Can President Sisi Initiate an Islamic Enlightenment?

The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, caused a stir last year by publicly denouncing radical Islam and calling for religious reform. As important as his words may be, writes Samuel Tadros, they will amount to little unless they are followed by changes in policy—and such changes should begin with the schools:

Egypt’s current educational system is an incubator for extremism and radicalization. This radicalization includes increasing intolerance toward non-Muslims and hostility toward the outside world. . . . Values of equality, peace, respect for other opinions, and citizenship must [therefore] be stressed throughout the curriculum. The curriculum should stress that diversity is not only natural but also plays a positive role in a nation’s progress.

The subject of history is an area that needs the most immediate attention. The texts taught in Egyptian schools need to introduce world history—the history of ideas and world religions and cultures. As things stand, students graduate with no knowledge of important world-historical events, with the outside world and its cultures . . . an enigma to them. No information is given on any impact the world, its cultures, and [its] civilizations have had on Egypt beyond colonialism. The void is filled by Islamists, who stuff impressionable minds with falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Even in studying their own history, students are unaware of the contributions Christians, Jews, and women have made to Egyptian society, making them unable to properly understand the richness of their own heritage. As it now stands, Jews are completely whitewashed from the history curriculum, despite a large Egyptian Jewish community having thrived there in the not-so-distant past.

Read more at American Interest

More about: Education, Egypt, Moderate Islam, Radical Islam, Religion & Holidays

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society