ISLAMABAD, Dec 17: Education Minister Zubaida Jalal has said she is a fundamentalist, as she practices all the fundamentals of Islam.

Talking to reporters after the 19th medal award ceremony of the Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education here on Wednesday, the minister said, “I am a Muslim and a fundamentalist and cannot think of deleting Islamic concepts from the textbooks.”

She also dispelled the impression that the syllabus of Islamiyat had been changed under the US pressure and all the references to ‘Jihad’ were being deleted from the textbooks.

However, she differentiated between terrorism and Jehad and said Islam had nothing to do with terrorism.

The ceremony was organized to give awards to talented students, who secured top positions in the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) Examinations 2003.

Master Usman Khalid secured overall first position in SSC examination and Umar Azad and Umair Saeed secured first position in the HSSC examination.

Referring to the opposition of the Wafaqul Madaris Arabia over the government’s policy of streamlining Madaris by introducing subjects like English, Science and Mathematics in their curriculum, the minister said, their opposition was only political and not based on logic.

“We are ready to give them funds provided they inform us about their schemes. But, they are demanding funds to spend them at their own, which is not possible because the ministry is accountable and has to use justifiable use of the funds,” she said.

She said the federal government had recently released Rs6 billion to the Punjab government, which would be equally distributed among the districts for the upgradation of educational institutions.

She informed that she was leaving for Egypt to attend education conference of E-9 countries, where she would also visit and study system being adopted by the Al-Azhar University.

Earlier, speaking at the ceremony, she said the government had taken effective steps to make up leeway by enhancing allocations for education and focusing on promotion of scientific and higher education to catch up with the rapid progress being made by the advanced nations.

She said education had now been given a pronounced scientific and technological bias and all available resources were being effectively utilized for the development of infrastructure and facilities to make education more meaningful and compatible with requirements of the modern world.

She informed the audience that the syllabi from class 1 to 12 had been reviewed in depth and revamped while innovative changes have been introduced to meet the real needs of the nation.