Break their minds while they're young: jihad's generational wedge, Part 1

In this series on the educational regression just imposed on Syria's children, we group these retrograde steps into categories and examine each in turn. In Part One, we examine the steps introduced to kill the imagination in all of Syria's children.

The Messenger of Allah said, “He who does not acquire knowledge with the sole intention of seeking the Pleasure of Allah but for worldly gain, will not smell the fragrance of Jannah on the Day of Resurrection” (Abu Dawud).

Hayat Tahrir al-Shams is not about to let that happen. The only unequivocally halal (permitted) science, unsurprisingly, is science pursued “for the pleasure of Allah”, and of course, nothing pleases Allah more than jihad, which is why Muslims have no problem accepting nuclear physicists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers and other similarly jihad-relevant bearers of knowledge.

Mosul Eye recalled the tense early days of ISIS rule on campus—and the debate over Shakespeare. ISIS wanted to ban the Bard. “One professor argued, that’s how we teach English,” Mosul Eye told me. “ISIS asked us, ‘But what could Shakespeare teach Muslims? He can’t teach them how to fight [in the cause of Allah].’”

While there are those Muslims who do their jobs with integrity, rather than use it as an opportunity to harm the kufaar—perfectly obvious, but apparently needing to be spelt out these days—a Muslim’s choice of job is no excuse to avoid “that which you do not like”, i.e., harming the kufaar, and many do respond to the call, including doctors. The same single-minded motivation behind a Muslim science intern stealing discarded centrifuges from a Western nuclear installation's dumpsters and smuggling them to his home country for their secret nuclear programme, lies behind a group of single-minded Muslims: learning to fly passenger jets specifically simulating only the route of their “martyrdom mission”; studying public health only to learn how to poison water supplies; studying computer science only to hack into networks for jihad; and assiduously extracting and collecting minute quantities of poison from otherwise harmless sources. It is all focused on the same singular objective of, “slay and be slain in the cause of Allah.” Hayat Tahrir al-Shams is not about to let the next generation of good martyrs go to waste.

Measures against the imagination

1. "The story is fictional (replacement)"
2. "Khawla bint Al-Azwar is a fictional character"
3. "Delete Zenobia"

Two types of learning that many of my students in China hated were role-play and hypothesising. They disparaged these as "daydreaming" and so a waste of time, clearly drummed into them from their earliest years. In Morocco, my students did not complain about role-playing, "but please, professor, not animals." However, they were upset enough to descend en mass on the Director's office to complain that: "She wants us to read books." This was a serious enough charge that the Director summoned me for a no-uncertain-terms dressing down. I was no longer to require my students to read books. All these students eventually graduated and are now, no doubt, productive members of their respective societies.

On 11 December 2024, The Kandari Chronicles attempted to answer the question: "Why Don't Arabs Read?" in an episode titled THE ARAB READING CRISIS. Reading and the imagination are inextricably entwined, as every Western parent reading his or her toddler to sleep well knows. It is not something that Arab Muslim parents know, as Kandari delicately explains, far too delicately, in my view, to get to the bottom of the problem.

[By] the mid 20th century, ...the written word, be it fiction or nonfiction, started to take off. Gradually, one new nation after another started to see its authors, researchers and poets express and document in written form. But one key factor to take note of was that the Arabic written form had no heritage.

Of course, from earlier in the century, the professional classes had access to newspapers, but such written heritage as there was went back only as far as the introduction of the printing press into the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the 15th century (Jewish refugees from Iberia printing in Hebrew) and towards the end of the 18th century (French occupation of Egypt bringing the printing press to Arabs). Today, if a household had a book at all, it would be the Qur'an. The Qur'an is never read in the sense that a Christian might read the Gospels or a Jew might read the Torah. It is recited, even if the words on the page are followed. In order to "read" the Qur'an, therefore, literacy is not required, hence the extremely high social value placed on the ability to recite the entire Qur'an from memory. Note, therefore, that someone could vocalise the Qur'an cover to cover without a single thought passing through their mind. 1.5 billion people on earth have minds made for this.

Yes, there was One Thousand and One Nights, but this was not read to children. Even where they were told, they were not told by parents to children as they drifted off to sleep. Even the classic Kelileh o Demneh, the Persian translation of the ancient Sanskrit Panchatantra, did not survive Islamic moral censorship upon its translation into the Arabic Kalīla wa-Dimna, many story endings changed to make them Islamically acceptable.

"Why don't Arabs read?" asks Kandari. He begins with the dismal statistics, here abridged:

The most fundamental of all reasons is illiteracy. The Arab world still suffers from this condition. And if we talk averages, then as of 2023, the Arab world has only achieved a literacy rate of 76%, whereas the comparable for Europe stands at 99%, and Southeast Asia at 95%. The 2011 Report on Cultural Development, by the Arab Thought Foundation, translated the numbers of books read by populations around the world into time. Arabs read for six minutes per year, while Europeans, 200 hours annually. The fact of the matter is that Arabs still don't read. We don't see them consuming books. There are minimal bookshops, people reading around us, libraries that enjoy constant and recurring visits by readers.

The most compelling sense of this cultural poverty comes from the intangibles:

Things get a little complicated when we leave the world of facts and dive into the behavioural reasons or cultural phenomena that don't allow for the engagement of Arabs with books. Beyond in the practice of faith, or in the pursuit of an education, reading is not really encouraged. And I'd like to illustrate these sequential interactions with reading that Arabs experience throughout their lives.

From a very early age, Arab children aren't read to. They don't own the early positive, inspirational, and formative memories when their parents read to them, reading experiences that could ideally establish real connections between the act of reading and the exercising of one's imagination, and the stirring of emotions that subsequently take place.

Every word in the Qur'an is true. "This is the book about which there is no doubt," (Qur'an 2:2). It is safe to read the Qur'an, and it is a safety not to be put a risk by reflecting on it, let alone by asking questions. Both the Gospels and the Torah are corrupted. They contain lies and are therefore to be kept well away from lest they corrupt the one who gets too close. Everything that can be known, therefore, falls into one of two discrete categories: Truth; and Lies. There is nothing else.

This is why the Muslim mind has such difficulty with hypothesising, with role-play and with fiction. None of these are the truth, therefore they are all lies. A mind accustomed to navigating the subtleties of fiction, demonstrating a well-developed imagination, has no problem reading facts interspersed with flights of fancy. It does not fear untethering itself from the facts. This is the faculty that Islam fears most, for it makes the Gospels, the Torah, the Vedas, the Mahabharata, the Tripitaka, etc., interesting, rather than threatening.

As a matter of urgency, Syria's children have to be rescued from such corruption. Whatever imagination they may have developed up to this point, despite their parents never reading to them, must be expunged. Only that way can the children be saved and made ready for Islam. Hence the removal of: a fictional story; a character of legend, Khawla bint Al-Azwar (even if feminists think she's great); and Zenobia, the real, historical Queen of Palmyra, but a pagan nonetheless. With their imaginations shut down, these children will be made ready to respond to their future orders to kill with "We hear and we obey," (Qur'an 24:51).

Part 2/...

Picture credits:

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-836049

Screenshot from jihad video

Comments:

On 5 January 2025 at 14:50, Peloni wrote:

Dear Anjuli,

I wanted to write you to share my strong appreciation for your work and the very important piece which you most recently published.  I shared this article with our readers today, and I am anxiously awaiting part 2.

Take care,
Peloni
Co-editor
Israpundit.org

Pandavar provides an important explanation of how the simplest of people are actually transformed into carrying out the savagery such as was conducted on October 7, or that was perpetrated a century earlier during the Hebron Massacre, where friends and neighbors seamlessly went from being innocuous acquaintances to being, well, members of a butchering horde. Indeed, as we hear daily about the need of denazification of the Jihadi mind which has been baked into and marbleized within the Pal consciousness, we have to appreciate the whole of society approach which has weaponized the individual Pal into a collective conglomerate whose only purpose and whose greatest achievement is to conduct Jihad against the infidels who believe that they can be reformed.  Murdering and subjugating the infidel is not just an objective, but it is their highest passion, which explains the ease by which neighbors and friends of the victims of Jihad, such as those of the Hebron Massacre as well as those of October 7, were so easily transformed from being benign neighbors and friends of these innocent victims to being their executioners.

On 5 January 2025 at 14:59, Anjuli Pandavar wrote:

Hi Peloni,

Thank you very much for your kind words and endorsement. I appreciate it.

It's going to be a nightmare series. Definitely not for the squeamish.

Happy New Year,
Anjuli