Education is Haram

Our Swedish correspondent CB has translated an article about an educational crisis among the children of Sweden’s Muslims. Some of the required activities in school are “haram”, and therefore the students more and more often don’t participate.

First, a prefatory note from the translator:

This is an article about the cultural battle that we in the West are fighting every day against Islamic concepts.

The daily fight looks like this: Some Muslim immigrant parents are concerned about certain subjects or activities in school and ask for special treatment for their kids. Sometimes it’s about swimming lessons. It might be not wanting their kids to shower in front of other kids, or even not wanting the kids see their own nakedness. At other times it’s the food in school. Nice as Swedes are in the school world, we try to accommodate them — not realizing that we are accommodating a ready-made system that is regarded by its followers as vastly superior to Western culture.

Swedish schools have looked the other way on this issue, and during recent weeks we have seen the results of allowing kids to drop out of school with incomplete grades and be locked out of the job market: the car-burnings and various other arsons and vandalism in Swedish towns by kids with no future, susceptible to criminality.

The legal demands on all children require participation in everything in school, and that should apply to all Muslim kids too. There should be no exceptions. And Swedish authorities should promptly abandon multiculturalism for assimilation, and convey the clear notion that if you come to Sweden, you come here to become a Swede and nothing else. You may keep some of your customs, but no ideas prompted by shari’a will ever be accepted as a norm governing public life.

Lastly, a clarification for all our non-Swedish readers: I seriously doubt that Mrs. Maja Lundberg advocates children being naked at school and holding hands — since that would have very poor support indeed among Swedes. We should see that as hyperbole to emphasize a crucial point, that children must not regard their bodies as impure or something similar.

Below is the translated article from Aftonbladet:

Schools must fight — against the word haram

To not hold hands.

To not dance and sing.

To not sit beside a girl or boy in school.

The little word haram is about to disrupt Swedish schools.

So, what does the word mean?

Haram is a word in Islamic jurisprudence that means forbidden or sinful.

A concept with great pervasive force. At least in a school where most of the children have an immigrant background.

There is much that can be called haram: Swedish culture is haram. Christmas trees and lit candles are haram. To speak about Jesus is haram. That boys and girls play together is haram. Physical training is haram. To take your underwear off and shower is haram. To be homosexual is haram.

But the word haram can also determine what a child is allowed to learn.

According to a new survey, parents forbid more than one out of ten pupils in the Stockholm area to participate in lessons on biology, sex and living together, music, swimming and athletics.

Another survey: 27 percent of the girls and 17 percent of the boys don’t participate in all classes.

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A prohibition with consequences. Children who are forced to skip the mandatory education will not get any final grades.

And then the risk are that they can’t continue their studies and will end up unemployed.

During the school year 2004-2005, four out of ten students with immigrant backgrounds left the 9th year with incomplete grades.

In the spring of 2008, almost every other 9th year student in Rinkebyskolan was failed in some of the core subjects Swedish, English and math.

What happens with these children? the teacher Maja Lundberg asked in the TV program “Skolfront” [School-front] which was aired last week.

Maja Lundberg is one of the few teachers who stands up for immigrant children’s equal right to an education, and said, “Swedish schools are in a crisis. The special treatment of immigrant children enhances segregation”.

And Maja Lundberg has been fighting the word haram every day:

“I’ve told the children that school is a religion-free zone. That boys and girls have the same value here. I’ve said that our bodies aren’t sinful and that the concept of haram doesn’t exist at school. I’ve said that the children’s beliefs belong at home with their parents, and that they are free in school. Here they can be naked and hold each others hands.”

— Monica Gunne

Hat tip: Steen.