Stand corrected. In the last minute my finger missed the right name.
Changes in History teaching in Pakistan:
There is increasing evidence that changes in history teaching in Pakistan were being matched with changes inside India after 1971. The western institution and think tanks ; probably are involved in this change in both countries. University of Nebraska had a program to change the curriculum of Afghanistan text books after 1980 to make Russians as enemies during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally AH Nayyar a Pakistani commentator said 'The fact of the matter is that jihad by sword came into not only Pakistani textbooks but Afghan textbooks as well, only because the US wanted it so. He said the task of putting jihad into textbooks in Afghanistan(and prob. Pakistan) was given to a University of Nebraska department in the Cold War years'. He said 'the same University of Nebraska entity has now been instructed by the President Bush's wife to take charge of getting jihad OUT of Pakistani(actually Afghan-corrected) textbooks.' At least one education program the U.S. did sponsor probably did little to break the culture of violence that envelops children here from an early age.
The Agency for International Development paid the University of Nebraska $50 million over eight years, from 1986 to 1994, to produce educational materials for Afghan primary- and secondary-school students. But texts on a range of subjects were highly politicized and often had a militaristic overtone, Tom Gouttierre, director of the university’s Center for Afghan Studies in Omaha, now concede. Some questions prodded students to tackle basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles. In addition to arming such groups for hitech jihad, the United States became directly involved in their indoctrination process. Between 1986 and 1992, USAID underwrote the printing of explicitly violent Islamist textbooks for elementary school children. The University of Nebraska, Omaha (UNO), oversaw this $50 million contract with the Education Center for Afghanistan (ECA), a group jointly appointed by the seven mujahideen organizations that the ISI and CIA had taken under their wing. With this money, the Peshawar-based ECA published a series of first- through sixth-grade textbooks whose recurrent theme was the promotion of Islam through violence. The education changes in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1980 may considered as social engineering projects and may be one of largest ever done in history. This social engineering resulted in a steady stream of Islamic jihad militants for the next 25 years that it has changed the world as never before. India has been the biggest targeted country due to the effects of this social engineering.
Taking rather a different tack than Dr.Seuss, these USAID-funded books instructed children that, in the Persian alphabet, Alif is for Allah, Jim is for Jihad, and Shin is for Shakir, adding that “Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes happy with the defeat of the Russians.” Third- and fifth grade books depicted automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and tanks. A fourth grade mathematics text noted that “the speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second,” and then asked students, If a Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.
One of the two official views of history also causes problems for the study of History in Pakistan. This view popularized by Dr Ahmad Dani locates Pakistan as part of a Central Asian historical and cultural entity, rather than within India/South Asia. In the first decade after Pakistan's independence, Pakistan considered its history to be part of a larger India's, a common history, a joint history, and in fact Indian textbooks were in use in the syllabus in Pakistan. However, this changed in the early 1960s when Ayub Khan's government wanted to create a 'History of Pakistan' independent and separate from that of India's. The historians who were given this task attempted to 'take out' Pakistan from Indian history and just look at Pakistan without India. This gave rise to the writing of a Pakistani history disassociated from an Indian past and links were established with Central Asia. All the association with the Indian history has been negated or totally omitted.
It is very clear, that in Pakistan, it is 'Muslim history' that is being taught, and not 'Indian history'. In fact, this Muslim history, as we argue above, is perceived to be a Pakistani history dating from 712 AD. This has major repercussions on what is taught and the way it is taught. For example, since there is a Muslim history and there are courses and subjects called 'The Freedom Movement' which looks at the struggle for an independent Pakistan - the seeds of which according to some historians were sown in 712 AD, but for others in 1857 - seems to overlook the colonial period entirely and treats the Freedom Struggle as a struggle from Hindu domination, not colonial rule.
In none of the curricula studied, did we find a single course on British India, or on colonialism; the period after 1857 is seen as the beginning of the Pakistan Movement and of the Freedom Struggle. From the 'Muslim' period, we move on to the 'Struggle for Pakistan'. In essence, the Freedom Movement is shown to be a movement for the freedom of Muslims in India, but not of India from colonialism. What is interesting, though not at all surprising, is that post-independence modern India, is not taught as part of the history syllabus in Pakistan. For that matter, nor is there a course on the history of modern Pakistan, since both of these countries in this era, are treated under politics.
Interestingly enough, teachers at the University of Karachi's international relations department said that as late as 1989, the term 'South Asia' was "banned" in the department, since it was considered too 'pro-India' and was thought to be a part of an India-centric thinking. South Asia as a subject was introduced only after a democratic government took over in 1988-89 after the death of General Ziaul Haq.
One objective of change in Pakistani text book is to create an benign Islamic political history of the Mogul period in the sub-continent so that there is no antipathy towards the Muslim culture and Muslim people by the non-Muslims in the sub-continent. For the Muslims when a Islamic political history is glorified and is a continuum of the larger pan Islamic history; it energizes the Muslim community and unifies them over any political/ethnic differences. Pakistan after 1971 was rocked by decussating by Baloch and Sindh and unrest. The change in the education was to bring a common Muslim history to bind the provinces. This process was a way for creation of a sub-continent Muslim ruling class accepted by all the people in the sub-continent in the long run. The assumption here is that non-Muslim population will loose their Hindu attributes and blend with the Muslims in the long run and accept their hegemony. For 30 years in its 55-year history, Pakistan has had governments that were run by the military or put into office and sustained by the military. It is not a matter of surprise that the government-textbook connection has developed into a military-textbook bond. This started in the 1970s when a former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, introduced a full two-year course on the ‘Fundamentals of War’ and ‘Defense of Pakistan’ for Class XI and XII respectively.
In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code. Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.
During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders. "I think we were perfectly happy to see these books trashing the Soviet Union," said Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID's Central Asia Task Force. AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.
In the ‘Fundamentals of War’ themes like objects and causes, conduct, nature, modern weapons, operations, ethics, war and modern warfare were thoroughly discussed. The ‘Defense of Pakistan’ dealt with Pakistan’s defense problems, economy and defense, foreign policy, military heritage, the role of its armed forces during peace and the qualities of military leadership. There was a military science group for intermediate students, which consisted of war, military history, economics of war, military geography, defense of Pakistan and special military studies as subjects.
General Ayub Khan abolished history from the school system, and got official textbooks prepared for history students at the university level. Between 1960 and 1980 the students read no history at all for the first 12 years of their studies.[ why from 1960 the year Indian movies were banned in Pakistan ] Instead, they were taught a newly invented subject called "Social Studies", which was an uneven and coarse amalgam of bits of civics, geography, religion, economics and history. During the 13th and 14th years (undergraduate period) they read a history book prepared by the government. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's regime did not make any change in this scheme.
