The Christians in Pakistan are forced to learn Muslim doctrine in schools. “The teaching of Islamic content in compulsory subjects is unfair, as even students from religious minorities are thus forced to study and take exams in these subjects,” says Peter Jacob, Catholic leader and Director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ) in Pakistan.
Jacob argues that the government “should not include religious content in compulsory subjects such as Urdu and English. He was speaking to the Vatican agency Fides.
It also recalls that the Constitution of Pakistan specifies that “no person who attends an educational establishment shall be required to receive religious instruction, or participate in any religious ceremony if it refers to a religion other than his own.”
Therefore, it requires an educational commission to review these teaching policies since the content of school textbooks and the effects they are causing in society have not been analyzed.
In this regard, Muslim academic Riaz Shaikh, dean of the Department of Social Sciences at the “Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology” in Islamabad, denounced “discrimination and gender issues in the national curriculum”.
Similarly, Tauseef Ahmed Khan, a member of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, emphasized that the curriculum “includes content that sows hatred towards minority groups and this is becoming a source to sow hatred in the hearts of the students”.
In this sense, not only Jacob and the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) of the Pakistani Episcopate are those who speak out against this educational abuse to the detriment of religious minorities, but also Muslim academics.
It should be noted that the Pakistani curriculum dates from 2004 and several Christian and Muslim experts request one that is unique at the national level, in accordance with international standards and that promotes peace, justice, and inclusion.
That is why Kashif Aslam, program coordinator of the NCJP, emphasized to Fides that “a lot of work has been done in the last ten years to eliminate hate material from textbooks”.
“We don’t want it to go to waste. We have to remove content that gives rise to fundamentalism and even violence,” he added.