"They've memorized the entire holy book, but they don't understand its meaning."
Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.
"How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education."
Mesut Kacmaz, principal of a PakTurk school in Karachi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/world/asia/04islam.html?hp
In a recent NY Times article, Sebnem Arsu writes about flowering schools of Turkish origins taking roots in Pakistan. A Turkish school in Karachi is prospering. "It is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly trial ethnic group whose porer fringers have been among the most susceptible to radicalism." It is touching to hear testimony from Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam who lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water.Two brothers from his tribe were killed in a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar..Abdul is raising his younger siblings, his father died suddenly twelve years agol. Abdul decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school.
Illiteracy is one of the main problems of the Muslim world. Too often radical fundamentalists recruit desperate and illiterate men and women who do not understand the true teachings of the Koran. These false prophets take a skewed interpretation of Islam and they prey on the illiterate; in Baluchistan, Quetta's sparsely populated province of Pakistan, the literacy rate is less than 10 per cent.
Does this sound radical? Yes, especially to suspicious radical Islamists.
The model from which these schools are based, is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. It is estimated that the number of his followers in Turkey range from three million to five million. "The schools which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding." From this view, I can only hope that this moderate stance will prepare some leader for tomorrow to be more peace loving, and more tolerant of different religions and cultures. It certainly cannot hurt. JT
1 comment:
Hi Joge,
Congratulations on getting your blog up and running! I read the same New York Times article about Turkey's kinder and gentler form of Islam. A key to it is a strict separation of church and state as opposed to them being one as in Iran. Let's hope that the Turkey model will spread and render the Iran model failed throwback to the dark ages. George Pollock
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