The Inherent Violence In Saudi Arabian Education

Teaching Terror
By Nina Shea

Saudi Arabia now supplies jihad fighters for conflicts near and far, often in numbers far disproportionate to its size. As new statistics become available, one thing becomes ever clearer: The Saudi kingdom is the world’s leading exporter of suicide bombers and terrorists.

When it was discovered that three quarters of the hijackers in 9/11, along with the founder of al Qaeda himself, were Saudi native sons, the whole world suffered the realization that Saudi nationals were deeply involved in suicide terror. Less well known, however, is the fact that a Saudi was the mastermind of the terror in Chechnya, that Saudis have figured prominently in recent suicide attacks against Spanish tourists in Yemen, and that a Saudi doctor was a principal in the attack against the airport in Glasgow. Last summer, the state-backed Saudi Human Rights Organization was kept busy visiting Saudi jihadists imprisoned in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

... In Guantanamo, scores of prisoners have been Saudis. Saudis are, in fact, the largest contingent, second only to those from Afghanistan.

... Saudi royal advisers, after reviewing the state’s curriculum a few years ago, concluded: “[The Saudi official religious curriculum] encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’” The official Saudi ideology — known as Wahhabism — in which Saudi students are steeped from a young age, demonizes the West and the religious “other.” Saudi teens have, for years, been instructed by state school textbooks that claim that “fighting unbelief…and those who perpetrate it” is “one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.” The word for “fighting” here is “qital,” derived from “qatala” or “to kill,” and which has virtually no metaphorical meaning in Arabic. Enmity between Saudi Wahhabiists and others is exalted as a sacred duty from first grade through twelfth.

Predictably, this kind of indoctrination results in droves of young Saudi men ready and willing to enlist for suicide missions against infidels and heretics throughout the world. Surely the Saudi media commentators know about the state-sponsored indoctrination, and have views on how to revise the educational system. But an open, sustained, and in depth debate on these issues is yet to be permitted inside Saudi Arabia. Simply raising critical questions is pressing the envelope. By venturing for answers that would fault the Kingdom’s Wahhabi education, one would risk arrest for blasphemy or related charges.

The Saudi state has responded to these developments by quietly going from country to country, begging foreign authorities to release the Saudi prisoners, including the 16 Saudis who were released this month from Guantanamo, and by making a show of “re-educating” them.

Moreover, Saudi officials continue to aver that the educational curriculum has been reformed, just as they have ever since 9/11. In what has become an annual ritual, the State Department takes Saudi avowals on faith, giving assurances of Saudi educational reform, though (in spite of many requests to do so) it has not yet, independently and comprehensively, reviewed the educational texts. And, of course, this year is no different. On September 14, the State Department’s religious-freedom ambassador stated: “[I]n the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah called for increased religious tolerance, and the government took steps to remove intolerant references toward other religious groups from educational materials.”

While the State Department’s assessment is possibly technically accurate, the Saudi state curriculum continues to require a complete overhaul. It does not help Saudi reformers — or American security — to gloss over this fact.