Saudi Textbooks Retain Hateful Refrains
Schoolchildren primed with pre-persecution slurs against ‘infidels.’
ICC Note:
Textbooks in Saudi Arabian schools continue to discriminate against minorities and teach outright hatred toward Christians and Jews. “The Jews and the Christians are enemies of the believers, and they cannot approve of Muslims” and “The apostate has two punishments; worldly and in the hereafter. Punishment in this life: Death if he does not repent,” are among the teachings studied by Saudi children. Despite international pressure to reform Saudi curriculum, progress has yet to be made.
By Nina Shea
12/10/2012 Egypt (Morning Star News) – I have researched and written about the toxic content of school textbooks published by the Saudi Ministry of Education for almost a decade and have found that little has changed in them over this period. Last year, I had the opportunity as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to travel to Riyadh and meet with the Saudi minister of education, who is King Abdullah’s nephew and son-in-law, Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah Bin Muhammad al-Saud.
The education minister acknowledged that reform of grade 1-12 textbooks was needed but indicated it was not a government priority. I also met with Saudi Justice Minister Muhammad al-Issa and asked him why the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an infamously anti-Semitic fabrication at the time of the Russian revolution, is included in the textbook on Hadiths (traditions of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad) where it continues to be taught as historical fact. The Saudi justice minister said that the Protocols is treated as part of Islamic culture because it is a book that has long been found in plentiful supply in Saudi Arabia (one of the relatively few non-Muslim books to be so), and was a book that his father had in his home.
Muslims in many countries have reported that over the past 20 to 30 years, local Islamic traditions have been transformed and radicalized under the growing influence of Saudi Salafist Islam, known as Wahhabism. The late president of Indonesia, Abdurraham Wahid, wrote that Wahhabism was making inroads even in his famously tolerant nation. Journalists have documented this spread – and the sometimes desperate local Muslim efforts to thwart it – in Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Algeria, the Balkans, and the United Kingdom, among many other places.
Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department has not held Saudi Arabia to its 2006 pledge to reform Saudi textbooks within two years.
In October seven current and former heads of major U.S. publishing houses issued an appeal to the government of Saudi Arabia to stop publishing hate-filled textbooks. Leading it was Robert Bernstein, former chairman of Random House and founder of Human Rights Watch, who is now the chairman of Advancing Human Rights. The publisher at Amazon, the publisher of Simon and Schuster, a Reuters editor-at-large, the editorial director of Broadside Books (HarperCollins), and other prominent publishers joined him.
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