Jihad Textbooks

Failing the test
Saudi Arabia: Jihadist textbooks live on in Saudi-supported Islamic schools
 
In Saudi Arabia, a first-grader learns in Monotheism and Jurisprudence class that Jews and Christians are destined for hellfire. Hating them becomes the foundation years later for 12th-grade textbooks that exhort him to wage militant jihad against infidels.
 
Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Gulf Institute, sums up the results of such indoctrination: "Five million students in 25,000 schools. Imagine if only 1 percent of them took to heart the content of these schools. That's 50,000 terrorists."
 
Mr. Al-Ahmed's group researched and provided passages from 12 textbooks for a May 24 Freedom House report on the progress of Saudi education reform. The report shows that, contrary to Saudi claims, little has changed in Saudi-funded textbooks and curriculum -- which predominate at Islamic schools around the world -- since 9/11, when it became evident that the kingdom's virulent brand of Islam, called Wahhabism, was fueling global terrorism.
 
After the report's release, Saudi ambassador to the United States Turki Al-Faisal quickly began damage control. "Overhauling an educational system is a massive undertaking," he said in a statement. "There are hundreds of books that are being revised to comply with the new requirements, and the process remains ongoing."
 
But for the past year, he and other Saudi officials have claimed that intolerant content has been revised. Instead, inflammatory teachings remain in the textbooks, in some cases moved or added.
 
"It doesn't take anyone five years to remove the obvious material," Mr. Al-Ahmed, himself a Saudi who came through his country's schools, told WORLD. "At least they could stop using these textbooks outside [of Saudi Arabia]." The Ministry of Education, he said, is dominated by Wahhabi activists. He believes, overall, that the kingdom has little genuine interest in reform ("World Magazine," June 10, 2006, p. 38).