The End of Education As We Know It

By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
May 21, 2007

For half a century, some 270 million Arabs have had to suffer a drastic limiting of the idea of education as it has been shrunk to fit concepts of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, a process funded by nouveau riche Arabian oil wealth. The results have been nothing short of tragic.

In the Arab world of today, the word "intellectual" has come to refer to a person who reads newspapers regularly. An "educated" person is someone who holds a high school diploma. So-called "ulemas," a word that literally translates as "scholars, scientists, or people of knowledge" has come to mean bearded, turbaned men whose only formal instruction was in theology and who occupy their days explaining to the faithful the ways of seventh-century Islamic scriptures and how to wage jihad.

According to a dramatic statement included in the United Nations Arab Human Development Reports of the past few years, readership of books is so limited across the Arab world that the Arabic language itself is in "a state of crisis." Illiteracy in elemental factual knowledge stands at well over 50%. The reports' ultimate conclusion is that the major object of education in the Arab world today is evading true knowledge in favor of teaching submission to religion.

The instruments of that evasion have been forged inside the religious institutions of Islam. During the last 50 years, for example, half of the "great ulemas" of Saudi Arabia, those who legislate the laws, have been chosen from among men educated in madrassas. They are true illiterates by any measure, having never read books outside the Koran and the Hadith. In fact, many have literally seen nothing of the world at all, as the religious factions in Saudi Arabia tend to pick blind men, whom for some reason they regard as particularly pious, to be their lawmakers.

Across the rest of the Arab world as well, such "intellectual leaders" as university deans, newspaper editors, heads of television and radio networks, broadcasters, and educators for decades have been chosen strictly for political, religious, or tribal loyalties.

Al Azhar University in Cairo, often referred to as the 1,000-year-old font of Islamic scholarship, once upon a time graduated thinkers versed in debating all aspects of Islamic theology. Starting the early 1970s, however, as oil money asserted itself out of the vastly backward Arabian Peninsula, a changing of the guard took place: Scholarship was forced out and a blind, literal interpretation of seventh-century religious texts was substituted. Indeed, the most remarkable activity undertaken by Al Azhar School of Theology during the last two decades has been the banning of an average of 50 novels and translations of foreign literature a year.

Among their other accomplishments, the doyens of Al Azhar have issued edicts that define the veil and female circumcision as Islamic values and dub the Sphinx, the Pyramids, and the other vast monuments of the Pharaonic, Greek, and Persian cultures in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan as symbols of pagan idolatry that the faithful should shun or destroy altogether.

On the Arabian Peninsula, from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates, the airwaves buzz with religious programming that features debates on such topics as how best to beat your wife under Shariah law and whether Muslims should shake hands with Christians or step to the other side of a sidewalk upon encountering such an infidel.

By far the greatest victim of this nouveau riche-supported fundamentalism has been formal education. In Saudi medical schools, women students watch male professors do surgery or demonstrate diagnostic techniques over a remote video feed because the blind ulemas long ago decreed that women and men cannot mix outside marriage.

In Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, which in a recent New York Times advertising supplement marketed itself as the country's "capital" of education, miles upon miles of gleaming marble universities have been erected to be nothing more than mausoleums to education. The teachers in these government-owned institutions, hired from universities of equally low standards in Egypt and Pakistan, would not qualify to teach high school anywhere else.