New Iraqi school spans chasms between religions

Just outside the sprawling mosque that used to be known as the Saddam Hussein Mosque in Hilla, a somber memorial recalls the city's dark history. On one end, an outstretched hand rises towards the sky, steel rods jutting from it to signify lost souls rising to heaven.

Just below it lie the 76 graves of unidentified victims of Mr. Hussein's regime found in a mass grave in Hilla last May, separated by a stream from a fountain. Around the statue, scriptures from the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran offer prayers for the victim's souls.

For the Hilla School of Religion, which took over the mosque and requisitioned the memorial, it's meant as a dramatic statement in a town that prefers not to discuss the issue of the mass graves. Indeed, in the most unlikely of places, an unlikely school has begun raising critical questions about faith, humanity, and religion.

Founded six months ago by a Shiite scholar, the institution bills itself as the Arab world's only school of theology, teaching Muslim, Christian, and Judaic texts. In a town full of deep-seated sorrow, the statue may best embody the school's credo of breaking down barriers and asking dangerous questions.

"This is a school of theology, not of Islam," said Sheikh Faris al-Shareef, professor of Islamic law and philosophy at the school. "There is one thing that unites all of us: God and his prophets. With that realization, you can teach all theologies." And by discussing all theologies, many of the school's largely Muslim leadership insist, Islam itself can be reinterpreted and rethought.

About 250 students of all ages have descended on the experimental school in search of a broader understanding of faith. The school's scholars have broken from the traditions of Islamic teaching and the Shiite orthodoxy, sprinkled in some concepts of secularism and social justice, and cobbled together a new curriculum for studying theology in the broadest sense.

The school's 180 or so full-time students and 50 or so part timers now study the teachings of the Bible and the Torah; they may learn a few things about religions like Hinduism and Buddhism as well. All the while, they are sent searching for religious insights into everything from medicine to astronomy. Computers are taught as a religious tool; philosophy becomes a theological discipline.

The ultimate goal, says Sheikh Farqad al-Quzwini, the school's founder and dean of its 25 or so faculty members, is to get at answers to the vexing religious problems that left Iraq, and perhaps much of the Muslim world, in its current state.

"For 35 years, Iraqis have feared nothing but Saddam," says Mr. Quzwini, a giant man who wears the headdress of a Shiite cleric. "What's supposed to happen now is that humanity must stop firing the bullets; the language itself has to change. We must fix the Iraqi before we can fix Iraq."

Quzwini began changing the language in 1999 as a student at the Hawza, the Shiite seminary, in Najaf. With a penchant for discussions that made many in the Hawza orthodoxy cringe - most of all, veiled challenges to the regime - Quzwini set out to develop an experimental curriculum that challenged the orthodoxy.

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