Tehran, September 07: Iran is planning to ‘Islamise’ humanities studies following complaints that Western teachings make students question religion and promote secular ideas.
“In our country a large part of the syllabus… is not in line with our Iranian-Islamic culture,” Hamid Reza Ayatollahi, the head of the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, said.
“This calls for a revision.”
The revision comes after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei criticized human sciences taught in the Iranian universities.
“If we teach a copy of what Westerners have said and written to our young people, then we are conveying to them both doubt and disbelief in Islamic principles and in our values,” he said during a meeting with academics last week.
“Most human sciences are based on materialistic philosophies that see the human being as an animal,” he said.
The humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition.
The science uses methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences.
Humanities cover ancient and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy, religion, visual and performing arts.
Additional subjects sometimes included in the humanities are technology, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and linguistics.
Purge
Several Iranian scholars also lashed out at universities promoting secular ideas, particularly the Tehran-based Islamic Azad University, accordingly.
“This university must once again be purified,” Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi said.
“This purification must occur at the management level and other levels.
“You see just how many who do not believe in religion, Islam and God have attended and graduated from this university.”
Iranian universities, which have nearly two million students, are a hotbed of political activism.
The universities suffered massive purges in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution during a three-year cultural revolution aimed at Islamising campuses and curricula.
Scores of lecturers were sacked and students ejected after being perceived to be leftist or liberal.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a purge of liberal and secular academic staff in 2006, a year that saw a number of lecturers forced into early retirement from leading universities.
More than 60 percent of Iran’s 70-million-strong population is aged under 30, and hundreds of thousands of young people poured on to the streets to protest against Ahmadinejad’s disputed June 12 re-election.
The protests, which have since subsided after a heavy crackdown by the authorities, have plunged Iran into its worst internal crisis in three decades.
-Agencies