These days, parents struggle a lot to admit their children in quality schools. Even in public schools, admitting a child has become a hard task and parents suffer a lot to manage different needs of schooling. But all Afghans have witnessed a time when people were reluctant to send their children to the schools and they tried their level best to keep them away from the school. In almost all the rural areas and some of the urban places, teachers of schools were given the responsibility to go and see the parents and persuade them to admit their children in schools, but it was not an easy task. In those days, a teacher was perceived to be as strong as a police commissioner and people respected him too much. Whenever a teacher visited a village, all the male members of the village assembled in the house of the village chief and looked at teacher as if he was an alien, being sent from an outer space. Anyhow, villagers requested the teacher to exempt their children from admissions. In this regard, they did their best to please the teacher and win his favor. Teacher was presented with different gifts like pure ghee, hen, sheep, and similar things associated with the village life. Indebted under all these, teacher agreed to exempt their children from the enrollment and this favor of teacher was time and again remembered by delivering wood, edibles and similar gifts on different occasions.

Parents feared that if their children started going to school, they will become an atheist or leave their religion. This fear was based on a rumor that majority of the literate do not follow their religion, drink forbidden alcohol and get indulged in similar sins, not permitted by their religion. This rumor was spread by a few who had travelled to Kabul and observed some of the citizens who were in fact in the same condition.

Like in every society, there were also present some people in Kabul in those days who had not only lost their belief on any kind of religion and things associated with it, but they also did inappropriate work of talking against the religion. They also criticized those who followed any religion and termed them to be stupid and lazy. Those days, people were much strongly attached to the belief system and all these came to them as a great shock and thus there spread a belief that anyone who goes to school or becomes educated, strays away from religion and turns into an atheist or an agnostic. In fact, they believed that education taught them to revolt against their set of established beliefs and turn them into an atheist.

However, whatever were the possible causes of this belief, it kept many of our generations away from schools and weakened the basis of the country and made it vulnerable to a number of dangers. In the years to follow, our vulnerability was exposed in the form of internal differences and civil war which kept the country crippled for about three decades and pushed the country back for many more decades.

Anyhow, in those days, Afghanistan was under the strong influence of the communist block and many students were sent to the countries of the block for higher education. They not only learned the languages of the host countries but also made their access to the different books of philosophy, logic and literature. As many of us may be aware of, last two centuries were the most productive regarding the growth and maturity of western philosophy. There were many eminent scholars whose ideas molded the minds and thoughts of people of their time and brought changes in politics, social ideology and other fields of life. Many forms of government like communism, socialism, capitalism and a number of other political schools of thought were the results of the great ideas of the political philosophers of their time. There is a long list of such philosophers and some of the prominent are Bertrand Russell, Kant, Hugo, Carl Marx, Angels, Rousseau, Milton, and many more. All these scholars and philosophers were at the peak of their natural talent and literary skills and thus, whatever they wrote, left lasting traces on the minds of their readers. As most of us know, the system of church had greatly lost its effectiveness and its greedy and selfish members had greatly used it as a source to earn personal benefits. This greatly disappointed the people and a number of scholars wrote against this institute of belief. They also scolded the practices of church that paralyzed the open thinking of people and thus most of the above scholars emphasized critical thinking and were opposed of following the beliefs without any proper evidence. As religions are based on beliefs, thus they directly opposed the religions and not only their own religion Christianity came under attack but they also opposed all the other religions of the world. They were of the view that religions stop the people from open thinking and it was a tool of some of the religious elders to fool the people and exploit them for their own benefits. To replace this, they talked of Atheism in which a person doesn’t believe on any religion or God or less harmful is to become an agnostic. An agnostic is a term used for a person who believes that it is not possible to know if God exists or not.

The readers of these thinkers were very much moved by the impressive reasons, logical points and other mesmerizing features and they entered a new world of amazing facts and realities. The basic theme of all these writers is based on reasoning. They ask us to challenge every set of established beliefs with questions and not to accept anything without proper investigation. Every idea is accepted after it is supported by logic and reason and nothing is accepted on mere belief. It wants us to challenge the existence of anything which is not felt by our senses. Their reasoning is impressive that a person with less knowledge about the religious basics can soon develop the doubt. Doubt is the base of logical reasoning but in religions, especially Islam, doubt acts like dynamite to the set of beliefs and brings down each and everything.

As mentioned earlier, if we do not have good knowledge about our religion, these books and ideas in them can harm us a lot. But stopping our youth from these books by force will not be a logical approach. Rather it would make them more curious about these ideas and they might adopt a secret route to access them. First, we can choose good books for them. Luckily, there are modern Islamic scholars in the world who have presented the logical interpretation of the Islamic teachings. These books can be provided to our youth according to their ages. The books of philosophy and logic (mentioned above) can also be provided after they get mature enough to understand and tackle them with logic and understanding.

The above problem may not be much evident in our society but the more the level of knowledge and education will rise, more will be our youth and educated vulnerable to the above mentioned problem. With the gradual advancement of literacy and education in our country, we should be fully ready to protect our youth of this problem.