In Sudan, Islamists and advocates of the ousted regime of Omar al-Bashir have waged a fierce campaign against the country’s Director of the Educational Curricula Center Omar Ahmed Al-Qarray over the sixth grade’s history book containing “The Creation of Adam” by Italian artist Michelangelo.
Apart from Qarray receiving death threats, Islamists have also threatened to prohibit the teaching of the academic curriculum. They argued that the work of art is blasphemous in its attempt to portray the divine.
Qarray, alongside a host of supporters, considered the painting an important work of art that is worth studying away from any religious context. He also warned that followers of the former regime are using the painting as an excuse to push their self-styled curriculums.
Campaigns both with and against Qarray have taken over social media.
Some accused him of exploiting curriculums to promote republican ideology formerly held by Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, who was executed for apostasy by the regime of Gaafar Nimeiry.
Others supported Qarray’s effort to turn around a curriculum tailored to Muslim Brotherhood dogma, saying that it advances the goals of the revolution that toppled Bashir’s Islamist regime. They added that the new curriculum gets the new generation to step out of the shadows of extremism that the former regime introduced to rather tolerant Sudanese religiosity.
On October 17, 2019, Sudanese Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok entrusted Qarray with rewriting school curricula.
Hamdok tasked Qarray with purging material taught in schools from Muslim Brotherhood influence, which had dominated education in the African country for the last three decades.
Qarray, for his part, described the campaign organized against him on social media sites, some mosques, and places of worship as unfair dishonest.
Defending the inclusion of “The creation of Adam,” Qarray told a presser that this was not the first time the painting appears in Sudanese curriculums, and that it was already studied in the arts curriculum at the Islamic University without anyone criticizing it.
He launched a violent attack on the Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments, which issued a statement declaring the prohibition of teaching the new history curriculum to sixth graders.
