Review Finds Slurs In '06 Saudi Texts

Faridah Turkistani, Girls School principal at the Islamic Saudi Academy. (Katherine Frey - The Washington Post)

Other students said material from the textbooks was sometimes taught in class, although it was unclear how often. "I'm not saying that there wasn't anything that said Islam is the best, everyone else is wrong," said Ahmet Sahin, 31, a 1994 graduate who has worked in Iraq and Kuwait as a Defense Department accounting contractor. "Every religion has that, but there wasn't any emphasis on violent jihad."

The Saudi ambassador to the United States is chairman of the school's board of directors, and the kingdom subsidizes expenses beyond the academy's $3,000 annual tuition for non-Saudi students. Saudi students attend free. Saudi officials said they have little day-to-day involvement in running the academy.

School administrators said teachers were told to keep any inflammatory material out of the classroom. "I taught for 15 years,'' said Dana Nicholas, assistant principal of the girls' school. "I would not have stayed if I thought that my students that were coming into my classroom and dealing with me every day, as a Christian, as a woman, if they were being taught this kind of thing in the Islamic class.''

She is one of numerous non-Muslim staff members at the academy, which was founded in 1984 on the grounds of an old Christian school in Fairfax and moved to the U.S. 1 campus in 1988. Saudi officials said the school was started to educate the children of Saudi diplomats and other Washington area Muslims who had difficulty finding Arabic and Islamic studies programs.

Saudi officials acknowledged that the controversial materials were in the school's Islamic studies textbooks until at least 2006. "We've always conceded there are problems with the textbooks,'' said one Saudi government source, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the textbook issue inside the kingdom. "There are some things that shouldn't be taught to children.''

Saudi officials said inflammatory material was gradually added to the kingdom's textbooks starting in the mid-1990s as religious hard-liners gained power in the kingdom's Education Ministry.

For example, an eighth-grade monotheism book from 2005-06 contains a Koranic verse about Allah turning people into apes and pigs. The textbook states in a footnote: "It is said: The apes are the people of the Sabbath, the Jews. The swine are the unbelievers of Jesus' table, the Christians."

In 2006, in reaction to a report criticizing the textbooks by the Center for Religious Freedom of Freedom House and the Institute for Gulf Affairs, the Saudi Embassy ordered changes, Saudi officials said.

In interviews last week at the main location -- a tree-shaded red-brick building with a small sign visible from the road that simply says "ISA" -- administrators said they worked day and night in summer 2006 to carry out the embassy's mandate. Divided into three committees, they revised textbooks by whiting out words, chopping out paragraphs and creating makeshift books. Because the process was hasty, they said, they missed some things, but they have continued the revisions during the past two years and plan to roll out a new line of books this fall.

Faridah Turkistani, the girls' school principal, said: "We were told [to take out] whatever is controversial. 'Think like an American, and if you feel like there is anything that will upset any nationality or any ethnicity or anything, you know, take it out.' ''

She spoke in a room near the school's entryway, where walls bear photographs of Saudi royal family members and Arabic inscriptions, along with a picture of an American flag. Bulletin boards in the school's hallways showcase student government, model United Nations and sports teams.

Another display depicts a veiled girl and a girl wearing a tank top and jeans. The Arabic at the top reads: "Your veil will protect you as the shell protects the pearl."

Even after the 2006 revisions, a 12th-grade Islamic studies textbook used in 2006-07 contained a reference to jihad as "the pinnacle of Islam" and said: "There is no security or stability except in strength and victory over the enemies. In martyrdom in the path of Allah is a type of honorable life."

Amin Bonnah, an assistant professor in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, said that jihad can have several meanings, including internal struggle, and that he read the passage "not as a call for jihad but as a call for fighting your enemies."

Bonnah, who reviewed Arabic passages from the academy's textbooks, said that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups would interpret that as fighting America and that the reference to martyrdom "means one thing: to kill for God. . . . Martyrdom is what they are doing in Iraq today or Gaza.''

Nina Shea, a commissioner at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, expressed concern that this and other passages could help radicalize students. Noting that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were Saudi, she said, "Saudi Arabia, of all countries, needs to be quite clear about what's permitted in jihad and what isn't.''

She added that the school's efforts to revise the textbooks have fallen short. "They may have ripped out some pages, but we don't know what they ripped out and whited out, so it's difficult to make any comparisons," she said.

Charles Haynes, senior scholar for religious freedom at the First Amendment Center in the District, said the school "deserves credit for trying to clean up the textbooks. That's a big job, given the long history of these kinds of materials being used in Saudi Arabia. They made an effort. They probably need to do better."