the curricula. She raised the concern with the authorities but in vain, said the email.

The fresh statement from Dr Dean came just weeks after the gun attack on an American national, Debra Lobo, on Shaheed-i-Millat Road. Mrs Lobo, the Jinnah Medical and Dental College vice principal for student affairs, was seriously wounded in the attack carried out by four unidentified gunmen on Shaheed-i-Millat Road. In her email, Dr Dean also clarified her role as a member of the committee citing that she just co-authored the reformed books with Muslim authors and all the books were reviewed multiple times before being approved.

“The New National Curriculum 2006 approved by the federal government included Islamiat as part of general knowledge in class 1-2 and from grade 3 Islamiat was made a separate subject,” she said.

“The decision was taken at that time that Islamiat-related content would be removed from the other subjects, as Islamiat is a compulsory subject for grade 3 onwards,” she explained.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1181357

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 29, 2015 at 7:31pm

Two of #Pakistan's top #Muslim clerics fight at CII meeting over status of #Ahmadi minority. #Apostacy #Islam http://gu.com/p/4fdck/stw ;

Two Pakistani clerics have come to blows at a meeting of the religious establishment over the fraught issue of the status of Ahmadis, a Muslim sect that hardliners want declared apostates.

A scuffle broke out on Tuesday between the two at a gathering of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) when the chairman, Mohammad Khan Sherani, called on the group to consider whether Ahmadis, who are declared non-Muslims by the constitution, should be considered murtads that have rejected Islam.

A declaration of apostasy by the constitutional body charged with advising parliament on lawmaking would likely put Ahmadis in even greater peril, given that many interpretations of Islamic law prescribe death for people who quit the religion.

Tahir Ashrafi, a liberal-minded voice on the CII, strongly opposed any discussion of the incendiary issue, prompting a furious confrontation with Sherani, who is also an elected member of parliament.

Ashrafi, who heads the Pakistan Ulema Council, said discussion of the Ahmadi issue would have been dangerous. “Even if five members of the council agree they are murtads it will be a big problem, it will create violence across the country,” he said.

Ashrafi said any attacks on the Ahmadi, also known as the Ahmadiyya, community would likely be worse than riots in previous decades, given the current strength of extremist groups. “We have made a lot of effort for interfaith harmony and then [Sherani] puts himself at the head of the extremists,” he said.

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In recent months, a mob burned down an Ahmadi-owned factory in the city of Jhelum and hundreds of people protested against police after they removed anti-Ahmadi signs from a shop window in Lahore.

The CII regularly makes headlines with its suggestions for strengthening the role of sharia law in Pakistan, which in recent years has included a ruling that girls as young as nine should be able to marry if they have reached puberty.

Another controversial ruling said DNA could not be used as primary evidence in rape cases as Islamic law required four witnesses to determine whether a rape has taken place.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Sherani also attempted to force a discussion on whether millions of non-Muslims in Pakistan should be subject to the medieval practice of paying a jizya tax, despite enjoying equal rights under the constitution.

Ashrafi said the grip of Sherani and other hardliners over the council had been weakened after the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, appointed nine relatively moderate new members.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 26, 2017 at 5:42pm

#Pakistan's #Punjab province acts to improve #science content and correct #history in new revised school #textbooks. #education
by Pervez Hoodbhoy. https://www.dawn.com/news/1372660


The new books are cleanly printed on paper of decent quality, typographical errors are infrequent, and coloured cartoons show smiling girl children in class. Earlier textbooks typically showed docile boys facing grim-faced elderly teachers. My heart gladdened at suggested science experiments that are both interesting and doable. And, instead of beating the tired old drum of Muslim scientists from a thousand years ago, one now sees a genuine attempt to teach actual science — how plants grow and breathe, objects move, water makes droplets or freezes, etc.

On the history front one feels instant relief. Pakistan’s date of birth has thankfully been set at 1947 and away from 712 — the year Arab imperial conqueror Mohammed bin Qasim set foot in Sindh. Schoolbooks during Gen Ziaul Haq’s years contained this claim and no subsequent government dared to reset the clock. Astonishingly, one book frankly admits that Muslims had fought against other Muslims and ascribes the Mughal Empire’s downfall after Emperor Aurangzeb to his quarrelling sons rather than eternally scheming Hindu Rajputs.

But here’s the wonder of wonders: an Urdu translation of Quaid-i-Azam’s famous speech of Aug 11, 1947, has finally found its way into at least one social studies book! This declares that religion is a matter for the individual citizen and not of the state. The speech had hitherto been kept hidden for fear of polluting students’ minds and weakening the two-nation theory. Whether it will actually be covered in Matric examinations is difficult to say; if not then students and their teachers won’t take it seriously.

The older curriculum helped create a militant, intolerant mindset. A generation later, Pakistan saw jihad-obsessed youngsters emerging even from mainstream schools. Willing to kill and be killed, they are now everywhere and have to be crushed with Islamic-sounding operations like Zarb-i-Azb and Raddul Fasaad (for which great credit is claimed). Terrorist networks of students and teachers that target policemen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens have been discovered within many colleges and universities.

The eventual revamping of Punjab’s school textbooks owes to a belated realisation that thousands of Pakistani lives were needlessly lost to militancy fuelled by hate materials in textbooks. Many years will be needed for the new books to produce a more enlightened, less xenophobic generation. This welcome step needed to be taken sooner rather than later. I have no knowledge of the blacked-out province of Balochistan but Punjab’s bold move has not been matched by other provinces.

Sindh remains frozen. Its education ministry and the Sindh Textbook Board have long set the highest standards of laziness, depravity and stupidity. An earlier analysis of STB’s science books was published in this newspaper two years ago. It has had zero effect; matters are just as grim there today as then.

Those who rule Sindh continue to stifle education. Sindh could have outraced Punjab by taking advantage of the 18th Constitutional Amendment which frees the provinces from the federal diktat. Instead, secretaries of education in Sindh who worked to improve things were defeated and shunted out. Sindh’s misfortune has been the ideology-free money-grabbing PPP which oversees a system based upon patronage and unlimited corruption.

With KP’s cleaner administration one expected better. The earlier ANP government had considerably softened textbooks in KP. But after Imran Khan’s PTI entered into an alliance with the Jamaat-i-Islami (and now possibly with arch-conservative Maulana Samiul Haq), there was drastic backpedaling....

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