Saudi reforms: reading, writing, and tolerance

But conversations with students and recent graduates show that some tougher – and often wildly ill-informed – views have taken root. Anti-Jewish rumors are widely believed here, for example. One holds that 4,000 Jews did not show up for work at the World Trade Center buildings on Sept. 11. A variation has it that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon himself called all 4,000 people to warn them. Some Saudis say they believe that the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA and Israel's counterpart, the Mossad. Others ask if it is true that Jews cheered the World Trade Center destruction from the roofs of their New York homes.

"Jews hate us and control the whole world," says one American-born Saudi businessman who asked not to be named. "They are using the Russians, Americans – all Christians – to fight Muslims, to kill each other, so only Jews are left."

But there are also more compromising views, which incorporate the mainstream view that Islam is a religion of peace and that killing or even hurting any innocent creature is wrong.

"If one [you are fighting] surrenders, you must treat them well," says another young businessman. "Even if he is a Jew."

Those at ground zero of Saudi Arabia's school system say that part of the problem is that education lags behind more dynamic, modern-leaning aspects of this society, like business.

"I have never been exposed to anything creative," says a Saudi educator in Jeddah, who asked not to be named. "Critical thinking is nonexistent. This is a 'banking system' of learning: You put all the information in a safety deposit box and leave it there. Our youth are not prepared for globalization."

While the need for reform is widely recognized, not enough attention is being given to content, this Western-schooled educator says.

"There are 64 new colleges, but the curriculum has not changed in 40 years. Some teachers can't read," the educator says. "It's like a building being eaten by termites and rotten on the inside, while outside it is all polish and marble. It can't last."

But change may be difficult to achieve, not least because fundamentalist religious institutions organize education. While their framework is not as extreme as the Taliban and Al Qaeda worldview, their Salafi roots are the same.

"Salafis regard the Islam that most Muslims practice today as polluted by idolatry," an analysis in the journal "Foreign Affairs" noted earlier this year. "The Wahhabi ideology of the Saudi state, for example, and the religious doctrines of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt [adherents of which shaped the Saudi curriculum decades ago] ... are all Salafi ... [and] share the belief that Muslims have deviated from God's plan and that matters can be returned to their proper state by emulating the Prophet."

For Saudi leaders – who forged an alliance with the puritanical Wahab sect 250 years ago to unify this nation – that translates into fighting what one Western diplomat calls an "uphill battle to rein in" hard-liners, like those ready to protest the education merger.

Among them are the religious police, known as Muttawain, which were strongly criticized after the Mecca fire. "This is an alliance, not a theocracy. The imams do not run this country," says the Western diplomat.

But the problem with the religious police mirrors a deeper education gap, the diplomat says. "You can't argue with them. They are ignorant. Just like the Taliban, they rote learn, and know nothing about the context of the Koran and Islam."

"Saudi Arabia needs to recognize they created a monster, by keeping religion and education in the hands of extremists," the diplomat says.

Spreading the word couldn't be easier. "The Internet is playing a major role, it shapes people, and rumors go everywhere," says Saleh al-Khathlan, a political scientist at King Saud University in Riyadh. "An Islamic discourse is dominating it. Everything is seen through the Islamist prism – they are the most active on the internet."

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