NEW YORK, Jan 22: US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday advised the Arab and other Muslim governments to broaden the curricula of madressahs, avoid teaching hatred, saying they should impart skills besides teaching "science and maths."
"We have been talking not only to the Saudis but to other Middle Eastern leaders and Muslim leaders around the world, and made it clear to them that Islam is a great religion," Mr Powell said in an interview with a Philadelphia-based radio station.
In some of these schools, children are being taught to hate, thereby hurting peace efforts in the region and also not helping their own societies, Mr Powell said. "But they also have to be educating their youngsters not just in the tenets of Islam and the Islamic religion, but they have to educate their youngsters for the demands of the 21st century," Mr Powell said.
"They have got to give them skills. They have got to teach them to read and write," Mr Powell said. "They have got to teach them science and math and all the other things that are necessary for societies to be successful in the 21st century."
Mr Powell said" "if they are just going to take their young people and put them in these madressahs, these schools that do nothing but indoctrinate them in the worst aspects of a religion, then they are shorting themselves, they are leaving themselves back as well as teaching hatred that will not help us bring peace to the region, and will not help their societies."
Mr Powell said the Bush administration had made it clear to Saudi Arabia that the 21st century is going to require changes in their society. "But we do it as friends, and we don't do it to beat them up or lecture them," Mr Powell said.
The US needs Saudi Arabia, but "there are certain policies they have that we are not happy with," he said. The US would work through several programmes, including one introduced on Monday by President George W. Bush, to convince leaders in the Muslim world that the education currently provided by many madressahs is incomplete and damaging to security, AFP quoted Mr Powell as saying.
