http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram
Their most recent activity involves abducting an entire school of over 200 Nigerian girls, holding them and converting them to Islam against their will, and threatening to sell them into slavery and arranged marriages.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-27342757
Let's make it clear. This is a vile and disgusting act. But so, it seems, is everything that Boko Haram does, and all that it stands for.
Here I'm not tackling Boko Haram's obvious heinous crimes of murder, abduction, terrorism and kidnapping but just trying to get inside their mindset and see where the urge to end "western education" comes from. Even upon cursory examination, the assertion that "Western education is bad" faces a couple of significant challenges:
Firstly to define exactly what Western education is. Since, if you can't define it, you can't qualify it either way, good or bad. The problem is, it's almost impossible to come up with a model that exactly represents "Western" education. There are as many curricula in the Western world as there are Western countries and as many teaching styles as there are teachers.
Just in the UK alone, we have public schools, private schools, Church Of England (Anglican / Protestant) schools, Catholic schools, Muslim schools, and (unfortunately) faith schools, all with their own ideas of what to teach. There really seems to be little commonality between teaching methods or subjects and any approximation which may match certain types of education would be way off for others. Pupils even have some sort of choice of what to learn even at secondary school. And all this is before you even go into further education, which some choose to go into, whilst others do not. There is no "right answer" here - stopping education after secondary school is everyone's right and choice.
To claim that there is some sort of "standard" Western education is ridiculous - the whole experience very much depends on where you go and, as a pupil, how much effort, or not, you put in. It's clear as day - there is no such thing as "Western education" - it's just education full stop. Even in Japan (that country famed for being in the East) they teach their kids about literature, history and science you know. So we're left with the firm conclusion that in fact, what Boko Haram want is no education at all. But of course they like to give their cause legitimacy, by trotting out the lazy fallacy of "The West is bad". That tedious meme again.
Secondly, Boko Haram must explain what type of education they intend to replace it with, which is not "Haram". I assume this would Islamic studies. Reading the Koran and Hadith. This is about akin to using the Bible as your everyday guide to life. It's no solution.
The feelings that motivate Boko Haram are the same misplaced "anti-Western" sentiment as I described in a recent post. The Islamists are falling are falling into the trap of assuming "The West" is a single, homologous entity where all parties are aligned, all agree and there are no dissenting voices. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
In my view, Islamic apologists like Karen Armstrong (a "Westerner" to spite the logic that we're all united in anti-Islam) have something to answer for in providing legitimacy for Boko Haram. These apologists support the notion that Muhammad should be a role model (and he took Aisha as his bride when she was really young, like 9 I think). By extension, of course, it's OK to take little girls from school and sell them to bitter old men as toys, since we all need to be like Muhammad. Aisha didn't need an education, and so why should these girls be any better? In the book "Does God Hate Women?" Benson and Stangroom provide an effective remedy to Armstrong's all-too-friendly apologetics.
The very existence of leftist newspapers like The Guardian flies in the face of the "The West Is One" argument, as these journals and journalists clearly have no allegiance or love for their right-leaning government. The intra-national internal fight against the pro-right haters of "multiculturalism" is alive and well.
Some, mostly leaning toward the right, would say that certain non-Western countries need to get over their victimhood complexes, and start sorting out their governments and infrastructure.
Whilst I wouldn't go that far, it's clear there is a balance between national responsibility for building the country they want to live in, and Western aid in development. And before you jump the gun, remember that it's all too easy for leftists to accuse any notions of "on-site aid" as it were, of being "imperialistic" and "a return to colonialism". So this is not a problem with simple answers.
This is the "rock and the hard place" Africa seems stuck between - its own internal strife, no doubt with deep roots in the abuses of the past meted out by the West, and fear of asking for help from countries who can't entirely absolve themselves from responsibility for their current plight. When we are asked for help, we must oblige.
The next blog was originally planned for another section of this post but became so long that I decided to make it an entire separate post!
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