Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both treat the education and formation of the young as a central political instrument, not a neutral transmission of skills. Both claim the authority, and the practical necessity, to shape the beliefs, loyalties, and habits of the next generation according to the doctrine, and both built dedicated institutions to guarantee it—the Bolsheviks from the founding moment of their state, and Islamic rulers the moment a doctrinal threat demanded it.
In 1065, the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk opened the first of a network of state-funded madrasas in Baghdad, standardizing Shafi’i law and Ash’ari theology across the curriculum. He explained his own reasoning in his political testament, the Siyasatnama. Ismaili Shia da’wa was a doctrinal infiltration eroding loyalty to legitimate rulers, and education was the countermeasure.
The network extended within decades to Nishapur, Herat, and Isfahan, training the scholars and officials of the Seljuk state. The Baghdad madrasa alone enrolled some three thousand students by the 1090s and drew Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, later Islam’s most influential theologian, onto its faculty. Classical jurisprudence had already established the parental and communal duty to raise children in correct belief. Nizam al-Mulk’s contribution was to make that duty an instrument of state policy, not a matter left to families and mosques.
Marxist-Leninist communism reached the identical position by different means, less than two years after seizing power. Lenin, in his 1920 address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, insisted that education under the dictatorship of the proletariat must break entirely with bourgeois content and method. The Decree on the Unified Labor School, issued October 16, 1918, nationalized and secularized Russian schooling.
The Komsomol, founded two weeks later, extended party formation into organized youth life beyond the classroom. Both were built before the Civil War had even been won, on the premise that a socialist state could not wait for a settled peace to begin forming its children.
The parallel is that both treated the education of children as too consequential to leave to families, markets, or rival authorities, and both built state or party institutions specifically to close that gap. Nizam al-Mulk and the Bolsheviks were separated by eight and a half centuries and were answering different threats—Ismaili da’wa in one case, bourgeois pedagogy in the other—but they reached for the same instrument: a curriculum the state itself controlled, extended by an organized youth structure operating outside the classroom entirely.
The instinct persists into the present, at the level of the state curriculum and below it. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Imam al-Mahdi Scouts, founded in 1985 and still operating under the party’s own Executive Council, enrolls tens of thousands of children as young as four in Shia indoctrination combined with military training. Former leaders say most members enlist in Hezbollah’s fighting ranks by sixteen or seventeen, and more than two hundred alumni have since died in combat.
The London-based IMPACT-se institute’s analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s 2025–2026 curriculum, used by 1.3 million students, found the Arabic word for “martyr” taught as a first-grade spelling term, fourth-grade arithmetic adding First and Second Intifada death tolls, and a science textbook illustrating Newton’s Law with a girl firing a slingshot, imagery IMPACT-se ties to attacks on Israeli soldiers. Fifth graders in at least one UNRWA-run Gaza classroom were separately instructed to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led a 1978 attack that killed thirty-eight Israeli civilians, as a role model.
Over decades, parents failed and big time by ignoring what was going on in our K-12 schools and Universities for that matter. I am one of those parents who really didn’t look into what was being taught, or better yet, what was being omitted. Like the real history of socialism and communism.
How else can you explain LGBTQ protesters, marching along with extremist Islamic followers, wanting the destruction of Jews from the river to the sea? American kids are clueless, or maybe they are all being paid, and this is nothing but a job to them.
How do we solve this issue? Get rid of Teachers Unions or at least restrict them to addressing working conditions and pay only, no more using woke BS to lure our kids to the dark side of the failures of communism and socialism, and no, a man cannot have a baby. All IMO.
“Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both treat the education and formation of the young as a central political instrument, not a neutral transmission of skills. Both claim the authority, and the practical necessity, to shape the beliefs, loyalties, and habits of the next generation according to the doctrine, and both built dedicated institutions to guarantee it—the Bolsheviks from the founding moment of their state, and Islamic rulers the moment a doctrinal threat demanded it.
In 1065, the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk opened the first of a network of state-funded madrasas in Baghdad, standardizing Shafi’i law and Ash’ari theology across the curriculum. He explained his own reasoning in his political testament, the Siyasatnama. Ismaili Shia da’wa was a doctrinal infiltration eroding loyalty to legitimate rulers, and education was the countermeasure.
The network extended within decades to Nishapur, Herat, and Isfahan, training the scholars and officials of the Seljuk state. The Baghdad madrasa alone enrolled some three thousand students by the 1090s and drew Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, later Islam’s most influential theologian, onto its faculty. Classical jurisprudence had already established the parental and communal duty to raise children in correct belief. Nizam al-Mulk’s contribution was to make that duty an instrument of state policy, not a matter left to families and mosques.
Marxist-Leninist communism reached the identical position by different means, less than two years after seizing power. Lenin, in his 1920 address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, insisted that education under the dictatorship of the proletariat must break entirely with bourgeois content and method. The Decree on the Unified Labor School, issued October 16, 1918, nationalized and secularized Russian schooling.
The Komsomol, founded two weeks later, extended party formation into organized youth life beyond the classroom. Both were built before the Civil War had even been won, on the premise that a socialist state could not wait for a settled peace to begin forming its children.
The parallel is that both treated the education of children as too consequential to leave to families, markets, or rival authorities, and both built state or party institutions specifically to close that gap. Nizam al-Mulk and the Bolsheviks were separated by eight and a half centuries and were answering different threats—Ismaili da’wa in one case, bourgeois pedagogy in the other—but they reached for the same instrument: a curriculum the state itself controlled, extended by an organized youth structure operating outside the classroom entirely.
The instinct persists into the present, at the level of the state curriculum and below it. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s Imam al-Mahdi Scouts, founded in 1985 and still operating under the party’s own Executive Council, enrolls tens of thousands of children as young as four in Shia indoctrination combined with military training. Former leaders say most members enlist in Hezbollah’s fighting ranks by sixteen or seventeen, and more than two hundred alumni have since died in combat.
The London-based IMPACT-se institute’s analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s 2025–2026 curriculum, used by 1.3 million students, found the Arabic word for “martyr” taught as a first-grade spelling term, fourth-grade arithmetic adding First and Second Intifada death tolls, and a science textbook illustrating Newton’s Law with a girl firing a slingshot, imagery IMPACT-se ties to attacks on Israeli soldiers. Fifth graders in at least one UNRWA-run Gaza classroom were separately instructed to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led a 1978 attack that killed thirty-eight Israeli civilians, as a role model.”
