Welcome to Daringopinion.com The Website of Elie Elhadj
Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of
Syrian Youth
July 2010
The Website ALL4SYRIA reported (in Arabic) on July 17, 2010 that private Islamist
elementary schools have been proliferating in Syria. The title of the article: Secrets and Background Behind the Decision
to Ban the Wearing of the Niqab in Syria’s Schools and Universities Taken by
the Office of National Security.
A Summary of the ALL4SYRIA article
Islamist groups in
Syria have succeeded in controlling most private elementary schools (up to
sixth grade), estimated to be around 200 schools (presumably in Damascus) with
approximately 25% to 30% of all elementary schools enrolment. The article revealed
that teachers are all women, don the Niqab (black covering of face and body), and
belong to Islamist proselytizing groups, typically led and
controlled by women. ALL4SYRIA added that classroom teaching material contravenes
Ministry of Education curriculum and textbooks, that young children are instructed
to insist that their mothers must wear the Niqab so that they avoid burning in
hell’s fire, that large amounts of money have been paid by Islamist organizers
to purchase secular private schools from their owners; for example, Dar
Al-Faraj, Dar Al-Na’eem, Omar bin Al-Khattab, The Arab Islamic College, Ummat
Al-Majd, Al-Yaqzah…).
Significance of the article
Such a
development is disconcerting. Syria must be vigilant. At the core of Islamist
teaching, just like Wahhabi teaching, is indoctrination and brainwashing in fanaticism.
Sunni Islamists, Syria’s included, embrace
Wahhabi extremism with all their being. Their speech and actions are akin to
being members of a religious cult.
It should be noted that the word "Islamist" refers only to the tiny minority among individual Muslims who are extremists in their religious fervor and beliefs; specifically, the Hanbalite Wahhabis. The word "Islamist" does not apply to the 95% of Sunnis who follow the other three schools of jurisprudence (Hanafites, Maliktes, and Shafiates). This great majority is moderate, enlightened, and tolerant. On a macro level, the word "Islamist" refers to extremist Islamic states, not to moderate Islamic countries. While Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Syria, and Turkey, for example, are Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia is an Islamist country.
If allowed to go unchecked, such a development
would cause irreparable damage to Syria’s way of life and to its multi-ethnic
multi-religion harmony, including discrimination against and persecution of the
country’s many religious minorities and sects, particularly the ruling Alawite
minority, which orthodox Muslims regard as heretics.
To appreciate the
consequences of Islamist teaching one need not look beyond the Saudi
educational curriculum to see its effects on Saudi youth and Muslim youth in Islamist/
Wahhabi sponsored schools elsewhere. While Saudi textbooks might not be seen in
Syria’s classrooms, the dogma, dictums, values, attitudes, and beliefs imparted
through the words, mannerism, dress, and personal behavior of Islamist teachers
would, nonetheless, mold impressionable young children with Arabia’s seventh
century culture.
Content of Islamist education
Students in
Wahhabi controlled schools are taught to denigrate other religions and Islamic
sects, including other Sunnis. Starting with the First grade, children are
taught that Jews, Christians, and others are destined to be consumed in hellfire.
As the children grow up, the same message is honed more explicitly. Fourth
graders are taught to hate the polytheists and infidels. Fifth graders are
taught that someone who opposes God, even if he/she were one’s own
brother/sister becomes his/her enemy. In Sixth grade, students are taught that
Islam bans the mourning of the dead tradition that Shi’ites venerate (Center for Religious Freedom of Freedom House with the Institute for Gulf Affairs, Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance, with Excerpts from Saudi
Ministry of Education Textbooks for Islamic Studies, 2006.
To put overall Saudi
school curriculum in perspective it is helpful to describe some of what the
older students learn. Eighth graders are taught that building mosques on
graves, even by Muslims, is the work of polytheists and unbelievers. In Ninth
grade, teenagers are taught in apocalyptic terms that violence against Jews,
Christians, and other non-believers is sanctioned by God. Tenth graders are
taught that, in
law, the life of non-Muslims as well as women is worth a fraction of that of
free Muslim men. Eleventh graders are taught that Muslims do not yield to Christians
and Jews on a narrow road out of honor and respect (the Prophet reportedly
said: “Do not initiate greeting the Jews and Christians, and if you encounter
one of them on a road you should force him toward the narrow side” The
Six Books, Sahih Muslim, tradition 5661, p. 1064 and Sunan
Abi Dawood, Ibid., tradition 5205, p. 1603). Twelfth graders learn that the spread of
Islam through jihad is a religious duty, that jihad is the summit of Islam, that
through jihad Islam’s banner was raised high, that jihad is one of the most
magnificent acts of obedience to God.
xe
“Jihad”
Islamists/Wahhabi
education emphasizes the belief in predestination—the antithesis of
intellectual reasoning—the enemy of the scientific method and common sense. Absurdities
like the machinations of djinn, angels, the devil, and the evil eye anesthetize
the brain. Such beliefs are behind the many television programs that fill
Arabic airwaves with huge followings in search of advice from shysters and
tricksters masquerading as pious ulama invoking supplications from the Quran and
the Hadith, prescribing to naïve troubled questioners the Holy Scriptures’
voodoo science and medicine to cure what modern science and medicine had failed
to cure. Watching such proceedings is heartbreaking. Such mind control is the
worst form of slavery.
Outside the classroom, Islamist/Wahhabi propaganda promotes an anti-Western
agenda—Westernization results in the loss of
Islamic ideals and practices, encourages the introduction of Western political
systems, political parties, and parliaments, which interfere with social
cohesion and consensus, brings misery and suffering to
Muslims, undermines Muslim conduct, leading to mixing of the sexes, opening of
nightclubs, discarding of the veil, charging of interest on bank loans, and
celebration of non-Islamic holidays such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Labor
Day. (Madawi
Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, Cambridge University Press, 2003,
191).
Islamist/Wahhabi doctrine denounces Arab nationalism and socialism, as atheistic innovation. Abdulaziz Bin Baz, Saudi
Arabia’s former grand mufti (1993-1999), called Arab nationalism an atheist jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance and darkness). Ibn Baz
described nationalism as “a movement of ignorance whose main purpose is to
fight Islam and destroy its teachings and rules” (Ibid. 190). As for the Arab military-ruled republics that
since the 1950s have adopted nationalism as a basis for Arab unity and as a
political objective, Ibn Baz branded them “the enemies of Islam.” Saudi history textbooks highlight
that Arab nationalism is “European in origin, Jewish in motivation . . . [and]
represented as a conspiracy promoted by the West and Zionism to undermine the unity of Muslims” (Ibid. 191).
Islamist/Wahhabi
education engenders hostility towards all those who hold different religious
beliefs or political or national aspirations. Opponents are viciously attacked as
kuffars (atheists), orientalists, or agents of the CIA and Mossad, deserving death.
Islamist/Wahhabi education is designed to enslave the faithful through
superstitions and irrationalities in order to prolong the dictatorship of the coalitions
that typically govern Arab countries; namely political families and the ulama
class.
The dangers of Islamist/ Wahhabi teaching
That fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September
11, 2001 were Saudis along with Osama Bin Laden and many of his lieutenants suggests a connection between
Wahhabism, jihadism, and terrorism. This is not to imply, however, that 9/11
was a state-sponsored crime.
xe “September 11, 2001”xe “Bin Laden”
Religious beliefs play a definite role in determining
human conduct. Human conduct is a reaction to current events as determined by
the stock of religious beliefs, value systems, and past experience an
individual possesses. Such elements cannot be compartmentalized in isolated
chambers from one another in the human brain. The religious beliefs chamber cannot
be neutralized—it is a part and parcel of the thought process.
Religious
extremism may be likened to gunpowder. The gunpowder explodes at the touch of a
spark. The spark might be a personal tragedy a jihadist has, sexual frustration
he might suffer, or humiliation by a tyrannical ruler at home, or by U.S.
Middle East politics, or by Israel. Frustrations make the promise of paradise
to Muslim martyrs in the Quran all the more alluring—“companions with beautiful, big, and lustrous eyes” (44:54),
“bracelets of gold, green garments of fine silk and heavy brocade” (18:31), and “rivers of wine delectable to
drinkers” (47:15).
However, neither Islamist beliefs alone nor personal
and political frustrations alone would lead a jihadist to explode. It is Islamist
extremism mixed with personal and political frustrations that cause a jihadist
to explode.
Exporting Islamist extremism
The Wahhabi way
of life has helped the growth of Islamist extremism not only among Saudis, but
also among some of the estimated fifty
million Muslim expatriate workers who worked since the mid 1970s
in Saudi Arabia and the eight to ten million foreigners who continue to work
there. Those millions have
been subjected to a constant diet of indoctrination in the Wahhabi way of life.
If a tiny proportion were radicalized, hundreds of thousand, possibly few
millions, could be spreading orthodoxy in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt,
Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, among
others. The number of Syrians in Saudi Arabia is difficult to estimate
accurately. At the risk of making a guesstimate, however, the number might be
in the range of 400,000 to 500,000; about 50% as expatriate workers with the remainder
being Syrians who became naturalized Saudis over the past fifty years or so plus
political refugees, mainly members of the banned Muslim Brothers Party who escaped and
migrated from Syria following the bloody confrontations between the government and the Party in 1982 in the city of Hama.
Radicalized foreign workers may be regarded as Wahhabi Trojan horses in
their home countries.
Supplementing the brigades of radicalized
foreign workers are the extensive networks of mosques, religious schools (madrassahs),
and charities built, funded, and staffed by Saudi trained preachers and
teachers over the past four decades or so. They brainwash young students in
poverty-stricken foreign communities into believing that Saudi Islam is the
short route to salvation. Little wonder that Wahhabism is alive and well
causing havoc today in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places.
Syria must not become the next battleground.
The rapid growth in orthodoxy in Arab
countries, Lebanon in particular (by virtue of the Hariri clan) and Egypt
(through Saudi financed clerics at Al-Azhar and other institutions) and the
resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to a lesser extent
in Bangladesh, suggests that a Wahhabi arch appears to be forming under Saudi
stewardship. The arch is to rival the Shi’ite crescent formed as a consequence of
America’s failed project in Iraq that empowered Tehran, which extends from Iran
to Iraq to Syria and Southern Lebanon plus the scattered but substantial Shi’ite
communities in Kuwait, Bahrain, the oil rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and
Northern Yemen.
Wahhabism has been exploited by the Saudi regime to legitimize its rule. However, it backfired. A genie was born, and the genie got out of the bottle, and no one today
seems able to get the genie back in the bottle.
xe “Wahhabism”xe “Al-Saud kings”xe “genie”
What
should Syria do?
Syria can take
four actions.
First, trace and cut off the flow of funds that sustains Islamist
groups. The source is most likely to be Syria’s home grown
Islamists and Syrians who had worked or are still working in Saudi Arabia and
who embraced Saudi Islam plus rich Saudis on a mission to spread the Islamist
creed around.
Second, proselytizing
groups, like other Islamist organizations, must be declared illegal and their
financial backers prosecuted.
Third, teachers who deviate
from the Ministry of Education’s curriculum must be punished.
Fourth, the
teaching of Islam to Muslims students and Christianity to Christian students
should be replaced by the teaching of ethics and/or comparative religious thought--Christianity, Judaism, and Islam--to all students.
Fifth, promulgate
a twenty-first century personal status law befitting a supposedly “secular”
country like Syria to replace its current antiquated Shari’a based laws and
courts for Muslims and spiritual courts
for non-Muslims. A country that claims to be “secular” should become
truly secular. Syria’s government appeasement of Islamists is like
riding a tiger. The tiger may someday devour the rider.
