(Photo: A crucifix in a Rome classroom, 3 Nov 2009/Tony Gentile)

Here’s an update from Phil Pullella in Rome:

The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday that crucifixes should be removed from Italian classrooms, prompting Vatican anger and sparking uproar in Italy, where such icons are embedded in the national psyche.

“The ruling of the European court was received in the Vatican with shock and sadness,” said Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, adding that it was “wrong and myopic” to try to exclude a symbol of charity from education.

The ruling by the court in Strasbourg, which Italy said it would appeal, said crucifixes on school walls — a common sight that is part of every Italian’s life — could disturb children who were not Christians.

“This is an abhorrent ruling,” said Rocco Buttiglione, a former culture minister who helped write papal encyclicals. “It must be rejected with firmness. Italy has its culture, its traditions and its history. Those who come among us must understand and accept this culture and this history.”

The Vatican spokesman said it was sad that the crucifix could be considered a symbol of division and said religion offered a vital contribution to the moral formation of people. Members of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government bristled, weighing in with words such as “shameful,” “offensive,” “absurd,” “unacceptable,” and “pagan.”

Read the full story here.

Here is our earlier item from Strasbourg on the ruling:
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled on Tuesday that Italian schools should remove crucifixes from classroom walls, saying their presence could disturb children who were not Christians. The decision is likely to provoke a controversy in Italy, which is deeply attached to its Roman Catholic roots.

(Photo: Parents in Ofena campaign to keep crucifix in Italian schools, 29 Oct 2003/Alessandro Bianchi)

The case was brought by an Italian national, Soile Lautsi, who complained that her children had to attend a public school in northern Italy which had crucifixes in every room. Lautsi said this ran counter to her right to give her children a secular education and the Strasbourg-based court ruled in her favour.

“The presence of the crucifix … could be encouraging for religious pupils, but also disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists, particularly if they belonged to religious minorities,” the court said in a written ruling.

Read the whole story here. Click here for the full ruling (in French).

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A senior Saudi cleric said religious scholars should vet the curriculum at the kingdom’s only co-educational university, meant to be a beacon of science, to prevent “alien ideologies” such as evolution.

(Photo: King Abdulla at KAUST opening, 23 Sept 2009/Susan Baaghil)

King Abdullah’s University of Science and Technology (KAUST), designed to produce Saudi scientists, is the only educational institution in the kingdom where men and women can mix. It is located near a Red Sea village away from the clutches of religious police and opened on September 23.

“The recommendation is to set up sharia committees at this university to oversee these studies and look into what violates the sharia (Islamic law),” Sheikh Saad al-Shithri, a member of a panel of top scholars, was quoted by al-Watan newspaper.

“We are looking at some of the sciences that have included some irregular and alien ideologies, like evolution and such other ideologies,” said Shithri, who is one of several clerics who objected to co-education at the university.

Read the whole story here.

What do you think about this? Can a new university for science and technology not teach evolution?

With 2009 being Darwin Year, we’ve had quite a few blog posts on evolution recently. Here’s a selection:

• Evolution book takes aim at “Intelligent Design”
• Texas reaches evolution compromise: who won, who lost?
• Anti-Darwin speaker gagged at Vatican evolution conference
• Just before Darwin day, Pew reviews faith and evolution in U.S.
• Evolution gets added boost in Texas schools
• Cardinal Schönborn links financial crisis to evolutionism
• Can policymakers use Darwin’s insights? New twist on old debate
• Vatican sees “urgent” need to review Darwin and evolution
• Harun Yahya preaches Islam, slams Darwin and awaits Jesus
• Pope Benedict’s evolution book finally comes out in English

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(Photo:KAUST under construction near Jeddah, 19 Oct 2008/Asma Alsharif)

Saudi Arabia is launching its first co-educational high-tech university, but unless clerical influence is removed the state education system will not move into the modern age, analysts say.  King Abdullah has invited heads of state, business leaders and Nobel laureates next week to the opening of a technology university which has attracted top scientists and is meant to produce Saudi scientists and engineers.

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is the first institute in one of the world’s biggest oil exporters that is outside the reach of the education ministry, where clerics opposing cutting religious content have a strong say. Men and women will be able to mingle, a stark contrast to otherwise strict gender segregation in the Islamic kingdom.

Despite its immense financial resources, the parameters of Saudi school and university education are governed by religious strictures and many subjects are off-limits for women to study.

While KAUST enjoys almost unlimited funds, sophisticated equipment and is run by an independent board, most Saudi schools and universities have curriculums still dominated by religion, despite reform efforts begun after the September 11 attacks of 2001.

Read the whole story here.

See also Saudi Comedy Enters the Debate Over Education Reform.

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By Niluksi Koswanage

Gay Austrian fashionista Bruno will not be making an appearance on Malaysia's screens this summer for fear of corrupting this mostly-Muslim nation's youth.

But Malaysia's parents will still not have it easy as the country's opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim  is again on trial for sodomy in a re-run of a 14-month case that in 1998 generated endless sexually explicit headlines and questions from curious children.

Photo: Anwar enters Kuala Lumpur courtoom with wife Wan Aziza Wasn Ismail for his sodomy trial on July 15/ Reuters (Zainal Abd Halim)

I was a teenager then when the former deputy prime minister was first found guilty of
sodomy and corruption in a marathon trial that featured graphic descriptions of anal
penetration, faithfully reported in lurid detail by this country's government-owned press and on prime-time TV.

(Photo: Anwar arrives in court on July 15, Reuters/

On my way to school, I saw angry protesters take to the streets and heard parents and teachers raging about children getting exposed to gay and straight sex (Anwar was accused of having an affair with a woman as well), accompanied by the kind of graphic descriptions usually reserved for specialist magazines.
 
A columnist in the normally staid government-run New Straits Times suggested at the time that all Malaysians should study a book to be entitled "An intelligent parent's guide to sodomy and other painful issues," based on the explicit testimony of Anwar's former driver who said he had been assaulted by Anwar and his adopted brother. Needless to say, he lost his column.
   
These were pre-YouTube days where sexual images were only available on illicit video recordings  and imported magazines. At the time, it was impossible to ignore the headlines as pro-government newspapers sought to tarnish Anwar's image.

One of the many ironies of the case was that Anwar, a pious Muslim, had been an education minister who had fervently opposed sex education in schools on moral grounds.  And blushing teachers often skipped or skimmed over the reproductive system in classes.

But with the trial, a generation of school kids were confronted with a court parade of x-rated items from a semen-stained mattress, medical reports on anal tearing to pubic hair samples.

Malay-language newspapers had to invent new words to decribe sex acts and body parts as Arabic loan words were inadequate to explain everything. Slang Bahasa Malaysia words like "pondan", a derogatory word for homosexual entered the formal lexicon via the courts and media.

The uncovering of Anwar's alleged sexual crimes in court and in the media was seen by many as a demonisation of a popular Malay politician in a leadership struggle during the Asian financial crisis that rocked Malaysia.

Despite the press palaver, there was no real crackdown on homosexuals during the trial, apart from the Muslim morality police occasionally raiding private gay parties in hotels. They still do that but you can more likely be arrested by the religious police for being in "khalwat" or "close proximity" to a person of the opposite sex.  

What 1998 did bring was protest. For the first time in a country that has now been ruled by the same political party for 51 years, many university students and young professionals took part in daily demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands.

It also gave birth to Malaysia's political alternative media that have grown into the main source of news in a country where the printed press is heavily controlled. Websites like Malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) got their first breath of life. A widely read Reformasi (reform) diary (a precursor to the blog), which detailed the movement started by Anwar, made its rounds in cyberspace and Malaysian gay websites saw their best business in years with chatrooms like GayMalaysia and SayangAbang (darling brother) filled with inquisitive onlookers. 
  
If there were long lines to get into the courthouse to witness the downfall of one of the country's best-known political figures, there were also long queues of straight patrons trying to get a feel of the drum and bass-thumping gay clubs like Liquid Room and the Blue Boy in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

The clubs, like Anwar, are still around today.
   
One young gay reporter even told Time Magazine his sex life had sizzled in 1998 as many people wanted to experiment, inspired by the trial.
   
Will the trial shock as much this time round or are Malaysians just too exposed to sex through MTV, YouTube and MySpace and numerous blogs?

More than 10 years on and two prime ministers later, Malaysia's conservatism appears to have grown deeper. Its rising political force is an Islamist party, one of Anwar's staunchest allies.

Will the new trial and publicity damage Anwar or the government? Finally released from imprisonment in 2004 and after a bar on holding office ended, the 61-year old was catapulted back into parliament in 2008 by-election with a huge majority, so it seems not.

Austrian politicians and media are in uproar over a recent survey that said a fifth of all Islamic religious education teachers here hold anti-democratic views.

In the survey of 210 teachers, conducted as part of a PhD thesis, 21.9 percent agreed with the following statement: “I oppose democracy because it is not compatible with Islam.”

The public debate has worn on without asking a few crucial questions, such as how representative these findings are, how thorough the survey was and whether the questions steered the answers.

(Photo: A Muslim woman and a far-right election poster saying “Now it’s about us Austrians” in Vienna, 18 Sept 2008/Dominic Ebenbichler)

Instead, only days after the survey appeared in the weekly magazine Falter, the education ministry unveiled a five-point programme to be implemented by the Islamic Community overseeing the teaching of Islam.

Children in Austria can choose to study their own religion at school. Lessons are funded by the state and, until now, teachers were not required to have any formal education. Now, among other measures, Islamic religion teachers will have to sign a contract stating their adherence to democracy, human rights and the Austrian constitution.

“No teacher- in any subject, and of any religion — should express undemocratic opinions in Austria’s schools or disdain our constitution,” said Education Minister Claudia Schmied of the Social Democrats.

Members of Austria’s far right Freedom Party, which scored 17.5 percent in the Sept. 2008 elections, extrapolated the findings to the Muslim community at large. “For years, (politicians) have looked away and acted as if there were no problems with the integration of Muslims,” they said. “It is high time that the Social Democrats wake up out of their multicultural dreams.”

The author of the survey, Islam expert Mouhanad Khorchide, 37, said he had feared his findings could be misused by the far-right and Austria’s estimated 400,000 Muslims. The Palestinian-born Austrian citizen  held back from publishing them until after the elections, in which the far right nevertheless garnered a record 28 percent of the vote.

(Photo: Muslims protesters pray outside Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, 10 Feb 2006/stringer)

Khorchide said those saying Islam was incompatible with democracy were often older Islamic religion teachers, many of whom came from countries in the Middle East without established democratic traditions.

In a previous survey in 2007, he found that 97 percent young Muslims between 16-26 years of age in Austria felt that democracy and Islam were compatible. “This shows there is a change in attitude over the generations, younger people think differently, which is actually positive” he said.

Austria’s Greens party has criticised the government for not extending their new plan to teachers of other religions. A question like that raises another one, i.e. how many Austrians overall are dissatisfied with democracy and national institutions if so many vote for far-right parties?

Former British diplomat Henry Hogger was in Vienna this week to discuss two recent Gallup polls debunking some common misconceptions about Muslim communities. One main finding was that the generally higher religiosity of Muslims did not imply a weaker sense of national identity.  On the contrary, about two-thirds of Muslims in London said they had confidence in the British government, for example, compared with just 36% of the British public overall.

Hogger pointed out that the formulation of the statement in the survey of Austria’s Islamic teachers could have been misleading – arguably, it already suggests that Islam is not compatible with democracy, something many Muslims might disagree with.

Social and religious conservatives in Texas suffered a setback on Thursday when the State Board of Education narrowly voted to ditch a requirement that high school science teachers cover the “strengths and weaknesses” of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is more popularly known as the theory of evolution.

A final vote on the entire science curriculum is expected today. You can see reports here and here.

The rule to teach “both sides of the evolution debate” had been in place since the 1980s, but national interest has been rekindled in recent years by attempts to get Biblical creationism taught in U.S. schools in one form of another.

Proponents of intelligent design — which holds that life is so complex that it must have had an ultimate creator — have suffered a number of setbacks.

Some in the pro-evolution crowd — which includes just about all of the mainstream science community in the United States — contend that introducing “flaws” or ”criticism” of the theory of natural selection is a smokescreen for creationists who can claim that just discussing “doubt” does not in itself signal the promotion of a religious agenda.

Many in the scientific community say there is little doubt on this score or at least the kind of doubt suggested by the proponents of creationism and intelligent design.

The Dallas Morning News on Thursday quoted Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, as saying that: “There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.”

What do you think? Is the Texas school board living up to President Barack Obama’s pledge this week “to restore science to its rightful place?”

(Photo: The new Charles Darwin postage stamp, issued by Britian’s Royal Mail to commemorate his 200th birthday this year and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work. REUTERS/Royal Mail, 29 Dec 2008)

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is one of the Catholic Church’s most vocal critics of what he calls evolutionism, which he defines as an ideology that applies Darwin’s theory of natural selection to a wide variety of questions beyond biology. He usually directs his criticism at scientists and philosophers who say evolution proves that God does not exist.

(Photo: Cardinal Schönborn, 16 March 2007/Leonhard Foege)

In an interview with the Austrian provincial newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten on Jan. 5, Schönborn, a former student and close associate of Pope Benedict, said his criticism also applied to the current financial crisis:

Q, One of your favourite topics is evolution and creation. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to devote yourself to more practical things than those that cannot be proven anyway?

A. Look at the current economic crisis. The question of evolutionism and the economic crisis are very closely linked. What we can call the ideological Darwinist concept that the stronger survives has led to the economic situation we’re in today. I think that if education only focuses on making young people fit for the rat race and doesn’t teach them the great human values that society needs, it’s because it’s based on an image of humanity linked to ideological evolutionism. So it has very, very practical consequences.

Q. Where is this discussion leading and what can emerge at the end of it?

A. We can’t say, but (scientific) research continues. Very successful, very exciting. On the one hand, it certainly is going very strongly in the direction that says all life can really be proved to be linked together. In this respect, the scientific theory of evolution is, of course, supported and carried by very strong arguments.

(Photo:Staff at Lehman Brothers in London, 11 Sept 2008/Kevin Coombs)

On the other hand, one must clearly highlight the distinctive qualities of humans, their dignity and their intellectual abilities and responsibility in the face of reductive thinking that understands them in a materialistic way or as just a product of evolution. That is certainly insufficient.

The interview is here in German (registration required) and a summary (open access) in the Vienna daily Die Presse is here.

It’s already been a big theme in Germany, France, Turkey and the Netherlands, and now the Austrian far right is asking: Should public employees be allowed to wear Muslim headscarves at work?

Two women have become the first schoolteachers in Vienna to wear headscarves while teaching.

One is also a local centre-left Social Democrat politician.

Teachers in other parts of the country already wear headscarves, and there is no law banning public employees from wearing such items as there is in some other European countries.  

But the two women have now found themselves featured on the front page of the Austrian daily Oesterreich and have drawn criticism from the resurgent far right, which won a combined one-third of the vote in a parliamentary election several weeks ago.

“Headscarves are a symbol of Islamism and female oppression. They have no place in Austria,” says Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the far-right Freedom Party, which has now become Austria’s third most powerful.

The director of the state schools in that part of Vienna fully supports the women — one-third of the school children come from Turkish families so the women “break down linguistic and cultural barriers”, she says.

But some feel a division between religion and state is more important.

“Something that would be unthinkable in Turkey is a reality in red (left-leaning) Vienna,” says Martin Strutz, the general secretary of the right-wing Alliance for Austria’s Future.

“The (Vienna) Social Democrats don’t value the separation between church and state any more,” he adds, calling for a complete ban on headscarves and veils in public office.

While Freedom and Alliance call for symbols of Islam to be removed from state schools, they do not seem to object to symbols of Christianity in Austria, which is predominantly Roman Catholic.

The ban on religious symbols in France, on the other hand, covers all faiths in a strict separation of religion and state. The arguments to uphold the ban there also focused more on women’s rights, rather than equating the veil with Islamism.

By targeting Muslims specifically and raising fears about Islam, the Austrian far-right parties can touch on the kind of themes that helped them win so many votes in September 

Whenever God is mentioned in connection with human rights, the idea is usually that there are “God-given rights” bestowed on humans.

Nepal’s Supreme Court has turned this around by bestowing basic human rights such as education and healthcare on gods. Goddesses, to be more precise. It seems that kumaris , virgin girls venerated as “living goddesses” and confined to Buddhist temples until puberty, return to their families as teenagers unprepared for real life. Critics of the tradition filed a suit that led to the Supreme Court decision.

“A directive order has been issued to the government to provide basic human rights, including education and health (care) to the child,” Supreme Court spokesman Hemanta Rawal said. “This means the child’s rights can’t be violated in the name of culture.”

Read Gopal Sharma’s story from Kathmandu here.

There was some speculation before his visit that Pope Benedict was going to read the riot act to Catholic educators for not keeping their universities and schools sufficiently Catholic. That was never really on the cards, because Benedict doesn’t like to come and berate people like that.

Also, the situation is complex, reflecting changes in the overall Catholic population and in Catholic academe. Reading the riot act would not have been very effective, anyway, because Benedict doesn’t really have the power to enforce changes in individual U.S. Catholic universities.

Instead, he opted for an approach that was actually more challenging to the Catholic educators than sitting through an outright rebuke would have been. He outlined a whole philosophy of what Catholic education should be and challenged them to live up to its ambitious goals. It was a counter-cultural message, one that sounds quite strange in such an individualistic society like America. He defended academic freedom, but freedom as the Church defines it — the freedom to follow the truth of Catholic doctrine. Freedom in this view is not simply “freedom from…” It’s “freedom to…” It’s not some free-standing concept (as modern society might see it) but a concept with a purpose.

“Divergence from this vision weakens Catholic identity and, far from advancing freedom, inevitably leads to confusion, whether moral, intellectual or spiritual,” he said at Catholic University of America in Washington.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne looked at the wider implications in his article “Disquieting Words for the Faithful.” As he wrote, “Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing. Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications … This is the thinking of a communitarian counseling against radical individualism.”

Here’s our news story on the education speech and the full text.

In the Washington Post, the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, read between the lines and noted that the pope did not call for universities to dismiss theologians who disagree with church teachings. “At the same time, he says freedom can be abused by people who don’t teach the truth or who don’t teach Catholic teachings,” Reese said. “In a sense, he’s exercising his own academic freedom to criticize people he disagrees with, and that’s fine.”