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SCHOOL

School ‘forgets’ to teach required course

With graduation only days away, students at a high school in Gothenburg are outraged after learning they must complete a required course in religion that the school somehow neglected to teach them.

School 'forgets' to teach required course

“This is really the worst thing you can imagine,” student Aryan Roozy Talab told the Metro newspaper.

Another student, Patricia Kjellby, is sceptical she and her classmates will be able to don their traditional white caps next week to celebrate the completion of their upper secondary school education.

“We’re supposed to graduate in four days and I’m meant to complete a course that is actually supposed to last the whole year. That’s impossible,” she told the Expressen newspaper.

“To be honest, I’m extremely pissed off; that they figured this out now, just a few days before graduation.”

The students’ frustration stems from the shocking news delivered by officials at the Aniaragymnasiet high school that they neglected to teach the students a required course in religion.

According to the school’s principal, the mix-up stems from a misinterpretation of the curriculum laid out by Swedish law.

“When you read the law, it can be interpreted that you can switch religion with social science,” Christel Berver, principal at the publicly-funded, privately-managed free school, told Metro.

But such a change isn’t, in fact, allowed.

Students had raised the issue previously with their teachers, expressing suspicions that the school had left something out, but to no avail.

“The last two years I’ve wondered, ‘Aren’t we supposed to have religion?'” said Kjellby.

“They said that we had social science instead so I thought that stuff about Buddhism and everything would come then, but it never did.”

Now students have less than a week to complete the entire course in religion to avoid finishing high school with incomplete marks.

Alternatively, the students can accept a failing mark for the course and then make up the course in the autumn, the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) newspaper reported.

TT/The Local/dl

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RELIGION

Al-Azhar university calls for Sweden boycott over Koran burning

The Sunni Muslim world's most prestigious educational institution, Al-Azhar in Egypt, has called for the boycott of Swedish and Dutch products after far-right activists destroyed Korans in those countries.

Al-Azhar university calls for Sweden boycott over Koran burning

Al-Azhar, in a statement issued on Wednesday, called on “Muslims to boycott Dutch and Swedish products”.

It also urged “an appropriate response from the governments of these two countries” which it charged were “protecting despicable and barbaric crimes in the name of ‘freedom of expression'”.

Swedish-Danish far-right politician Rasmus Paludan on Saturday set fire to a copy of the Muslim holy book in front of Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm, raising tensions as Sweden courts Ankara over its bid to join Nato.

EXPLAINED:

The following day, Edwin Wagensveld, who heads the Dutch chapter of the German anti-Islam group Pegida, tore pages out of the Koran during a one-man protest outside parliament.

Images on social media also showed him walking on the torn pages of the holy book.

The desecration of the Koran sparked strong protests from Ankara and furious demonstrations in several capitals of the Muslim world including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry “strongly condemned” the Koran burning, expressing “deep concern at the recurrence of such events and the recent Islamophobic escalation in a certain number of European countries”.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson condemned Paludan’s actions as “deeply disrespectful”, while the United States called it “repugnant”.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price on Monday said the burning was the work of “a provocateur” who “may have deliberately sought to put distance between two close partners of ours – Turkey and Sweden”.

On Tuesday, Turkey postponed Nato accession talks with Sweden and Finland, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned Stockholm for allowing weekend protests that included the burning of the Koran.

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