Muslim sex education: just say no
Email Print Normal font Large font By Caroline Milburn
May 29, 2006
ISLAMIC schools in Australia have adopted a sex education policy aimed at overturning the influence of Western sexual values on their students.
Under the policy, non-Muslim teachers would be banned from teaching sexual health classes. Students would be taught that pre-marital sex and homosexuality were anti-Islamic and therefore prohibited.
Otherwise, Muslim teenagers were in danger of forming their attitudes to sex from un-Islamic sources such as newspapers, magazines, television and the internet, the policy said.
"Thus Muslim youth may end up getting the wrong notion of sex, as for example, safe sex is OK," the document, Sex Education Policy: an Islamic Perspective, says. "It is imperative that the Islamic attitude to sex should win the race over the Western attitude to sex in reaching the minds of Muslim youth."
The policy has been adopted by private schools that are members of the Australian Council for Islamic Education in Schools.
One of the report's authors, Mohamed Hassan, the principal of Minaret College, in Springvale, Melbourne, said Islamic sex education classes would not include discussion about "safe sex" - the use of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases - because it encouraged promiscuity.
"If you are going to tell kids that safe sex is OK, you are more or less encouraging them in this behaviour. But it is not acceptable outside marriage," he said.
Meanwhile, experts in teenage sexual health have warned that sexual diseases will become rampant among young Australians if state governments continued to avoid introducing a universal sex education program into all schools.
A leading adolescent health expert, Professor Susan Sawyer, said the rising rates of sexually transmitted infections among under 25-year-olds, could soon reach levels found in the US.
