BY EMAN AL NAFJAN
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: In the years just before the
9/11 attacks, I spent two semesters at a public school in Riyadh for
my training as a teacher. I was stationed each day at the campus
gates, instructed to inspect the girls’ abayas as they left school.
For each student older than 12, I checked: Was she wearing the
tent-style cloak over her head and down to her ankles? Was her face
fully covered, no slits for her eyes? I felt like a hypocrite,
penalising girls for violating a custom I don’t support – and one that
the majority of Islamic scholars say is not a religious obligation.
The mandate was and still is part of the
government-issued curriculum taught in Saudi public schools; it was in
their textbooks that the girls were told they should cover their faces
in order to be good Muslim women.
Much is made about the role of Islam in Arab societies
– how different interpretations of the Koran can shape laws and
conventions. But less often do we consider how these interpretations
reach our children: at school and ultimately in the textbooks they
read. Since Saudi Arabia’s first national textbooks were issued in
1937, the controversies they have inspired have mirrored the country’s
most fundamental debates – about religion, the treatment of women, the
influence of the West. Over time, textbooks have become instruments of
the country’s religious conservatives, replete with calls to jihad and
denunciations of non-Muslims. Yet despite periodic reform efforts, and
even though these efforts have escalated amid the global outrage that
followed 9/11, in many ways, the books remain stubbornly impervious to
change. Even in the past two years, they have instructed first-graders
not to greet infidels and warned 10th-graders of the West’s threat to
Islam.
The Saudi education system wasn’t always destined for
orthodoxy. King Abdulaziz, the kingdom’s founder, established the
precursor to today’s education ministry in 1925, seven years before
officially founding the country in 1932. The first national textbooks
were heavily influenced by Egyptian and Lebanese curricula and their
chief author, the researcher Omar Abduljabbar, was considered a
progressive, opening one of Saudi Arabia’s first private girls’
schools at a time when only boys could attend public schools.
By the 1950s however, religious ultraconservatives had
begun putting down roots in the education ministry. Despite the
ministry’s efforts to recruit members of the Muslim Brotherhood from
Egypt and Syria, who were seen as proponents of a more liberal form of
Islam, the more powerful Saudi religious establishment ensured that
textbooks and school policies would become more intolerant and
conservative, which the government’s 1969 educational policy document
solidified formally. In the following decades those brave enough to
criticise the government-mandated curriculum were scarce if not
non-existent. Saudis who were unhappy with the public education system
could send their children abroad; even private Saudi schools were (and
still are) required to teach Arabic and the government’s religious
curriculum.
Things went on this way with few changes until 15 of
the 19 hijackers responsible for the 9/11 attacks were revealed to
have been Saudis. Suddenly, outsiders began asking questions and
pointing fingers, wondering what exactly was being taught in our
schools. A 2002 Boston Globe report, for instance, bearing the
headline ‘Saudi schools fuel anti-US anger’, quoted inflammatory
passages from a government textbook, such as: "The hour will not come
until Muslims will fight the Jews and Muslims will kill all the Jews".
Saudis too began to reconsider: What kind of messages were we teaching
our children?
The question was blown wide open in 2006 with the
publication of a Freedom House report titled ‘Saudi Arabia’s
Curriculum of Intolerance’ which was translated into Arabic and
published in the local newspaper Al-Watan. The report analysed
12 Islamic studies textbooks, concluding that "the Saudi public school
religious curriculum continues to propagate an ideology of hate toward
the ‘unbeliever’" – most egregiously in a 12th- grade text that
instructed students to wage violent jihad against infidels to "spread
the faith". Many Saudis bristled at a foreign organisation meddling in
their internal affairs but the findings managed to rekindle the debate
about Saudi education. The pages of Saudi schoolbooks were finally
submitted to a new, unfamiliar scrutiny – not just from outsiders but
also from Saudis themselves.
The education ministry responded to the criticism,
appearing to commit itself to reform by relegating 2,000 teachers it
deemed extremists to administrative roles far from the classroom. The
ministry also instructed principals to report anyone preaching
extremism. Yet textbooks remained largely untouched, with only the
most explicitly intolerant material removed. Now and then a journalist
today picks up one of the government-issued schoolbooks only to find
that extremism has sneaked back into Saudi schools.
In the 2010-2011 academic year the new first-grade
jurisprudence book (yes, "Islamic jurisprudence" is taught in the
first grade, along with a subject called
"monotheism") condemned saying hello to non-Muslims. The lesson was
presented as a dialogue between a teacher and a student named Ahmed.
Ahmed asks: "Should I say hello to people I don’t know?" The teacher
replies: "Yes, you say hello to Muslims you know and Muslims you don’t
know."
The news caused an uproar in the Saudi media that
prompted the education ministry to recall the books and remove the
offensive portion. But the new copies suspiciously omitted the names
of the book’s authors, replacing them with the phrase "Authored and
revised by a team of experts". Among the book’s creators had been
Sheikh Yusuf al-Ahmad, known for suggesting that the Grand Mosque in
Mecca be rebuilt to ensure complete gender segregation and for calling
for a boycott against supermarkets that planned to employ female
cashiers. (The sheikh is currently in prison for speaking out against
the government’s practice of imprisoning political dissidents
indefinitely and without charge.)
Just last year new interpretations were introduced in
the boys’ 10th-grade Hadith, the book of the Prophet Muhammad’s
sayings and traditions. (Ever since a 1958 royal decree that allowed
Saudi girls to attend public schools, boys and girls have been
required to use different textbooks.)
The move seemed progressive on the surface: The new
subjects included human rights, westernisation, globalisation and
international scholarships – but under these headings lay more
propaganda. Westernisation, for instance, was described (in a
mouthful) as a policy "exerted by the dominant forces by tools such as
the Security Council and the United Nations in order to implement
westernisation strategies in poor countries, especially Islamic
nations, under the slogans of reform, democracy, pluralism, liberalism
and human rights, particularly with regard to women and religious
minorities". The book also warned that by obtaining an education in
the West, Saudi students were at risk of adopting beliefs, values and
behaviours at odds with Islam.
The Hadith additions were widely thought to be an
underhanded way of criticising Saudi King Abdullah’s scholarship
programme which since 2005 has funded 1,30,000 Saudi students to study
in countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States.
That such anti-western language made it into the Hadith proves how
embedded Saudi ultraconservatives are in the education ministry – they
were able to modify textbooks even against official national
programmes.
The education ministry ultimately held its ground,
revising the textbooks to exclude the intolerant subject matter.
Still, teaching extremism is only one facet of a much larger, more
persistent problem. In a 2009 study on education reform in Saudi
Arabia, Riyadh-based researcher Ahmed al-Eisa found that the lion’s
share of the average male Saudi student’s class time – about 30 per
cent – is still in religion. It is no wonder then that Saudi Arabia
ranks so poorly in other core academic subjects. In the 2007 ‘Trends
in International Mathematics and Science Study’, published by the US
National Centre for Education Statistics, only Ghana and Qatar fared
worse than Saudi Arabia in eighth-grade maths scores across 48
countries. In science, Saudi students only performed better than those
in Ghana, Qatar, Botswana and El Salvador.
A study published last year by religious scholar
Abdulaziz al-Qasim found that Saudi religion textbooks "have focused
far too much on the lowest educational and skill objectives, such as
rote memorisation and classification, and neglected entirely the
objectives of analysis, problem solving and critical thinking",
leading to "passiveness and negativity". But Eisa’s 2009 study noted
that there is widespread refusal within the education ministry even to
acknowledge the need for an overhaul.
It has been more than a decade since the education
ministry began working on a plan to address these problems. Known as
the Comprehensive Curricula Development Project, it is expected to be
implemented across the kingdom in the next year, according to its
website. Yet if one reads the project’s mission statement for
religious textbooks, it is difficult to be optimistic. It calls for
the books to require that "the learner grasp his membership and
loyalty to Islam and derive all his affairs within it and renounce all
that goes against it" as well as to "protect himself in facing deviant
sects, creeds, false interpretations of Shariah with reason, evidence
and politeness". Nowhere in the statement’s 28 points is there any
mention of tolerance or peace. Somehow "time management", No. 28, is a
bigger priority.
Even if the ministry’s changes materialise, education
reform in Saudi Arabia is not simply a matter of revising textbooks.
It is a matter of changing the minds of whole generations. Saudis who
were taught to believe a very narrow interpretation of Islam are now
foisting it on millions more students. They will have to determine a
way forward – but they won’t find the answer in their textbooks.
(Eman Al Nafjan is the author of Saudiwoman’s
Weblog. This article was published in Foreign Policy magazine,
May-June 2012.)
Courtesy: Foreign Policy;
www.foreignpolicy.com