🇸🇾Syria's new government is changing its education system, with critics saying it is trying to push an Islamist agenda on schoolchildren in a country that has long been secular.

The Financial Times writes about this.

Let us recall that the Sunni Islamist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham came to power in Syria.

Textbooks are removing references to ousted President Bashar al-Assad and his late father Hafez, who ruled for 50 years.

But many were alarmed that references to pre-Islamic deities and even the word “deities” were removed, and criticism of the Ottoman Empire was curtailed (recall that the groups that seized power in Damascus are allegedly linked to Turkey - Ed.)

However, new interpretations of the Koran have appeared. For example, in the Islamic studies textbook for the first grade, an interpretation of a Koranic verse appeared that mentions “those who deserve [Allah’s] wrath” and “the lost” as a reference to “Christians and Jews.”

In a first-grade science textbook, the words "the bounties of nature" were replaced with "the bounties of Allah," and in a 12th-grade history textbook, a sentence was removed that mentioned the mass execution of Arab nationalists in 1916 during the Ottoman Empire.

Also excluded were the text of the Syrian citizenship law, a section on the evolution of the vertebrate brain, and a mention of Zenobia, the famous pre-Islamic queen of the ancient city of Palmyra.