Salaam dear young friends, and hope you are all fine by the Grace of God Almighty. This is our last chat of the Gregorian Calendar Year 2021, which means our next meeting will be in 2022.
So let us first felicitate our Christian readers on the occasion of Christmas which they celebrated last Saturday as the supposed birthday of Prophet Jesus (AS). We also wish them a happy New Year, which they would be celebrating coming Saturday.
Well, as you youngsters know, yesterday on the 7th of the Iranian month of Dey (December 28), we marked the anniversary of the literacy campaign that was launched in Iran on the orders of that Sage of the Age, Imam Khomeini (RA), following the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Those were the days when more than half of the Iranian population was illiterate, since the tyrannical Pahlavi regime – installed by the British and backed by the Americans – was against the national values and religious culture of the Iranian Muslim people.
Thanks to the efforts of the Islamic Republic, today some 95% of the Iranians are literate, while 98 % of the country’s population enjoy the blessing of education. Universities and higher education centres in Iran cover all subjects taught at the international level, ranging from various branches of humanities to natural sciences, including nuclear technology, stem cell medicine, and aerodynamics.
In addition, the seminaries throughout Islamic Iran, especially in the two holy cities of Qom and Mashhad are undoubtedly the centres for diffusion around the world of the genuine teachings of Islam, as bequeathed to us by the Messenger of Mercy, Prophet Muhammad (SAWA), and his Infallible Ahl al-Bayt. Students from some 70 world countries are studying Islamic sciences in Iran.
This progress has come despite the criminal sanctions imposed on Iran by the Great Satan (US) and its devilish lackeys. This is the key to the success of Iran in thwarting the plots of Global Arrogance and its agents.
For your information young friends, according to UNESCO, the literacy figures for various world countries are indeed pathetic. Overall, during the years 2000 to 2010, illiteracy worldwide was reduced by just 1%. UNESCO says that in 2014 there were about 774 million illiterate adults among the world’s population – not to speak of the children and adolescents numbering hundreds of more millions who continue to be deprived of education and even basic literacy skills on our Planet.
It is said, half of the world’s illiterates live in war-hit and crisis-torn countries. In low-income countries, a mere 37% of teenagers barely reach the first grade of secondary level before dropping out, and this rate for the very poor people is 14%.
We hope the governments of world countries will realize the importance of education and literacy, and devote their efforts to the progress of their populations instead of kowtowing to the dictates of big powers, who have unleashed wars, bloodshed, cultural depravity, political stagnation, economic crises and terrorism in our region.
Goodbye and God bless you.