By Ashraf Abdul Wahab.
Tripoli, 18 October:
Libya’s Dar Al-Ifta’ (the Fatwa office), presided by Grand Mufti Sheikh Sadeq Al-Ghariani, has called on . . .[restrict]the Ministry of Education to remove passages relating to democracy and freedom of religion from school textbooks. It has also asked for clarification as to why extracts of the Prophet’s Sunnah had been deleted.
According to official news agency LANA, the Fatwa office issued a statement on Tuesday saying that the Grand Mufti had published an article entitled The Curriculum and the Instilling of Valuesin which he highlighted a number of criticisms of the new school syllabus textbooks for the current academic year. The first was about the deletion of some of the Prophet’s Sunnah within the Islamic education syllabus, and the second addressed the two paragraphs included in the basic education textbooks about religious freedom and democracy.
The statement said, according to Libya News Agency, that the Ministry of Education responded positively to the remarks made by the sheikh and promised to investigate the reasons behind the deletion of the prophet’s sunnah texts from the Islamic education curriculum.
The statement added that the Fatwa office had called on the ministry to delete two pages in the National Education text books — one about ancient Greek democracy because it contained information it said it contained information too detailed for school students to understand, the other relating to freedom of belief and religion because it suggested to younger students that they could chose any religion they wanted.
The Fatwar office called on the authorities to take into account the views of the public, especially those relating to religious values. Ignoring the people’s will and aspirations, it said, could spark public anger.
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