Islamic International School

The rise in Islamic evangelical organizations has resulted in mushrooming of Islamic International Schools all over the country.  Most prominent among these is IIS run by the IRF. These schools cater to the education of Muslim children whose parents want their children to be educated in an Islamic setting. These schools boast of being either under the process of affiliation to IGCSE or having an IGSCE affiliation. These Schools lure parents through promises of imparting education of formal subjects in accordance along with the Islamic perspective and reference. No wonder Muslim parents seeking the best education for their children fall for the promise of a globally recognised syllabus, without considering the long term consequences of such schools.

What I find surprising is the silence that the boards of education and the government of India have adopted on the issue. Perhaps, they   too are not farsighted enough to see the impact of segregated Islamic education on secularism. These schools will create a breed of ‘educated’ Muslims with no appreciation of other religions and secularism. (their allegiance would be to Cairo’s declaration of Human Rights) This in turn will pave the way for more fundamentalist breed of Muslim hardliners within a few generations. Combined with an active conversion program run by IRF the consequences of this can be devastating to secularism and religious tolerance if this trend continues unchecked.

It is really surprising to see that a man who has been banned in many countries for hate mongering and has been criticized for his views on evolution can openly run a school which boasts of being under the process of being affiliated to IGCSE, Cambridge University.  It is unfortunate that Sanal Edmaruku, a rationalist and promoter of scientific awareness has been charged with blasphemy and faces a possibility of three years of arrest for exposing a miracle while fraudsters and hatemongers like Dr Naik continues to be listed among most influential Muslims in the world, top spiritual gurus and most influential Muslims in India.

Clearly these schools will mislead its students into Islamic fundamentalism while dealing a blow to scientific education, creating a breed of Muslim with skewed perspective on secularism and science dressed in smart business suits, who will continue Dr Naik’s mission to mislead the gullible. This is in fact what the school state as its mission. In it’s ‘about us’ section the official IIS website states Dr Naik to be nurturing a dream of uplifting the ‘Generation Next’... to be multiple times more talented than him. That is an ominous statement and this certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of the society.