State Dept. Urged to Shut Saudi School in Fairfax

The Saudi academy was founded in 1984 to educate pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade children of Saudi diplomats; it also enrolls others. Its enrollment has fallen to 1,000 students from 1,300 five years ago, a decrease Saudi activists call a result of negative publicity in recent years. About 30 percent of the students are Saudi.

The academy is unlike other private Muslim schools in the United States, in part because it is heavily funded by the Saudi government, whose official religion is a rigid strain of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. The chairman of the school's board of directors is the Saudi ambassador.

The eight-year-old commission, a creation of Congress, puts out a report each May meant to advise the White House, Congress and the State Department about "countries of particular concern" when it comes to religious freedom. It has no power to implement policy on its own.

Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House subcommittee on state and foreign appropriations, announced yesterday that he plans to introduce a House resolution requiring Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to close the Saudi Academy until its textbooks are made available for public examination.

State Department spokesman Karl Duckworth said the department is studying the commission's report. "We continue to engage the government of Saudi Arabia on the need to address the intolerant references toward other religious groups in their textbooks and in other educational materials," he said. "There has been progress . . . but they still have a ways to go."

The commission and other religious-freedom groups have been complaining about Saudi textbooks for years, and congressional hearings have been held on the subject. Last year, the Saudi government agreed to make changes. The commission is following up but said it has not been given access to the revised texts.

Ordinarily, the U.S. government would have little power to close a private religious school, said Kevin Seamus Hasson, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

But because the school is funded by the Saudi government, the U.S. government could consider the school a Saudi entity and, thus, subject to a U.S. law that gives the government wide discretion in regulating the non-diplomatic activities of foreign governments in the United States, Hasson said.

At the main campus in the Fairfax County section of Alexandria yesterday, students and teachers -- some sheathed in veils, others in Western clothes -- went about their day while administrators scrambled to address the commission's report.

Alghofaili said that a number of worried parents called the school yesterday after hearing about the report and asked if the school would be closed. "Our response has been that we are fine," he said.

Staff writer Michelle Boorstein contributed to this report.