A few days ago I stumbled across this article from Inquisitr: “ISIS Bans Children From Learning Math And Social Studies.” Essentially, the Islamic State is saying that they are willing to sacrifice their children’s future in order to live up to their interpretation of Islam. This is not merely saying they wish to teach intelligent design in addition to biology or something along those lines. The Islamic State is cutting mathematics — a fundamental necessity to understanding practically every branch of science — because it offends Allah.
If this is the way the Islamic State wants to play it, they will discover an entire generation of children in the Levant who are wholly unequipped to enter into the dialog of science. These intellectually unprepared children will continue to pull their societies down as more educated societies prosper. Let me put it this way: You will find fewer and fewer Iraqi and Syrian children applying for and getting accepted to medical schools. The engineers will dwindle. Technological innovation will be a thing of the past. Their idea of an Islamic paradise sounds like hell to me.
I can’t stress this enough; they aren’t cutting art or extracurricular activities to balance the school’s budget. They are banning math — MATH — because they’ve twisted their religion so much that mathematics is essentially satan. This is quite a contradiction of Islam’s previous contributions to mathematics. How has Islam fallen so far that it could even allow for this backward-thinking group to come to power? This is another reason why moderate Muslims should condemn ISIS to the maximum extent possible. We need mathematically literate children. Without them there is no future in science and no future for children under ISIS control.
The Atheist Papers 
Why on earth are they offended by math?
I’m not sure. I was worried this article might be fake or a misunderstanding of what ISIS was trying to do. So I waited a few days before writing about it. So far no one’s contradicted this article. I do know, however, that at the end of the Golden Age of Islam, math was banned by the caliphate. I guess they’re trying to go back to that.
Unbelievable. They actually have major achievements they can point to as unequivocal contributions to the world, and they want to ban learning about them.
All other religions besides Christianity remained hostile to philosophy (later known as science).
Whereas, philosophy is the language of Christianity.
This is why modern science only developed in the Christian West and all other cultures and civilizations never progressed past the horse drawn cart and brute human labor.
So today, in contemporary iSLAM we are witnessing a mentality that hasn’t changed since the 7th century.
errr, the maximum extent possible is extinction. I’ll vote for that.
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