No Silver Lining

So, you think you have plumbed the depths of human depravity?  Think again.

The 28 May 2016 edition of the Washington Post has a "Visual Stories" item about religious students in Senegal,
The thought they were going to religion school.

Young boys in daaras (religious schools), chained and beaten, sometimes raped, and exploited for street beggary.  Read it and weep.

At the very bottom of this sordid story are the parents.  Desperate people desperately looking for a way out of grinding poverty.  A husband and wife tell how they could not afford to support their three children, so the parents "gave away" their children to a local daara hoping they will be well educated.

Everything about this story is awful, beginning with their hope.  If you know anything about the Muslim tradition of education, you must know that the hope is futile, from the beginning.  

In Muslim religious schools, young boys are taught to recite the Koran.  Even in this little thing, there is less than meets the eye.  The vast majority of Muslims are not Arabs and they know no Arabic.  The boys are taught to read the Arabic script, to pronounce the words, to memorize, and nothing else.  They do not understand a word they read.

In the life of the mind, this practice does not even rise to the level of a low bar.  For example, because Greek letters are used in mathematics, over the years I have developed enough familiarity with the Greek alphabet that I can appear to read Greek words.  I have no idea what I am saying.

Even if the boys actually learned the stories of the Koran, so what?  Can you imagine less useful knowledge, in the 21st century?  Yes, of course, Christians learn their Bible, too.  But, unless you are going to be a priest or a minister, you will learn something else, as well, something more practical.

So, what's left?  The boys learn no useful skill, and they do not even learn the Koran, as we understand the concept of learning.  Years of terrible abuse, with nothing, nothing to show for it.  It is a comprehensive loss.

In the West, we have a saying:  Behind every dark cloud there is a silver lining.  And that, dear friends, is the unique blessing of the West.