Sudan

Although traditional religious instruction has been combined with instruction in other subjects in Sudan's modern education system, Quranic schools are still an important component of educating Sudanese Muslim youth. Quranic schools existed as the first educational institutions in Sudan, and even today the Quranic schools are the first educational experience for many children, and there can be elaborate, formal ceremonies for pupils' first admission to the Quranic school—for example, shaving pupils' heads and writing bismallah ar-rahman ar-rahim, on the palms of students' hands, committing at the start the children's education to the cause of Islam in the name of Allah.

Classes in Quranic schools begin each day with a morning session, followed by an afternoon session, and a later evening session for students who cannot attend the day sessions—for example, if they are enrolled in a primary or elementary school. Thus, students have the option of attending both Quranic and primary school at the same time. The school week in Sudan runs from Saturday to Wednesday, as in most Islamic nations, with the weekend being on Thursday and Friday.

Children normally begin study in the Quranic schools between the ages of three and six. The curriculum consists mainly of memorizing the Quran, and learning the Arabic alphabet for this purpose. Equipped with a wooden slate and a simple ink made of soot mixed with gum, students are economically prepared to begin writing the Arabic alphabet and sections of the Quran. Complete memorization of the Quran normally takes around five years, sometimes longer, and there are ceremonies at the end of each of five stages of memorization.

Competitions for children to demonstrate their ability in reciting the Quran from memory offer rewards to those students who have successfully mastered the memorization challenge. The Quranic schools are not without their critics inside and outside the Muslim world. One of the main criticisms leveled against Quranic schools, in some cases by students who have gone through such schools early on in their education, is the fact that rote memorization and the ability to recite the Quran without understanding are seen as pointless aims of the Quranic curriculum. In many Quranic schools in countries with non-Arabic speaking Muslim believers, there are students who do not understand the words they are being taught to chant with religious fervor, and hence there is no true progress in understanding Arabic without the comprehension of memorized Quranic verses. To some, the ability of a child to chant the entire text of the Quran without understanding the words is evidence for divine inspiration, while to others the practice denotes a futile use of minds that could be put to better tasks.

In the past, some Quranic schools did not always follow this tradition of memorization without compre hension—emphasizing instead poetry, composition, arithmetic, and Arabic grammar in the curricula before moving on to detailed study and memorization of the Quran. There are critics of the Quranic curriculum, but advocates argue that at a minimum, students are introduced to Arabic, and get a foundation for further instruction. It may also be said that the schools socialize students into an Islamic community, instilling and inculcating respect for Islamic scholars and culture.

As Stephen Amin (2000) reported, going to school can be a deadly undertaking for primary school-age children in the Sudan. A missionary-sponsored primary school in Kauda Fouk, in the Nuba mountains of central Sudan, was bombed on 8 February 2000, along with numerous displaced persons camps where Western aid agencies were operating. At Kauda Fouk, four bombs were dropped by a Russian-made Sudanese Airforce Antonov plane on the school where over 600 students attended daily. Ten children and a teacher were killed instantly, while four more died in transit to the hospital. Witnesses note that the plane had identified the school-target several days previously in a flyover of the school premises, during which the terrified schoolchildren fled from the school.

So why would the military directly target a primary school? The answer, according to Ramadan Hamid, is that Khartoum wishes to "create insecurity among civilians, in order to stop life supporting activities such as schooling and farming, to give the civilians no other option apart from 'peace camps."' Another eyewitness explained, "The government of Sudan is not just trying to fight us physically, they want to prevent even our education." Khartoum's strategy succeeded. After this attack, surrounding schools closed their doors and students expressed their terror-stricken state of mind: "I will stay at home, why go to school and die."

The young minds of many primary school-age children in Sudan are being terrorized, to the point that they refuse to come to school for fear of being killed by more attacks. The memories of bombed out classrooms, mutilated classmates, burned churches and mosques, have been etched forever into their tender minds as victims of fratricidal civil war atrocities. Intimidation and terrorism, and the genocidal onslaught of the Khartoum regime, have not spared the innocent children. Their education has been one conducted according to the policy of intractable warfare, whose casualties number in the millions of minds scarred by loss of family, dislocation, malnourishment, psychological intimidation, and desperate privation.

In many refugee camps, school sessions for children might be held under the shade of a tree, and instead of a blackboard there are markings in the dust. Among the 4.5 million plus displaced Sudanese, a whole generation of children has grown up without any formal education.

In addition to severe problems with the provision of social services among the displaced populations, statistics from the Sudanese Ministry of Education for the year 2000 reveal the existence of serious problems apart from those school-age children directly affected by the war. Out of 111,141 teachers at the primary level in the Sudanese education system, only 43 percent had received professional training. So not only are there problems among the displaced populations and a total lack of education in the South, but in the Sudanese education system outside the war zones, there are serious problems including a lack of trained teachers, poorly paid teachers who must resort to handouts from students' families, a lack of facilities, and poor transportation to and from schools. On top of all this there are the budgetary deficiencies resulting from the diversion of funds to the war effort's aim of crushing the southern rebellion.

Pupil enrollment statistics for 2000 reveal the financial problems brought about by a war that devours around half of the annual national budget, an estimated $1 million per day. Teachers are not paid, or severely underpaid, and at the preschool level (kindergarten and nursery schools), only 349,306 out of an estimated 1.8 million eligible school-age children were enrolled in schools. At the primary level, out of a targeted population of 6.6 million, less than half (47.2 percent) or 3.13 million students in the 6 to 14 age bracket were enrolled in primary schools. The Ministry of Education explains that the meager enrollment rates are a result of the civil war. The buying of munitions and military hardware has been a greater priority than paying teachers' salaries and developing the educational infrastructure. An education system that should have been a government-provided education free of charge for all Sudanese has resorted to desperate measures to support teachers trying to educate less than half of the school-age Sudanese children, a large proportion of whom have been adversely affected by the war.