Turkmenistan takes former leader's oddity off the syllabus

THE rambling spiritual guide penned by Turkmenistan's late president and for years hailed as the source of all universal knowledge, has finally been removed from the country's school curriculum.

The Central Asian nation is abolishing the requirement for final-year pupils to take an exam on Saparmurat Niyazov's Rukhnama, Book of the Soul.

Students will instead have to take a computer science test in the latest sign that the overbearing personality cult to Mr Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan for two decades until his death in 2006, is gradually being dismantled.

Turkmenistan has some of the largest reserves of natural gas in the world and has been actively courted by Western nations, China and Russia. In spite of that international attention, Turkmenistan has largely cut itself off from the world since gaining independence in 1991.

Turkmenistan's educational standards withered under the arbitrary and authoritarian rule of Mr Niyazov. He issued a decree in 2004 invalidating all university degrees obtained abroad and made study of the Rukhnama obligatory for students at all levels. First issued in 2001, the book was quickly made the cornerstone of a pervasive state-sponsored ideology based on Mr Niyazov's world view and was described in official publications as "the source of universal knowledge."

Critics, meanwhile, have described it as an incoherent anthology of insipid literature and folksy, often hopelessly inaccurate, accounts of the nation's history.

"One passage says the Turkmens were the first to harvest (wheat for] bread, even though there was no such thing as the Turkmen people when that happened," said Farid Tukhbatullin, who heads the Vienna-based Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights.

Mr Tukhbatullin said the erratic nature of the book often forced students to simply learn its contents by heart, at the expense of studying more useful subjects.

The Rukhnama was only one part of an elaborate system of state-enforced adulation for Mr Niyazov. Gold-leafed statues of the president were erected all over the country and government media endlessly extolled his policies. The Rukhnama has been translated into dozens of languages, almost always by foreign companies hoping to tap into the country's burgeoning energy wealth.

State workers were formerly obliged to gather for readings from the book on Saturday in dedicated rooms in government buildings. The month of September was renamed Rukhnama. It was changed back in 2008.

The books role in Turkmen society has noticeably waned since Mr Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, came to power.The annual Rukhnama Day in September was once celebrated with great fanfare, but is now only nominally observed.

Mr Berdymukhamedov has gradually implemented educational reforms.

His government has increased basic education to ten years from nine, and higher education has been extended from two years to five.

Last month, he ordered the government to start recognizing foreign educational qualifications, a change that will allow graduates of international universities to get state jobs.