7th July, 2015
In a case raising the spectre of religious profiling, Islamic extremist threats have forced a leading Catholic educator to flee Pakistan.
Bernadette L Dean, an educator on Sindh Province”s committee for curriculum and textbook reform, said she faced a hate campaign by the Islamic extremist Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and its militant, Al-Qaeda-linked student wing, the Islami Jamiat Tulaba (IJT), earlier this year. They accused her of being secular and against Islam.
Director of the VM Institute for Education and former principal of St Joseph”s College for Women and of Kinnaird College in Karachi, Dean on 12th May sent an email to friends and colleagues saying she feared for her life and, on the advice of family, colleagues and police, was leaving Pakistan.
Dean wrote that a “political party” had unleashed a hate campaign against her for writing textbooks as a member of the advisory committee.
“This campaign started a few months ago with threatening phone calls to members of the advisory committee on curriculum and textbook reform and Sindh Textbook Board, visits of religious leaders from the Punjab and Sindh to the STBB to complain about me and the work I am doing with respect to textbook writing, a vicious letter accusing me of being a “foreigner woman who has single-handedly made changes to the curriculum and textbooks that made them secular” and called me an enemy of Islam,” she wrote.
Of Anglo-Indian descent, Dean is a Pakistani national who was born and raised in Pakistan and is recognised as making many contributions in education to the country.
She attached to the email a letter to the Karachi police chief from a civil society organisation asking for the removal of banners against her, which the political party had put up. She also referred to the All-Parties Conference at the Karachi Press Club in March, where she was blamed for carrying out amendments to the curricula. She raised concern with authorities, but in vain, she wrote.
On 28th March, the IJT organised an All-Parties Conference on curriculum change at the press club, where JI Sindh chief Merajul Huda Siddiqui declared as “intolerable” the Sindh advisory committee”s efforts to remove mandatory religious lessons from general knowledge, Sindhi, Urdu and Pakistan Studies textbooks.
Singling out the only non-Muslim member of the committee, the JI and IJT leaders reportedly attacked Dean”s character. Inflammatory banners deriding her subsequently appeared throughout Karachi.
In her email, Dean noted that she only co-authored the reformed books in conjunction with Muslim authors, and that all the books were reviewed multiple times before being approved.
Dean has served as principal of St Joseph”s College for Women, Karachi, principal of Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore, and as professor at Aga Khan University. She holds a doctorate in education from the University of Alberta, Canada. Dean has fled to the United States, where she has a grown daughter.
Riaz Ahmed Shaikh, who worked with Dean on the curriculum reform committee, said that the Islamists targeting her misunderstood the proposed syllabus changes. Shaikh said whenever any attempt is made to bring education under regulation, there is always an outcry from such Islamic extremist groups.
“People like Dr Dean are not posing any threat to our religious beliefs and ideology,” Shaikh said. “Rather, they are helping us make our young generation more enlightened and tolerant.”
– Morning Star News (follow the link for the full version of the story)
