By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, January 27: The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jatiya Party (JP) have slammed the Bangladesh government for including Darwin’s theory of evolution in the new textbook for Class 7.
But this is not peculiar to Bangladeshi Muslims. The theory that humans evolved from monkeys is rejected by the votaries of Islam, Christianity and cultural revivalists in some parts of the world. The 19 th.Century zoologist, Charles Darwin, had said that humans had evolved from monkeys, while Islam and Christianity say that humans were created by the union of Adam and Eve.
The BNP and the JP have described the Darwinian theory as “blasphemous” and want the government to investigate and punish those responsible for its inclusion. Jatiya Party MP Golam Kibria Tipu said: “ As Muslims we are children of Adam. There is no chance of being monkeys. It is an insult to Islam. A blasphemy law should be enacted in this regard.” The BNP’s Standing Committee has demanded the withdrawal of the new textbooks, which they said have anti-religious content.
Long-standing Issue
M. Akhtaruzzaman, Bangladeshi author of several books on Evolution, Cytogenetics and Genetics, writing in www.en.muktomona.com in 2009 had said that teaching evolution theory had been controversial in Bangladesh, and before it came into being, in Pakistan too.
After Bangladesh was carved out of Pakistan in 1971, evolution became a subject of study at the university level as the new government was secular. But this did not last long. The military regimes which came after the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, Islamized the country. In Chittagong University, Islamic fundamentalist students forced the cancellation of the course on evolution. The movement drew wide support. The conflict was between the “Evolutionary” (Darwinist) theory and the Scriptural or “Creationist” theory. The topic “Evidences of Evolution” was removed from the Intermediate Biology course around 2001.
Akhtaruzzaman recalls: “I tried to explain that Creationism is merely a faith, not supported by logic or evidence, whereas Evolution is a Science, supported both by logic and evidence and above all by Scientific methods. Indeed, Darwin’s success in discovering the first Law of Biology, the law of Evolution, was due to his ability to use the scientific method in full for the first time in the history of Biology. But I had to handle it cautiously so as not to hurt the feelings of the students.”
Currently, under pressure, the Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina, is in the process of correcting the mistakes in the school textbooks issued for 2023. A team from the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) will visit the schools in March to obtain feedback from students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders. Education Minister Dr.Dipu Moni had said that the committee will have religious experts too and that strict action would be taken if any evidence of negligence is found.
Turkiye Ban
As the issue is religious, Turkiye, which has been Islamizing under President Erdogan, stopped teaching Darwin’s theory in high schools in 2017. A chapter entitled “Beginning of Life and Evolution” was deleted from the standard biology textbook used in schools, though it was made available to students at the university level.
Turkiye officials explained to Reuters at that time that since school students did not have the knowledge and scientific temperament to understand some controversial issues, evolutionism was left out. The then Deputy Prime Minister, Numan Kurtulmus (who is currently Deputy Chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party) had described Darwin’s theory as “old and rotten” which could be safely left out.
India
Although there is no move to get rid of Darwin’s theory in Hindu-majority India, there is a strong move by its current Hindu nationalist rulers to bring curricula in line with ancient Hindu traditions.
Satyapal Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader, had raised the issue of the validity of Darwinism in 2018 when he was State Minister of Higher Education in the BJP government of the day. Singh said that the Darwinist theory was “scientifically wrong and not fit to be in school and university curricula.” Top scientists condemned Singh’s remarks. Mercifully, the issue did not go beyond that.
Issue in Arkansas
The most modern country in the world, the US, had faced this issue too and still does. In Arkansas, one of the more conservative American States, evolutionism vs creationism has been a hotly contested educational issue for very long. The opposing parties had frequently resorted to legal action, says an account in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas ( https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/teaching-of-evolution-5991/)
According to the encyclopedia, by the late 19 th. Century, many people in Arkansas, indeed all over America, were increasingly disturbed by modernization or secularization of thought. Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) was completely rejected by Rev. Benjamin Marcus Bogard, one of Arkansas’s most influential clergymen, for being contradictory to the Scriptures. In 1928 he said that the evolutionary theory “demoted human beings from their exalted status as God’s children to merely another animal, sharing ancestors with, most closely, the apes.”
In 1927, the “Creationists” submitted a bill to the Arkansas legislature to ban the teaching of Evolution in the state’s publicly-funded educational institutions. The bill was rejected, but in 1928, it was passed. In 1937, 1959, and 1965 bills were presented to overturn the 1928 law. But all attempts failed.
However, no one was ever actually charged for breaking the 1928 law and at any rate, private schools could teach the evolutionary theory.
With the USSR challenging the US in science in the 1950s with the launch of the satellite Sputnik, there was a fresh move in the US to install the study of evolution on the grounds that it was scientific. New biology textbooks were written reflecting this view and were adopted in many States. In 1965, Susan Epperson, a high school biology teacher, sued for the right to teach evolution at the Arkansas Supreme Court. She lost, but appealed to the US Supreme Court. The latter struck down the 1928 Act in 1968 , on the grounds that it violated the constitution’s principle separating the Church and State.
By the 1980s, Creationists changed their tactic. They propagated “Creation Science” according which evolution is merely one theory of how life had originated and developed. The creationists insisted that “scientific evidence if correctly understood, would show that it was at least as likely that life on earth in all its present forms was the result of a sudden, and fairly recent, act of creation.”
In the spring of 1981, the Arkansas legislature passed a law mandating “equal treatment” for “Creation Science” in schools if evolution was taught. The Arkansas American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a suit against this new law. Creation Science, they argued, was simply a fig leaf to cover an attempt by the creationists to insert their own religious beliefs in the State education system. This was upheld by the Federal District Court of Eastern Arkansas in 1982, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says.
“But despite these court rulings, Creationism, fueled by biblical literalism, has remained a strong force in Arkansas and has continued to influence the teaching of biology. An option used by creationists has been to send their children to religiously oriented private schools,” it adds.
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