In the Islamic world Jahiliya is a place of ignorance, before the coming of Islamic in Arabia. This is how the text books in Pakistan are portraying their thousands of years of Hindu/Buddhist past. What does it do to the future of education?
According to V.S. Naipaul, “History, in the Pakistan schoolbooks I looked at, begins with Arabia and Islam. In the Islamic texts, survey of the Prophet and the first four Caliphs and perhaps the Prophet’s daughter are followed with hardly a beak, by live of the poet Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, the political founder of Pakistan, and two or three “martyrs” soldiers or airmen who dies in the holy wars against India in 1965 and 1971….
History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before Mohammed there is a blackness: slavery, exploitation. After Mohammed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish. But did it? How can that be said or taught? What about all those slaves sent back from Sind to the Caliph? What about the descendants of the African slaves who walk about Karachi? There is no adequate answer: so the faith begins to nullify or overlay the real world.” (Naipaul, p, 143).
V.S. Naipaul (1982) Among The Believers. Vintage Books, N.Y.
