This is why they killed them

Archaeologists have yet to uncover the mosques used by Native Americans. Perhaps the Zionists destroyed them before they could be found. One day though, Allah willing, the truth will emerge...

Sheikh Salem Salameh, member of Hamas Legislative Council and Deputy Head of the Palestine Islamic Scholars Association [!] on Lebanese TV:

"We warn the Muslims of what U.S. President Washington himself warned. [Washington] killed the Indians and the Muslims, because the Indians and the owners of that land were Muslims. It has been proven that they were Muslims, and that they had mosques. This is why they killed them... The [U.S.] is a murderous state that assists murderers. It helps those who have killed the prophets, the holy men, the women and the innocent children. The [Americans] give them rulings permitting them to kill the [Palestinians]." [Mick Hartley] Read more

The Ahmadi Abdus Salam and Muslim Nobel Prizes

.... Here’s a question for study and discussion: why? Why are there so few Muslim Nobels in the subjects that really count — the sciences? The three science winners received almost all of their education in the West, enjoying in their work the mental freedom that only the West, and not their countries of origin, could supply. Isn’t it plausible that there is something about Islam itself, its deep suspicion and discouragement of free and skeptical inquiry, while the habit of mental submission is encouraged, that accounts for this?

Could it be that all the time and mental energy that so many Muslims devote to learning the Qur’an by heart, some even memorizing the whole thing in order to attain the condition of hafiz, takes away from time that might be spent not on memorization, but on comprehension, analysis, discussion?

Is it possible that Islam stunts mental growth? Look at the confusion, illogicality, and hysteria of so many Muslim spokesmen, television guests and hosts, now on permanent view at www.memri.org. How many of us would wish our children to acquire what passes for an education in Muslim lands? Is it possible that, in addition to all its other unattractive features, Islam stunts mental growth? [New English Review] Read more

A prison that suffocates Muslims

Iraqi scholar Dr. Abdul Jabbar Al-Rifaee has noticed that the Islamic world's contribution to modern science has not been significant, to say the least. It has, in truth, been pretty much non-existent. "What our culture refers to as loyalty to its heritage is, in fact, a prison that suffocates Muslims."

I think he might be on to something. [Mick Hartley] Read more

Pakistan aims to bring religious schools into mainstream

Pakistan has agreed on a plan to overhaul instruction at madrasas or religious schools to bring the institutions closer into line with conventional schools and curb extremist teaching, Education Minister Shafqat Mahmood said on Friday.

The plan is the latest effort to address longstanding concerns that the roughly 30,000 madrasas in Pakistan provide a haven for extremist teaching with a rigid curriculum based around religious studies that fails to prepare students for employment after they graduate.

Under the plan, agreed with the madrasa umbrella organization, Wafaq-ul-madaris, religious schools would be registered and helped to strengthen conventional teaching in subjects like English, science and mathematics. [Reuters] Read more

Boris Johnson claimed Islam put Muslim world 'centuries behind'

.... Writing about the rise of the religion in an appendix added to a later edition of The Dream of Rome, his 2006 book about the Roman empire, Johnson said there was something about Islam that hindered development in parts of the globe and, as a result, “Muslim grievance” was a factor in virtually every conflict.

Johnson’s argument was described as disconcerting and problematic by Tell Mama, which monitors anti-Muslim hate and said he had demonstrated a lack of understanding of the religion. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said many people would like to know if the favourite to become the next prime minister still believed “Islam inherently inhibits the path to progress and freedom”.

.... “It is extraordinary to think that under the Roman/Byzantine empire, the city of Constantinople kept the candle of learning alight for a thousand years, and that under Ottoman rule, the first printing press was not seen in Istanbul until the middle of the nineteenth century. Something caused them to be literally centuries behind.” [The Guardian] Read more

Taliban surge ends schooling for girls

The Taliban has taken over every school in a district of northern Afghanistan, imposing a hardline Islamist curriculum and curbing education for girls.

Since militants overran Qadis, in northwestern Baghdis province, Taliban rule has already extended to almost every aspect of daily life. All the schools in the district, almost 100, have fallen in line with the insurgents’ demands or faced closure.

The broadly western curriculum that had re-emerged after the US-led invasion in 2001 has been scrapped. English and science have been exchanged for Koranic recitation. Education for girls has been halted beyond the age of 12 and many girls’ schools shut down. [The Times (£)] Read more

The removal of Darwin and evolution from schools is a backwards step

In recent weeks there have been alarming reports from both Israel and Turkey of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution being erased from school curriculums. In Turkey, this has been blamed on the concept of evolution – which is taught in British primary schools – being beyond the understanding of high school students. In Israel, teachers are claiming that most students do not learn about evolution; they say their education ministry is quietly encouraging teachers to focus on other topics in biology.

This news follows the astonishing statements made by India’s minister for higher education earlier this year. Satyapal Singh claimed Darwin was “scientifically wrong”, and is demanding that the theory of evolution be removed from school curriculums because no one “ever saw an ape turning into a human being”. [Guardian Cif] Read more

Turkish Education: Same Old Religious Obsession, Only Worse

In 2017, Turkey stopped teaching evolution at secondary school: for extremists, Darwinism remains a taboo subject. Instead, school textbooks started teaching Turkish pupils "jihad."

.... Secular Turks were shocked when Binali Yildirim, then Minister of Transport, explained to an interviewer why, in his youth, he changed his choice of university:

"I visited Bogazici University and saw that girl and boy students were sitting together... I feared I could go astray. And I decided to attend the technical university."

Yildirim who later became President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's choice for prime minister now serves as parliament speaker.

It is not surprising that for Turkey's extremists, governance broadly means the Islamization of everything, including education at every level. In a 2017 speech, Erdogan boasted that, after his Justice and Development Party came to power, the number of students at the religious imam hatip schools rose from 60,000 to 1.3 million.

Unsurprisingly, Erdogan has often declared his political ambition not as raising honest, well-educated, free minds, but as "raising pious generations." [Gatestone Institute] Read more

Islamic science

There is a notable tendency in Muslim circles to claim precedence for Islam in matters of science and discovery. I'm not talking here of the wilder claims of Islamic science - the healing powers of Koranic holy water, for instance, or camel urine as a cure for cancer - but of more mainstream, more credible beliefs. That, for instance, an Ottoman admiral was the first to discover America.

Nir Shafir, a historian of the Ottoman Empire, was alerted to a problem when he was preparing to teach a course on "Science and Islam". A book he was about to assign to his students had on its cover what purported to be a miniature from the ancient Muslim world, showing men in turbans examining the night sky through telescopes. A closer examination revealed that this was - of course - a fake:

.... Shafir sees the production of these fake miniatures - which have found their way into a number of august collections - as fundamentally well-intentioned, as a "desire to integrate Muslims into a global political community through the universal narrative of science". That seems extraordinarily generous of him.

Might it not be, rather, an entirely duplicitous effort to falsify the historical record, by attempting to show that the world of Islam, far from being backward and hampered by an inflexible belief in the correctness of everything in the Koran and the hadiths, has in fact been in the forefront of scientific discovery through the ages, and has only been denied its deserved recognition by the perfidy and dishonesty of the West? [Mick Hartley] Read more

Turkey says plans to place quarter of top students in Islamic schools

Nearly a quarter of top-performing students entering Turkish upper schools are expected to be placed in religious Imam Hatip schools, the education minister said on Thursday, a level which secular critics say unfairly prioritises Islamic education.

The top 10 percent of students currently in their final year of middle school are set to win places in selected schools under a new entrance exam system in June, part of education reforms drafted on President Tayyip Erdogan’s orders.

Erdogan has said one of his goals is to forge a “pious generation” in largely Muslim Turkey and the number of pupils at Imam Hatip schools, founded to train future imams and preachers, rose five-fold to 1.3 million students in the last six years.

According to the exam system guide posted on the education ministry website, nearly 300 of the 1,367 schools selected to receive students who pass the exam are Imam Hatip schools. [Reuters] Read more

How Pakistani school textbooks mould its students’ skewed worldview

Prior to 1977, no textbook contained any mention of the “Pakistan ideology.” But after that, the construct became the starting point and the central premise of high school Pakistan Studies texts. The description of Pakistan Studies textbooks that follows is based on my reading and analysis of textbooks from the mid-1990s to today, from all four provinces.

The books state, quite simply, that the Pakistan ideology is Islam, and begin by describing the five pillars of Islam—shahada (the declaration of faith), namaz (prayer), zakat (charity), hajj (pilgrimage), and fasting—that, together, form the basis of Islamic practice. But this material in the textbooks violates the constitutional provision that non-Muslims do not need to study Islam. In addition, defining the Pakistani identity solely in the form of Islam excludes non-Muslims from that identity. [Quartz] Read more

'They don't want you to criticize Islam': Controversial speaker Zuhdi Jasser talks about combating 'Islamism'

After days of controversy, a location change and a counter-protest event, Zuhdi Jasser visited Duke to give a talk about Islam. And despite fears of protest that necessitated five security guards at the event, the talk proceeded smoothly.

Jasser, a medical doctor and the president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, is a Muslim American whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Syria. The speech, originally entitled, “The American Muslim Identity: Patriot or Insurgent,” emphasized the need to reform Islam, curb Islamism and promote liberty and Americanism.

"Ideas don't have rights, human beings do,” Jasser said. “They call it Islamophobia because they don't want you to criticize Islam.”

He discussed how Islam is over 1,400 years old, but that there have been over 500 years of stagnation of Islamic thought. This period has seen the rise of political Islam—the belief that Muslim-majority countries should be governed based on Sharia or Islamic law. Jasser spoke staunchly against Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism, as he believes it is the root of “radical Islamic terrorism.” [The Chronicle] Read more

Demand for atheism rises in countries under Islamic rule

The scientist and author Richard Dawkins is giving away translations of The God Delusion in countries under Islamic rule like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan.

The reason behind the decision is the thirst for atheism in such countries. Whilst 3.3 million copies of the bestseller have been sold since 2006, the unofficial Arabic pdf alone has been downloaded 13 million times.

The rise of atheism in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia is something we have been speaking about for some time now. The Iranian Baztab Now website warned of a tsunami of atheism amongst Iranian youth. The #ExMuslimBecause hashtag initiated by the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain became viral overnight with over 120,000 Tweets from 65 countries.

The hashtag “#Aik crore Pakistani mulhid” (10 million Pakistani atheists) trended around Darwin Day for two years running. Free Mind, launched by Arab atheists promoting atheism, has recorded more than 1 million visits so far. [The Freethinker] Read more

Richard Dawkins will give away The God Delusion to Muslims

Richard Dawkins is to make a number of his books available free of charge in the Islamic world after an Arabic translation of The God Delusion was downloaded illegally millions of times.

The evolutionary biologist and noted atheist said that he had recently learnt that 30 million copies of the book questioning the existence of a supernatural creator had been illegally downloaded with three million alone in Saudi Arabia.

“I derive huge encouragement from that,” he said yesterday adding that he had heard similar stories about the number of PDFs of the book that had been downloaded in Iran.

Dawkins said he had started a project to provide free downloadable PDFs of seven of his books, including The God Delusion, “in the language of Islamic countries”. [The Times (£)] Read more

The enemy of all that is modern

Sayyid Al-Qemany is an Egyptian writer and intellectual whose work emphasises the importance of secular critical thinking. He believes, for instance, that the Koran should be subject to scholarly study as a historical document.

In 2009 he received Egypt’s highest cultural award, the State Award of Merit Prize for achievement in the field of the social sciences - a decision which didn't go down too well with the Muslim establishment:

"Just imagine a religion that a thousand years ago stopped adding anything, stopped changing, stopped renewing itself. Therefore the way Muslims think is at complete odds with our times, because they think according to the logic of a thousand years ago. Mankind has evolved and the sciences have progressed in a way that no one could have anticipated. The Muslims find it impossible to grasp and understand this great progress. [...]

"Al-Azhar refused to accuse ISIS of heresy for a very simple reason. If it had done so, ISIS would have said: "Everything we know we learned from you"....

"It is the source of terrorism. Al-Azhar is the enemy of all that is modern." [Mick Hartley] Read more

Muslim Anti-Vaxxers Partly to Blame for Indonesia’s Fatal Diphtheria Crisis

.... At least 38 people — most of them children — have died from diphtheria in the last year in Indonesia. The epidemic of non-vaccination is so bad that it caused the country to launch a immunization campaign to get vaccines to millions of children and teenagers.

How could such a thing happen? There are several contributing factors, according to Niniek Karmini of the Associated Press, but the one that sticks out to me is that some fundamentalist Muslims in the nation, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, think vaccines violate Islamic law.

The phenomenon has not gone completely unnoticed, and some onlookers say the impact of religious fundamentalism on the rise in diphtheria cases is understated. A recent report pinpoints “religious orthodoxy” as a causative factor in the continuing outbreak. [Friendly Atheist] Read more

Kuwait-based cleric asks youths not to study maths, chemistry, zoology

Kuwait-based cleric Arshad Mohsin on Friday exhorted the Muslims to stop studying arithmetic, chemistry and zoology as these subjects taught things against the basic tenets of Islam.

Delivering the Friday special speech at the White House Compound Mosque of the town, he said even nursery rhymes should not be taught to the Muslims as the likes of 'Johny Johny Yes Papa, eating sugar no Papa' polluted impressionable young minds and glorified telling a lie.

Referring to zoology, the cleric said Darwin's 'Theory of Evolution' negated the Islamic concept of the process through which the universe came into being. Anybody who studied Darwin automatically ceases to be a Muslim, he said.

Explaining his opposition to the teaching/learning of chemistry, the cleric said chemical elements like cobalt and titanium derived their nomenclature from idols worshipped in the pre-Islamic era. He said it was part of the larger design to promote idol worship, which is most abhorred by Islam. [The Times of India] Read more

The decline of Turkish schools - Out goes evolution, in comes Islamic piety and loyalty to the regime

DAYS before the start of the new school year, Merve, an eighth-grade science teacher, is flipping through the pages of her old biology textbook. A picture of a giraffe appears, alongside a few lines about Charles Darwin.

Teaching evolution in a predominantly Muslim country where six out of ten people refer to themselves as creationists, according to a 2010 study, has never been easy. As of today it is no longer possible. A new curriculum has scrapped all references to Darwin and evolution. Such subjects, the head of Turkey’s board of education said earlier this summer, were “beyond the comprehension” of young students. Merve says her hands are now tied. “There’s no way we can talk about evolution.”

.... A module on the life of the Prophet Muhammad will teach the same pupils that Muslims should avoid marrying atheists, and that wives should obey their husbands. Schools are also becoming a target of Mr Erdogan’s mosque-building spree.

A new rule requires that all new schools be equipped with prayer rooms, segregated by sex. “The interference of religion into education has never been as visible and as deep,” says Batuhan Aydagul of the Education Reform Initiative, a think-tank in Istanbul. [The Economist] Read more

Turkey's new school year: Jihad in, evolution out

Turkey's schools have begun the new academic year with a controversial curriculum that leaves out the theory of evolution and brings in the concept of jihad.

For Turkey's Islamist-rooted government, the idea is for a new "education of values".

Critics have denounced new textbooks as "sexist" and "anti-scientific", and complain of a major blow to secular education.

"By embedding a jihadist education of values, they try to plague the brains of our little children, with the same understanding that transforms the Middle East into a bloodbath," said Bulent Tezcan of the secular, opposition CHP party.

But the government has accused the opposition of creating black propaganda and trying to polarise Turkey ahead of elections in 2019.

"When we say values, they understand something else. We are proud of our conservative-democrat stand, but we don't want everyone to be like us," says Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz.wan [BBC] Read more

Iraq drops chapter on evolution from school textbooks

Iraq's education ministry has quietly dropped a chapter about evolution from its biology textbooks. The ministry has so far given no explanation but the change has brought complaints and ridicule from Iraqis on social media.

Among the complainers, Dr Mohammed Fawzi, who studied genetic engineering, bioinformatics and biotechnology at Bahgdad University, posted this sarcastic comment in Arabic on Facebook:

"We congratulate our people on deleting the chapter on evolution from the sixth grade textbook, because we have no need to evolve. Backwardness is beautiful!"

"Congratulations to us on our stance against the greatest scientific truths. Then come those who say: "Why are our people backward?"

Photographs of the revised textbook's index page have been circulating on the internet. They show it contains chapters on cells, tissue, reproduction, embryology and genetics. [al-bab.com] Read more