A new institute in Iraq that aims to change the country’s discourse toward religious minorities through educational programs for Muslim students and clerics has published its first curricula.
The Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity, the first of its kind in Iraq and the Middle East, was established nearly a year ago by Masarat, a Baghdad-based nonprofit nongovernmental organization that focuses on minorities, collective memory studies and interfaith dialogue, in cooperation with a number of universities and civil-rights groups.
The new curricula are a series of textbooks on non-Muslim minority faiths, which include Mandaeanism, Yazidism, Judaism and Christianity, that will be used in a new course that was taught for the first time this year. All of the curricula were designed by experts, academics and leaders within the groups they describe.
Initially, the focus will be on teaching students of Islamic seminaries (both Sunni and Shia) in traditional religious institutions and students of Islamic sciences faculties at some of Iraq’s public universities. There are plans to expand the course to media and journalism students, too.
The institute hopes that better understanding of different religions in Iraq will influence the rhetoric of Muslim clergymen and the wider Islamic discourse and prejudices regarding religious diversity, and help to combat radicalism and hate speech in the country.
“The idea is to prevent the preferential treatment of one particular religion as the ʹbestʹ or the ʹdominantʹ faith over others and actively work against the introduction of religious monopolies,” said Saad Salloum, Masarat’s general coordinator for cultural and media development and a political scientist at Mustansiriyah University, in Baghdad. (See a related article, “Iraqi Champion of Diversity, in a Discouraging Time.”)
“For the first time in our contemporary history, we are offering a Yazidi curriculum authored by a Yazidi expert who spent three decades collecting and documenting his people’s oral traditions,” said Salloum. “Moreover, we started to teach the beliefs of more modern officially unrecognized religions, such as the Baha’i faith and Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion recently revived in Iraqi Kurdistan after centuries of disappearance.”
In Their Own Words
For leaders of the minority groups, the institute’s new course provides a platform to combat stereotypes and misunderstandings that have caused their believers much suffering in the Middle East.
Qais Al Saadi, the author of the Mandaean curriculum, said most of the discrimination his religion has been subjected to “results from wrong reporting on it,” the writings of “authors who never asked us about our religion or life experience,” and Mandaeans’ “not writing about ourselves.”
“In order to reverse this,” said al-Saadi, a former education professor at Baghdad University who is now based in Germany, “I found, as a Mandaean, that I have a duty to present a textbook explaining the basic aspects that will help the reader get a clear image of this religion’s history and belief, and its followers as they are.”
Khalil Jundi, the author of the curriculum on Yazidism, was enthusiastic about the chance to teach Iraqi students about a religious group that survived the Islamic State’s attempt to eradicate it. Jundi, an expert on Yazidi affairs, is Iraq’s top diplomat in the Philippines, and taught his curriculum remotely from there.
“Teaching Muslim clerics about Yazidism will liberate the minds of new generations,” said Jundi.
His textbook, Jundi says, counters stereotypes about the Yazidi people and their religion by explaining some of their doctrinal and cultural topics. “It is an internal Yazidi narration combatting and correcting the distorted, unjust narration created by some Iraqi and Egyptian historians,” he wrote in his book’s introduction. “The old narration dominated by Arab nationalism and religious extremism created a disfigured image of the Yazidis in the Arabic and Islamic culture.”
Iraq’s dwindling Christian community is also represented among the new curricula. After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the number of Christians in Iraq dropped by 83 percent, from around 1.5 million to just 250,000. In 2014, 125,000 more Christians were displaced from their historical homelands in the Nineveh Plains and Mosul.
The textbook on Christianity “is an attempt to shed light on the Christian faith in a contemporary simple and understandable style, avoiding the complex philosophical expressions and old terminologies,” wrote Cardinal Louis Raphael I Sako, the Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church and the curriculum’s author.
“Teaching Christianity and other religions to Muslims will contribute to the confrontation of sectarianism and ignorance of the ‘other,’” he added.
