Talibanization of Education: Serbia on the Brink of a Clerical State

Serbia is one step away from the darkness of a clerical state. The talibanization of education in Serbia is no longer a warning, but a state–church project.

When Metropolitan Irinej announces that the Serbian Orthodox Church is “founding a church university” and at the same time declares state universities a “cataclysm,” this represents a program of delegitimizing public universities and an announcement of their clerical replacement.

When, at the same time in Niš, study programs are being removed from the Faculty of Philosophy through administrative force by the Ministry of Education and transferred to the newly established Faculty of Serbian Studies under the political patronage of the regime, we are no longer dealing with isolated actions. We are witnessing a pattern. We are witnessing a regime-led operation to take control of education and subject it to radical party and clerical oversight.

This is not reform, nor care for knowledge, nor a renewal of education. This is a cleronationalist abduction of education, a fascization of the public sphere through the disciplining of thought, the suppression of pluralism, and the replacement of critical knowledge with dangerous ideology.

The regime of Aleksandar Vučić and the leadership of the Serbian Orthodox Church clearly seek a university that will produce obedient subjects of a national-clerical order.

Solidarnost calls on all well-intentioned citizens to urgently stand together against attempts to turn education into a field of political revenge, church control, and dangerous ideological uniformity. Defending the university from national talibanization is a defense of the constitutionally secular state and Serbia’s European future.