Austrian authorities are investigating after children were sent home from a kindergarten with homework to learn the words to a Christian hymn, which had the word ‘God’ replaced with ‘Allah’.
The Austrian parent of one child at the Muslim majority school in Oberösterreich complained after he found the handout given to his daughter with the words and musical notation for the popular German children’s hymn ‘Gottes liebe ist so wunderbar’ (God’s love is so wonderful) had been edited and photocopied with new lyrics.
The school claimed they made the change to ‘Allah’s liebe ist so wunderbar’ to satisfy the majority of 10 year old pupils in the class, who are Muslim, reports Kronen Zeitung. While ‘Allah’ translates literally as God from Arabic, the angry father protested that schools simply cannot go about re-writing Christian hymns.
The Austrian schools inspectorate has called the teacher of the class and the principal in for discussions over the incident.
While inspector Karin Lang has given an explanation for the homework, that she admits Christian and Muslim pupils at the school were given segregated homework as a matter of due course may cause even more concern in a country which is working to integrate, rather than ghettoise migrant youth. She said: “The teacher had distributed to the Christian and Muslim pupils different texts.
“In the case, a child must have received the wrong copy into their folder”.
The school has withdrawn the homework while the investigation is ongoing.
The report of mangled hymns at the Muslim majority school comes just days after the author of a shocking report into the state of Islamisation of Austria’s schools spoke out about his concerns. Professor Ednan Aslan of the University of Vienna, himself a first generation immigrant to Austria was commissioned by the national government to deliver his report, which found there were at least 150 “problematic” schools in the country.
Citing “intellectual Salafism” and the Muslim Brotherhood as the driving forces behind the radicalisation of education in Austria, the professor said Islamists were sure to follow the letter of the law to avoid detection but ran a parallel educational system of their own.
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