RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 5 -- As it faces an armed revolt from within, Saudi Arabia is gradually confronting a painful issue that was long taboo: whether the religious traditions of the kingdom have promoted Islamic terrorism.
Radical clerics, accustomed to preaching violence against unbelievers, are being watched more closely. The government says about 2,000 have been removed from their mosques in the past three years.
Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, arrives at an international anti-terrorism conference in Riyadh.
(Amr Nabil -- AP)
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Religious charities that once funneled billions of dollars to promote extremist ideologies around the world are being regulated for the first time. In schools, reformers are wrestling for control of textbooks and classrooms that have long taught intolerance and hostility toward non-Muslims.
While changes are visible, some old attitudes persist. In November, 26 imams signed a statement urging Muslims to join the insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq. Some Saudi leaders denounced the call to arms, but the clerics were not punished.
This week, in another sign of shifting attitudes in the country that produced al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Saudi government is hosting a major anti-terrorism conference, attended by delegations from more than 50 countries, including the United States.
The official goal is to share information about better ways to catch terrorists, but Saudis are also using the event to try to convince the world that they are serious about addressing the problem, both at home and abroad.
"We are fighting terrorism, those who support it and those who condone it," Crown Prince Abdullah, the country's de facto ruler, said in an opening address to delegates on Sunday. "We will continue to do so until we eliminate, with the help of God, this evil."
The tone and introspection are a marked change from a few years ago, when Saudi officials complained that they were being unfairly maligned for fostering the Islamic extremism embraced by groups such as al Qaeda.
For months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudi leaders refused to acknowledge that most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens. Some senior members of the royal family said Arabs were incapable of carrying out such a well-organized plot and suggested that "Zionists" -- meaning Israelis -- were responsible.
Saudi officials also turned a blind eye to threats at home. In November 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister, declared in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper that there were no al Qaeda cells inside the kingdom and repeated the allegation that Israel was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
A major turning point in Saudi attitudes came six months later, on May 12, 2003, when al Qaeda sleeper cells that had been present in the kingdom for more than a year blew up three residential compounds for foreign workers in Riyadh, killing more than 20 people and wounding more than 200.
Since then, al Qaeda has engaged in a bloody revolt against the Saudi government, killing more than 90 people -- many of them Westerners -- in a series of bombings and kidnappings that have shaken the country.
In response, the government has rushed to upgrade its internal security forces and rounded up thousands of al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers. It has also increased its cooperation with the United States and other countries to fight international terror networks.
But the attacks have forced the country to come to grips with a long-suppressed question: whether the conservative Islamic beliefs that the kingdom was founded upon -- known as Wahhabism -- have opened the way for the emergence of al Qaeda and other groups that practice terrorism.
