15 October 2014

Tony Blair's 'war of ideas' - What, exactly, is religious extremism?

.... This is pie-in-the-sky stuff. Let's take the example of a nice, "moderate" Wahhabi school (or even a state school) in Saudi Arabia. Students there will be taught that anyone who is not a Wahhabi is destined for hell, and that non-believers are generally inferior because they haven't accepted the true faith. A visit from the Tony Blair Faith Foundation asking them to treat people from different faiths equally isn't going to change that, because it's an essential part of Wahhabi doctrine.

.... Adding an element of religious education, as opposed to instruction, would be a step forward of sorts, but a more radical proposal, advocated by A C Grayling at the recent conference on secularism in London, would be to abolish religious education in schools altogether and replace it with "the history of ideas" – a history in which according to Grayling religion would be no bigger than the dot on a TV screen when you switch it off.

[al-bab.com] Read more