Changing the Way Saudis Learn

SLATE dispatches
Changing the Way Saudis Learn
Americans complain about a Saudi school in suburban Virginia.
By Kelly McEvers
Updated Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009, at 10:12 AM ET
From: Kelly McEvers
Subject: Reforming Saudi Education
Posted Monday, Sept. 7, 2009, at 7:11 AM ET

The all-girls' high school is pretty typical for Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh. Poured-concrete walls, dusty bougainvillea, iron gate, padlocked door. Inside, a covered courtyard keeps out the late-spring heat. On the wall hang hand-drawn posters sporting logos and slogans.

"Everything in this world is a system that controls our lives," reads one poster, a promotion for the school's security force. "Rules were meant to be followed."

"The students drew these themselves!" boasts former teacher and education-reform consultant Jenan al Ahmad. "This is Tatweer."

Loosely translated, the word tatweer means reform. More specifically, it's the title of the King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Public Education Development Project—a $2.4 billion program aimed at dramatically changing the way the country's nearly 5 million students are educated.

The ostensible idea of Tatweer is to improve the quality of graduates in Saudi Arabia—that as the country's population explodes (more than 70 percent of Saudi Arabia is under the age of 30) and oil revenues dwindle, the kingdom needs more critical thinkers prepared to enter a modern, diversified workplace.

The underlying idea is that to produce such graduates, the curriculum must be less focused on religion—or, at least, the single, monolithic version of Islam that has dominated Saudi Arabia since the 1980s.

Known by scholars as Wahhabi-salafism, this version of Islam is built on the teachings of Mohammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, born near what is now Riyadh more than 300 years ago, who advocated the "purification" of Islam from "innovations" such as the Shiite practice of worshipping at the grave of an imam or the Sufi ritual of chanting prayers.

In the 1960s and '70s, Wahhabism was fused with radical Egyptian salafism—a return to the way Islam was practiced in the first three centuries of its existence—when Saudi Arabia granted sanctuary to Egyptian firebrands escaping the wave of secular Arab nationalism in their home country.

Now, Wahhabi-salafis exert near-total control over the Saudi ministries of education and justice—and the religious police. Millions of teachers, judges, and sheiks constantly remind the public that the Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is the only true Islam, and anyone who deviates from the faith is an unbeliever. In some cases, the thinking has gone, those unbelievers deserve to be punished.

This line of thought went nearly unchecked in Saudi Arabia, even after it became clear that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis. It wasn't until two years later that things began to change.

Late on the night of May 12, 2003, three car bombs exploded at housing compounds across Riyadh. On one compound, militants emerged from the rubble and stormed the houses of American, British, and Canadian doctors, nurses, and defense contractors, firing automatic weapons at the families they found inside.

Over the next three years, militants allegedly affiliated with "al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia" launched dozens more attacks across the country. An American engineer was beheaded. A veteran BBC reporter was repeatedly shot in broad daylight.

And the militants' targets were not always foreigners. Many were Saudis. In all, 90 civilians and 74 Saudi policemen died. Hundreds more were injured. All of a sudden, Saudi Arabia's leaders were forced to do some soul-searching.

"Members of the community tried to understand where they went wrong, and how extremist ideologies were able to infiltrate Saudi society," wrote Saudi professor Mohammad Zayed Youssef.

Youssef's close study of the country's school system revealed that not only did it preach hatred against Christians and Jews, but it was filled with "the spread of hatred between Muslims." This curriculum was "aggressively biased toward one school of thought, completely disregarding the principles of dialogue and respect between Muslims," Youssef wrote.

With all this in mind, the kingdom's leaders started to pursue a slow but palpable wave of reform that continues today—a movement led by the ruling monarch himself.

In 2006, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz launched the Tatweer education-reform project and announced it would be run as an independent corporation, outside the purview of the bloated, conservative ministry of education. Not only would the program graduate savvy, job-ready Saudis, but these young citizens would be more open to alternate interpretations of Islam and, ultimately, less likely to commit violence.

As ambitious as the project might sound, though, the posters at the Riyadh girls' school say it all. Such a transformation will be no small task.

The bell rings for recess, and a din of voices pours into the courtyard. Teenage girls mill around an outdoor stage draped with red velvet curtains and booths set up for after-school clubs.

This is a Tatweer school, which means it's an existing school that was reopened last year as a model, a pilot program of sorts to test reforms and see how they work.

"Tatweer is awesome," gushes 16-year-old Mishaal al Suweidan as a group of teachers and administrators looks on. Every student gets a laptop, she says. And students now participate in "group learning," in which the teacher asks them to solve problems, present their answers, and debate solutions. Suweidan says she wants to be an illustrator someday—to make cartoons for television, like her brother.

There seems to be no lack of technical resources for students like Suweidan: Wi-Fi access, do-it-yourself robot kits, and a science lab stocked with specimens handcrafted by an innovative biology teacher. But after hours of touring the school and talking to students and teachers, there's little evidence that the "reform" has gone beyond the purchase of fancy new gadgets—or that the school has tackled the difficult question of how to retool the prevailing religious ideology that underpins all learning in Saudi Arabia.

Taking a coffee break in the school director's office, Islamic-studies teacher Mayala al Qubeiri tells me she uses pretty much the same curriculum she's taught for the last 14 years. She says these days she likes sending students to the Internet to find examples of what's right and what's wrong. But in the end, "we have to rely on the trusted sheiks for a final ruling."

Upstairs, in an Islamic studies classroom, another teacher works from a brand-new electronic smart board to outline familiar Wahhabi-salafi principles. "There should be no one between you and God," she says, a veiled reference to "unbelievers" like Shiites or Catholics who might practice their faith through "intermediaries" like imams or priests.

"There is only one way to God."

As the Tatweer group quickly steers me away from the classroom, I can't help but wonder: If the religious ideology remains virtually unchanged in a "model school" (not to mention one located in an affluent neighborhood near one of the country's leading universities), what real and substantive change is possible in the tens of thousands of regular schools across the rest of Saudi Arabia? What really has been accomplished in the nearly three years since Tatweer was launched?

From: Kelly McEvers
Subject: Americans Complain About a Saudi School in Suburban Virginia
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009, at 10:09 AM ET

Inside Saudi Arabia, debate about how to reform the education system began after the 2003-06 al-Qaida attacks there that killed nearly 200 people.

Outside Saudi Arabia, of course, it all started with 9/11.

When it became clear that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, critics in America looked to Saudi schools and asked if they taught the kind of hatred espoused by the hijackers.

The most vocal of these critics was the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an advisory board founded by the U.S. Congress in the late 1990s to combat the persecution of Christians and Jews in countries like Sudan, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. (A founding member of the commission was Elliot Abrams, a neoconservative who served on George W. Bush's National Security Council, where he was in charge of promoting advancing democracy abroad.)

One of the commission's prime targets was the Islamic Saudi Academy, located just outside Washington, D.C., which uses the same curriculum and textbooks as those inside the kingdom. The ISA is funded, in part, by the Saudi Embassy in Washington and is one of more than a dozen such government-supported schools worldwide.

In late 2001, two former ISA students were forbidden to enter Israel on suspicion they were suicide bombers. One was jailed for four months for lying on his passport application. In 2003, a former ISA valedictorian was arrested in Saudi Arabia for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. He was sentenced to life in prison by a U.S. Court of Appeals last month.

As these cases surfaced, the Commission on International Religious Freedom focused on ISA's textbooks, claiming that the Wahhabi-salafi ideology taught hatred of—and violence toward—non-Muslims. The Saudi Embassy eventually ordered changes to be made to the ISA curriculum, and the school "worked day and night" to revise its textbooks, according to the Washington Post.

But that wasn't enough for the commission. In 2007, it issued a scathing report urging the State Department to close the school unless further revisions were made. But neither federal nor local officials found the material in ISA's textbooks offensive enough to warrant the school's closing, and an editorial in the Post suggested the commission was jumping to conclusions, without a full review of the textbooks and how they were used in the school.

Either way, ISA revised its textbooks again this year—this time replacing words like kaffir, which is often translated as infidel, with more neutral phrases like non-Muslim.

The main campus of the school is situated on a two-lane thoroughfare in Alexandria, Va. Teachers and administrators maintain there is nothing wrong with one religion stating its supremacy over another—especially in a private American school.

"Seventy percent of the teachers here are American. We have Christians, Jews, and atheists—and we have Muslims," says Abdulrahman al Ghofaili, the director-general of ISA.

"They teach my children. How can I teach my children to hate non-Muslims while at the same time entrust those non-Muslim teachers with my children?"

Still, local residents complain.

A recent proposal by the ISA to expand to a larger campus in Fairfax, Va., was met by angry leaflets in residents' mailboxes calling it a "hate training academy." One resident told the New York Times that the school "should not be allowed to exist, let alone expand."

Nonetheless, Fairfax County planners recently approved the expansion. Now the vote will go to county supervisors.

On a recent evening, I meet three former ISA students at a housing complex near the school's main campus. The alumni are now university students; all are completing graduate programs in Virginia.

Saudi native Maryam Assakkaf says ISA students were always able to question and discuss the textbooks with their teachers—while back home in Saudi Arabia, students were more likely to be told to memorize exactly what's in the books.

She concedes that the basic curriculum did have some passages and references that, taken out of context, could have been misconstrued by extremists. But that was never a problem at ISA. "We always had it in some kind of context."

Hadania Al Mazyed, another former ISA student, says those who took the passages out of context were in the minority. "Look at the majority. ... [T]he majority are not violent. And we're all taught from the same books!"

Al Mazyed, who is studying to be an educator herself, says she would like to see the Saudi curriculum be more "outward-looking."

"Is there room for improvement? Absolutely," she says. But should this improvement be "driven by an outside force"—such as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom or suburban Virginians who lack an understanding of Islam? "No, no, no. I don't think so."
Kelly McEvers is based in Riyadh and covers the Middle East for National Public Radio. Reporting for this story was supported by the International Center for Journalists.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2226874/