Development Site - Changes here will not affect the live (production) site.

Can President Sisi Initiate an Islamic Enlightenment?

April 6 2015

The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, caused a stir last year by publicly denouncing radical Islam and calling for religious reform. As important as his words may be, writes Samuel Tadros, they will amount to little unless they are followed by changes in policy—and such changes should begin with the schools:

Egypt’s current educational system is an incubator for extremism and radicalization. This radicalization includes increasing intolerance toward non-Muslims and hostility toward the outside world. . . . Values of equality, peace, respect for other opinions, and citizenship must [therefore] be stressed throughout the curriculum. The curriculum should stress that diversity is not only natural but also plays a positive role in a nation’s progress.

The subject of history is an area that needs the most immediate attention. The texts taught in Egyptian schools need to introduce world history—the history of ideas and world religions and cultures. As things stand, students graduate with no knowledge of important world-historical events, with the outside world and its cultures . . . an enigma to them. No information is given on any impact the world, its cultures, and [its] civilizations have had on Egypt beyond colonialism. The void is filled by Islamists, who stuff impressionable minds with falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Even in studying their own history, students are unaware of the contributions Christians, Jews, and women have made to Egyptian society, making them unable to properly understand the richness of their own heritage. As it now stands, Jews are completely whitewashed from the history curriculum, despite a large Egyptian Jewish community having thrived there in the not-so-distant past.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Education, Egypt, Moderate Islam, Radical Islam, Religion & Holidays

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic