There’s an interesting controversy developing in al-Matowa, a province in southern Iraq with a small, but larger than average, Christian minority of residents. As with all of Iraq, the Muslim faith constitutes the majority of the province, and Islam is taught in the schools. Students are taught the Qur’an, and each morning must pray and bow towards the south, or towards Mecca, the city designated by the prophet Mohammad as the holy city of the Islamic faith.
Christians of al-Matowa do not want their children raised in the Islam faith, and have protested to the local Kufat, or what we would call a school board. They have asked that their children be allowed to leave the classroom during morning prayer, and to be separately taught Bible studies rather than the Qur’an.
The Kufat recently ruled that since Iraq is a Muslim country, it was the right of the majority of Iraqis to have their religion taught in the schools.
Under Saddam Hussein, schools were secular, and religion was taught only in the mosques, or holy schools, with children dividing their time between both. Christian children at that time would stay with their parents and study the Bible, or attend religious services at their own churches. Saddam managed to hold together a tenuous peace among the various faiths by respecting each, including the minority Christians. It seemed to work. Now, with the new government and a re-assertive Muslim movement, the government is actively trying to bring Christians into the Islamic faith. It is a precept of the Muslim faith (called “masi-al-habi”) that Islam shall one day the the common faith of the entire globe.
It’s an interesting quandary for the newly-democratic Iraqis. Do they respect freedom of religion, or do they insist that the majority religion be taught to all?
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Piece of Mindful 
When building our summer home I had all five toilets face Mecca.
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just another reason we need to bring our troops home now. after the invasion which now we know was an undeniable mistake we have only upheld a puppet regime which owes no allegiance to anything except bribery and the means of obtaining a purchased cardboard and plastic form of democracy which of course is just the exact opposite of true democracy.
once again, our leaders have failed – are failing now and will continue to fail in whatever ill-conceived mission they claim to support while our troops are put in harms way. the troops i salute for doing their jobs and our leaders, both past and present, i revile for their lack of vision, the complete absence of any courage of genuine conviction, and their willingness to sacrifice our young for such an obviously contrived and phony goal…this flimsy facade of democracy which is propped up in iraq fools no-one with any reason.
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Love the soldiers, hate the generals. Even 90-year old commies don’t spout that line anymore.
You have a “flimsy facade of democracy” in Iraq because that’s what you’ve created in this country.
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No fundamentalists of any stripe accept the idea of freedom of religion.
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