Five years on the debate continues. Saudi educators argue that the problem lies in misinterpretation of religious texts or their ‘exploitation’ to justify intolerance.

‘The problem is not with the texts of religious curricula, which are largely based on the Koran and the Sunna (Prophet Mohammed’s doings and sayings),’ said Hamad Al Majed, an education professor at Imam Mohammed bin Saud University.

But some religious texts are interpreted by extremists to back up their thinking, while other texts fuel extremism when taken out of context, said Majed, who has taken part in dialogues with Americans on religious freedom.

One example is a verse urging Muslim faithful to ‘fight the infidels around you, and be tough with them.’

The verse referred to a situation in which the prophet was under attack by enemies and amounted to a call for self-defense, not to go on the offensive, the professor told AFP.

Saudi officials, who started reviewing schoolbooks even before the 2001 attacks in the United States, should ‘look at this matter without sensitivity and remove whatever could be misinterpreted’  from curricula, he said.

Changes have been introduced and continue to be made. Even ‘the dose of religious studies’ fed to students is a subject of debate, he added.

Khaled Al Awwad, a member of the appointed Shura (consultative) Council and former education ministry undersecretary, said that since September 11, curricula have been reviewed by specialized committees which dropped some of the material that could be misunderstood or ‘exploited’ to promote extremism.

Saudi curricula in general do not encourage intolerance of other faiths or extremism, he insisted.

Other factors are more liable to fuel extremism, such as ‘the injustice inflicted on some Muslim peoples’ and US support for Israel, which creates hatred toward the United States, Awwad argued.

According to Aziza Al Mana, a US-educated professor of education at King Saud University, ‘the flaw can be traced to the insertion of personal views of the authors in religious schoolbooks.’

‘After a verse (from the Koran holy book) or a text from the Hadeeth (words of the prophet), the author adds his personal, fanatical views,’ she said.

Mana, who sits on a committee preparing the sixth round of a ‘national dialogue’ on developing the Saudi education system, said it needed to be revamped to introduce more relevant sciences, change teaching methods and foster independent thinking.

‘If we can create a student who thinks freely, he will not be unduly influenced by personal opinions featuring in some books ... Our students now don’t have a critical mind,’ Mana said.

Officials are also trying to ‘curb the extremism’ of some teachers, she said.

Saudi schoolbooks have been accused of promoting intolerance of not just non-Muslims, but also of Islamic sects other than the purist Sunni Salafi school from which the Wahhabi doctrine dominant in Saudi Arabia is derived.

Books taught in schools and at universities are written by Salafis, some of whom put in their own explanations to ‘incite (students) against any trend that differs from Salafi thought’, Mana said.

‘Neither the Koran nor the Sunna say anything about sects, since the splits (between Muslims) occurred in the second generation. So anything said about sects (in books) is an interpretation by scholars,’ she added.

Saudi Arabia has a large minority of Shias and smaller communities of Ismailis, an offshoot of Shiism, and Sufis.

The beliefs of non-Sunni Muslims ‘should be presented (in schoolbooks) in an academic way, as facts, not from a critical perspective,’ Majed said.

Hatoon Al Fassi, a historian and women’s rights activist, said it was only three years ago when Al Qaeda militants struck at home that Saudis began to talk in public about ‘other (non-Salafi) sects’, whose existence was hitherto totally ignored.

The debate was sparked by triple suicide bombings of residential compounds in Riyadh in May 2003 that ushered in a wave of attacks in the oil-rich kingdom.

‘This was our own September 11. Before that, no one would believe that there is extremism or even that Saudis carried out the September 11 attacks. Saudis were in a state of denial,’ Fassi said.