Feb 19, 2014

Over the past 11 years, the Christian population in Iraq has decreased by more than 75%. It started to decline gradually after 2003, following the overall rise in violence and attacks targeting Christians. Before 2003, there were around 1.5 million Christians in Iraq, and according to recent church figures, only 300,000 remain.

Perhaps this drastic difference pushed administrators in charge of education to find ways to preserve Christianity’s cultural and religious heritage in Iraq. Christianity is a major component of Iraqi society, and it would be incredibly negligent to allow it to disappear, under any circumstances.

Emad Salem Jeju, director general of the Syriac Study Directorate, spoke with Al-Monitor about the Ministry of Education's decision to include Syriac and Christian religious education in the curricula of 152 public schools in the provinces of Baghdad, Ninevah and Kirkuk. The goal is to preserve the Syriac language, the mother tongue of all Christian denominations, so the schools were selected based on these areas' large Christian populations.

According to Jeju, the schools selected enroll a total of 20,500 students. In addition to teaching Syriac, they also offer Christian religious education. Jeju said that a committee of the Council of Catholic Bishops of Iraq has been working on developing a new curriculum for Christian religious education that will be issued next year. The schools are currently using the same curriculum as schools in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.

The initiative appears aimed at satisfying the Christian denominations in Iraq and to illustrate that religious teaching is not limited to just one sect. Iraq has 14 officially recognized Christian denominations with historical roots in the country.