Cairo: Egypt’s education authorities have revoked a plan to stop featuring the country’s recent uprisings in history textbooks after the scheme sparked an outcry.
The Education Ministry has notified a committee of experts who wrote a new book without Egypt’s 2011 and 2013 revolts that the work will be put on hold, a member of the panel said.
“The ministry has informed the committee that the new book has been cancelled,” Alaria Atef, a history expert on the panel, added in media remarks.
An official memorandum has been sent to the Curricula Development Centre, an affiliate of the Education Ministry, that the plan for the new history textbook has been scrapped.
“The old textbook that includes the January and June revolutions will be reprinted for the new school year,” Atef said.
“The ministry has not provided a clear reason for this decision,” she added.
An education official has attributed the backdown to interest in conducting further research.
“The ministry has decided to postpone printing the new history book that was meant for the final year of the secondary school in order to consider the possibility of developing the whole history syllabus of the three years of the secondary education stage,” Reda Hejazi, the head of the ministry’s General Education Department, said on Monday.
He added that the old history textbook, which covers the two uprisings, will be taught in the next school year again.
In the past six years, Egypt has seen two popular revolts that resulted in regime changes. The first took place in January 2011 when 18-day street protests forced long-time president Hosni Mubarak to step down.
In June 2013, massive protests against the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule prompted the army, led at the time by incumbent president Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, to depose president Mohammad Mursi, who hails from the now-outlawed Islamist group.
Last month, the Education Ministry said it would temporarily drop the two revolts from the history textbooks to allow time for objective evaluation of both events.
The ministry at the time added that the modifications were part of efforts to upgrade the national education system.
The plan drew fire from some history experts and members of parliament.
“This decision is a grave mistake,” Mohammad Afifi, a history professor at the state-run Cairo University, said.
“The two revolutions represent legitimacy of the current ruling system in Egypt,” he told private newspaper Al Masry Al Youm last month. “The argument that long years should pass before political events are included in history textbooks is a strange idea,” Afifi added.
MP Majda Nasr also criticised the plan and warned of consequences.
“Failure to include details of the two revolutions in education curricula will prompt the youngsters to search for information on them on the internet,” she said in a statement. “We all know that several websites pursue dubious goals. Therefore, we have to make historical facts available [to schoolchildren] and foil attempts by those who try to distort revolutions.”
