While students on campuses elsewhere in the world usually lug around heavy backpacks full of literature, Afghan students often do not carry much more than narrow plastic binders with a few photocopied pages in them. An interviewer says that Mohammad Rassul is studying mathematics. He is headed to an internet-café outside the campus to see what he can find online about the “use of graphs in statistic problems.” The department possesses two “modern” books on statistics, he says, and they did not contain what he needs to know. A whole group of students gathers around the author, complaining that there is no up-to-date literature on “analytical geometry, complex analysis, differential algebra and many other topics.” One says, “We have very intelligent professors, but they cannot provide us with new material. They say they do not have access to computers to find it, or their English is not good enough to translate things for us.”
Besides the low quality of universities, today, the ministry and 34 public universities and higher education institutes are desperate to make space for more students where there isn’t any. Lack of universities aggravates the challenges in the society. According to a report released by Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) – which is a regional non-governmental organization that monitors human rights in Asia – on June 18th, 2014, there are an estimated 1,476,233,470 Muslims on the face of the planet: one billion in Asia, 400 million in Africa, 44 million in Europe and six million in the Americas. Every fifth human being is a Muslim; for every single Hindu there are two Muslims, for every Buddhist there are two Muslims and for every Jew there are one hundred Muslims. Then, the underlying reason behind the powerlessness of Islamic world was pointed out as, “There are 57 member-countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around 500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims. The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407.”
It was further mentioned that in 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’, and intriguingly, not one university from Muslim-majority states was in the top-500. Moreover, based on data collected by the UNDP, literacy in the Christian world stands at nearly 90 per cent and 15 Christian-majority states have a literacy rate of 100 per cent. But, a Muslim-majority state, as a sharp contrast, has an average literacy rate of around 40 per cent and there is no Muslim-majority state with a literacy rate of 100 per cent.
Based on the report, Some 98 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world had completed primary school, while less than 50 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same. Around 40 per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Christian world attended university while no more than two per cent of the ‘literates’ in the Muslim world did the same. Muslim-majority countries have 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The US has 4,000 scientists per million and Japan has 5,000 per million. In the entire Arab world, the total number of full-time researchers is 35,000 and there are only 50 technicians per one million Arabs - in the Christian world there are up to 1,000 technicians per one million. Furthermore, the Muslim world spends 0.2 per cent of its GDP on research and development, while the Christian world spends around five per cent of its GDP. To conclude, the Muslim world lacks the capacity to produce knowledge!
Daily newspapers per 1,000 people and number of book titles per million are two indicators of whether knowledge is being diffused in a society. The report points out that in Pakistan, there are 23 daily newspapers per 1,000 Pakistanis while the same ratio in Singapore is 360. In the UK, the number of book titles per million stands at 2,000 while the same in Egypt is 20. To conclude, the Muslim world is failing to diffuse knowledge.
Furthermore, exports of high technology products as a percentage of total exports are an important indicator of knowledge application. According to the same report, Pakistan’s export of high technology products as a percentage of total exports stands at one per cent. The same for Saudi Arabia is 0.3 percent; Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria are all at 0.3 per cent, while Singapore is at 58 per cent. To conclude, the Muslim world is failing to apply knowledge.
Why are Muslims powerless? Because we are not producing knowledge, we are not diffusing knowledge and because we are not applying knowledge.
If we consider our own society, the educational system is terrible. As a result, libraries are actually the copy shops around Kabul University. Here, professors and students deposit the so-called ‘chapters’: photocopies of excerpts from books or partly still handwritten lecture notes students are supposed to work with – or rather learn by heart, a traditional and still widely practiced way of teaching and learning at Afghan universities. Hassib Copy Shop near the ‘engineering gate’ of the university for example has “600 to 700” of these chapters. Hundreds of students come every week to pick up these morsels of knowledge for one or two Afghani per page, often without knowing which books they were taken from, who compiled the notes or when they were written in the first place.
Ill-fatedly, the number of teachers with higher degrees remains low at public universities, which also impairs faculties’ capacity to get research going and compile new learning and teaching resources. “Despite the efforts of the ministry of higher education, the qualifications of faculty members have not significantly improved over the last few years.”
It is aptly said that ‘knowledge is power.’ To stand on our own feet and make a powerful country, the Afghan new government is supposed to pay serious attention on educational system and allocate considerable amount of budget. If the current trend goes on, our younger generation will graduate with low capacity. The government is further urged to equip our youths with the power of knowledge.