Education targeted as threat to Islam

The concerns have been stoked by speeches by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as confessions of political prisoners that suggest that the study of secular topics and ideas has made universities incubators for the political unrest unleashed after the disputed presidential election in June.

Khamenei said last week that the study of social sciences "promotes doubts and uncertainty". He urged "ardent defenders of Islam" to review the human sciences that are taught in Iran's universities and "promote secularism".

"Many of the humanities and liberal arts are based on philosophies whose foundations are materialism and disbelief in godly and Islamic teachings," Khamenei said at a gathering of university students and professors, according to IRNA, the state news agency. "Instructing those sciences leads to the loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge."

For years, the study of subjects such as philosophy and sociology has been viewed suspiciously by Iranian conservatives. During the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution, the nation's leaders closed universities and tried to sanitise curriculums to fit their Islamic revolutionary ideology. The efforts ultimately failed under the weight of more pragmatic forces eager to engage with Western economies, and a student population hungry for contemporary ideas and contact with the West.

But in recent years, academics who attended conferences abroad, or took part in cultural exchange programmes, have often been vilified at home or viewed suspiciously. Some have been arrested on charges of trying to organise a soft revolution.

The recent speeches by the country's leaders suggest they may no longer be willing to live with such ambiguity after months of unsuccessfully trying to extinguish the political and social crisis set off by the election.

"Iran is going through a crisis of legitimacy for the regime, and the crisis is based on the regime's inability to respond to the demands for reform from the increasingly youthful population," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "The only response it can think of is to stop teaching of the social sciences."

Rasool Nafisi, an academic based in Virginia who is an expert on Iran, agreed. "Khamenei's statement does not bode well for the Iranian universities," he said.

"He seems to try to pick up where the Islamic republic left off over two decades ago when the late Ayatollah Khomeini expressed similar aversion to 'Westoxicated learning' in the universities, and ordered dropping all but natural sciences from the university curricula," Nafisi added, referring to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The current supreme leader, Khamenei, called for "the promotion of a spiritual environment in universities" and requested that the government of Ahmadinejad make this a "serious concern".

During Ahmadinejad's first term in office, his administration forced out many professors and replaced them.

"I think that they don't like new ideas to get to Iran," said an Iranian academic now living outside the country. He asked not to be identified because he hoped to return and was afraid of reprisals. "They don't like social and cultural figures in the Iranian society to become very popular. That is the aspect which makes problems for them."

The state's renewed focus on education took centre stage when the confession of a prominent reformer, Saeed Hajjarian, who had been the theoretician behind the reform movement, was read in court and broadcast on national television.

The confession, dismissed by reform leaders as a reflection of the views of Hajjarian's jailers, provided a lengthy criticism of human sciences, especially sociology and political science. It lamented the negative influence of theories like "post-structuralism, post-Marxism and feminism".