U.S. 'Studying' Islamic School Report

The Saudi academy, which operates on two campuses in Northern Virginia, was founded in 1984 to educate pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade children of Saudi diplomats; about 30 percent of the roughly 1,000 students are Saudi, the school said. The school has a governing board headed by the Saudi ambassador to the United States and receives much of its funding from the Saudi government.

The commission was created by Congress eight years ago and issues an annual report about religious freedom around the world. Its members are appointed by the White House and congressional leadership. The current chairman is Michael Cromartie, vice president of the D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, at which he directs the Evangelicals in Civic Life program.

The commission has been studying Saudi curricula for years, said Commissioner Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the D.C.-based nonprofit Hudson Institute.

Shea said the Saudi school is unlike any other private religious school in the country because of its connections to Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, a number of whom were adherents of Wahabism.

She said Saudi officials have promised since 2004 to revise the school's curriculum to remove material.

"Ronald Reagan used to say, 'Trust but verify,' " she said. "I now believe we must verify and not take the Saudi government's word on faith."

School officials said the commission did not call and ask directly for the books. The commission said it asked the embassy and never received a response.

Nail Al-Jubeir, spokesman for the Saudi Embassy, said the Saudi ambassador has exchanged letters with Freedom House and invited officials to the school in the past few years. He said the last letter was sent Oct. 16, 2006.

"We never got a response," he said. "This whole issue should never have been raised."

Tom Melia, deputy executive director of Freedom House, said letters had been exchanged but called the embassy invitation "a red herring."

"We've asked them for the textbooks, and they said, 'Sure, when the new editions come in.' We've never received them," Melia said. "We'd still like to see them. . . . We are always interested in dialogue."

Ali Al-Ahmed, founder of the nonprofit Saudi Institute, which monitors Saudi Arabia, said he has seen the revised textbooks and finds that they still contain unacceptable material that promotes extremism. "It is like trying to remove a piece of bread that has a lot of mold," he said. "You can't do it. You remove a spot, but the bread is bad."

But Zenit Chughtai, who said she graduated from the academy and is attending Michigan State University, praised the school. "A terrorist school? A school of hate? This is the exact opposite of how I recall school," she said in an e-mail. "We were taught respect, tolerance, love, and decency."