Some German politicians are pushing for an expansion of Islam classes in public schools as a way to encourage the cultural integration of Muslim students and to promote an interpretation of Islam that highlights German values.
How will study of Islam that skips over so much of what the faith inculcates that discourages “cultural integration” by Muslim students in Germany help to ameliorate the situation? If the classes avoid all discussion of the more than 100 Jihad verses, the misogynistic verses, the antisemitic verses, the verses that tell Muslims not to take Christians and Jews as friends, “for they are friends only with each other,” the verse that describes Unbelievers as “the most vile of creatures,” that doesn’t make those verses disappear. These are the very verses that prevent integration of Muslim students, and they need to be held up for study and discussion. Pretending they don’t exist is not a winning strategy.
Shouldn’t the students learn that in Islam a man can have up to four wives, but a wife can have only one husband, and that a husband can divorce any of his wives merely by uttering the “triple-talaq”? Shouldn’t they learn that a husband can “beat” a disobedient wife? That daughters inherit half that of sons? That a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man, and the reason for that, Muhammad said in a famous hadith, is “due to the deficiency of her intelligence’?
“We need more religious education,” Kerstin Griese, a lawmaker from the governing center-left Social Democratic Party, wrote in an op-ed, “because it’s the only way to start a dialogue about our own traditions and values and to understand those of others.”
What kind of “dialogue” is possible with Muslims, for example, on the subject of Jews? The Qur’an, as Robert Spencer has noted, “describes the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); as fabricating things and falsely ascribing them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); claiming that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); loving to listen to lies (5:41); disobeying Allah and never observing his commands (5:13); disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more.” Muslims will have to reject these verses if they really want “to start a dialogue.”
Such advocates generally don’t envision non-Muslim students taking these classes to gain a better appreciation of Islam. While a few German school systems offer religion classes that include multiple faiths or ethics classes that touch on religion, religion as taught in public high schools and supported by Germany’s Basic Law is generally targeted at specific denominations.
Non-Muslim students could possibly benefit from classes on Islam, but only if they were to be offered a truthful, and not a sanitized view. It is clear that that is not being done today in German public schools, for Muslim pupils. Were teaching the real contents of Qur’an and hadith to be attempted, whether for Muslim or non-Muslim students, the uproar would be tremendous. So much effort is already being expended by politicians and the media to defend and promote Islam in Germany. Why would they now allow a truthful account of the faith to upset their propagandistic applecart? Private schools have more freedom from government watchdogs, and instruction that is islamocritical might actually be attempted in such places.