What's the Opposite of Islamophobia? Ask Ukraine

Ukraine to please its tiny Muslim population by

making Islam’s major holy days national holidays

FILE PHOTO. Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha in Kiev. ©Sputnik / Sergey Starostenko

Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha may soon become state holidays in Ukraine, where Muslims constitute anywhere between 0.2 and four percent of the population.

The somewhat puzzling change to Ukraine’s working calendar has been announced by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office this week, after he held a meeting with representatives of the Crimean Tatar community. Celebrating two of Islam’s most holy days as an entire nation is one of several promises he made.

Muslims may also get a big mosque in Kiev sometime in the future, and a politician of Crimean Tatar background was given the office of a deputy foreign minister.

Crimean Tatars are by far the largest predominantly Muslim ethnic group in Ukraine – or at least that was the case before their homeland, the Crimean peninsula, parted ways with Kiev and reunited with Russia in 2014.

Out of roughly 277,000 Crimean Tatars that once lived in Ukraine, more than 232,000 resided in Crimea, which is now a Russian territory. Yet, even there they constitute around 10.6 percent of the peninsula’s total population. Those, who stayed within Ukraine’s borders, constitute a tiny minority within the nation’s roughly 43 million-strong population.

Some Crimean Tatars staunchly opposed the peninsula’s transition and stayed loyal to Kiev, becoming an expedient political tool to turn against Moscow. Their persecution under Joseph Stalin has also been brought into the picture as an argument.

They also get their share of preferences for certain jobs. ATR, a private Crimean Tatar television channel, has been so dependent on government funding that a delay in government financing earlier this year brought it to the brink of closure.

Yet, many of the benefits are more symbolic than practical, like a promise to turn Crimea into an autonomous state of Crimean Tatars within Ukraine’s borders. Anton Drobovich, the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory – a state agency tasked with “restoration and preservation of national memory of the Ukrainian people,” which has been mostly reduced to erasing any memories about Ukraine’s Soviet past, at least when it comes to monuments and street names – floated such an idea in March. He said, though, that it could only be possible after the peninsula “returns” to Ukraine.

Making Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha national holidays is definitely within Zelensky’s power, but such a move may look a bit odd, considering how small a minority Muslims are in the country. This is especially true since apart from Crimea, some of the largest Muslim communities are located in the east of the country. Many Ukrainian Muslims now live in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which don’t take orders from Kiev.

There has not been a proper census since 2001, so there is no accurate figure on the size of its population and the share of Muslims in it. According to various sources, Islam believers constitute anywhere between under 100,000 and up to an optimistic two million in Ukraine. The World Bank estimated its population at 44.6 million in 2018. So even with an upper two-million estimate, less than five percent of Ukrainians will be observing the promised new holidays because of their faith.

‘Role play’? Swedish Schoolkids Made to Kneel in Gender-Segregated MUSLIM Prayer & Told to Listen to Koran in Arabic

When integration borders on indoctrination

FILE PHOTO © Global Look Press / ZUMAPRESS.com / Faisal Khan

A Swedish school decided to familiarize its fifth-graders with Islamic worshipping by having a teacher recite Koranic verse to them and having them pray facing Mecca, in a bizarre set-up the educators called “role play.”

An offbeat “religion lesson” was taught at the Bjurbäck school situated in the south of Sweden, according to Samhallsnytt news outlet. An outraged parent said pupils were told to face the Kaaba and kneel on prayer mats, while the whole class was divided by gender, with girls forced to the back of the room.

His daughters “did not even want to be there because they could not understand a word of what the teacher read from the Koran in Arabic,” the man, called Markus, revealed. After the “prayer,” the pupils “would dance to Arabic music and eat Arabic cake” in something used to replicate Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim festivities marking the end of compulsory fasting.

Local authorities confirmed the report, with an education official in Emmaboda – a serene southern county where the school is located – telling the news outlet that the class did take place.

When confronted by angry parents, the school management defended the activity, referring to it as “role play.” But the awkward explanation didn’t sit well with Markus who wants the school to apologize and its principal to be suspended.

Except, the teacher wasn't role-playing; he was almost certainly a real Islamic teacher and only God knows what he said, what prayers he recited over those children. They certainly have no idea.

“Calling this a role play is not OK as it hits me as a parent,” he told the paper. “It’s me, not the school, that raises my children ... they go there to learn things that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.”

The story sparked uproar on social media.

“Of course, the continuation of it will be Muslim students learning the Lord’s Prayer and attending a Catholic mass,” one person suggested.

Or, John 3:16. That would cause a real uproar!

“Forcing minors into submission is disastrous. One should choose a religion on their own,” another one wrote.

However, the Emmaboda municipality tried to cool down tempers, saying that, while “his lesson was about Islam and Muslim rituals and traditions,” there are other classes teaching about other world religions.

The class in question involved “so-called role-play pedagogy where the students have different roles in order to gain a better understanding” of the subject, it explained. During the lesson, no student expressed concern or felt insecure, the authorities said, adding that taking part in the role play wasn’t compulsory.

Allahu Akbar!

A similar scandal broke out in neighboring Denmark this summer, when a boy of African descent was filmed teaching his third-grade classmates a daily prayer ritual, with the exercise ending with the class kneeling and chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ (Allah is great). The school, however, defended the teaching methods used to integrate children of different cultures.

Countries that were once Christian ought to be concerned about how Jesus Christ feels about teaching children false religions, especially those that are violently anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. But then, those once-Christian countries don't really believe Jesus Christ is real, or, for that matter, any religion. God have mercy on them.