The academy opened in 1984 and stayed out of the spotlight until the Sept. 11 attacks. Criticisms were revived in 2005, when a former class valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was charged with joining al-Qaida while attending college in Saudi Arabia. He was convicted on several charges, including plotting to assassinate President Bush, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Most recently, the religious freedom commission–an independent federal agency created by Congress–issued its report, saying it was rebuffed in its efforts to obtain textbooks to verify claims they had been reformed. The commission recommended that the academy be shut down until it could review the textbooks to ensure they do not promote intolerance. Since the commission’s report, the academy has given copies of its books to the Saudi embassy, which then provided them to the State Department. The commission is waiting to get the books from the State Department. On Nov. 15, a dozen U.S. senators, including Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., wrote a letter to the State Department urging it to act on the commission’s recommendations. And on Tuesday, Reps. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Steve Israel, D-N.Y., introduced legislation to write the commission’s recommendations regarding the academy into law.
The Washington Post has already chastised the government panel for failing to ask enough times to look at the textbooks. The school’s director says that the textbooks have been cleaned up, but after the Saudi government similarly claimed to have modified its textbooks in 2006, Nina Shea at Freedom House reported that those textbooks still included passages such as these:
SIXTH GRADE: Just as Muslims were successful in the past when they came together in a sincere endeavor to evict the Christian crusaders from Palestine, so will the Arabs and Muslims emerge victorious, God willing, against the Jews and their allies if they stand together and fight a true jihad for God, for this is within God’s power. EIGHTH GRADE: As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus. TWELFTH GRADE: Jihad in the path of God — which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it — is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.
The real problem then is not that a religious school is asserting that it’s religious claims–even hate-filled claims against other religions–are true, but that particular teachings compel believers to wage war on unbelievers. As much as the Washington Post editorial page and U.S. political leaders would hate to admit it, even if the textbooks of the Saudi academy were scrubbed of intolerance, a literal interpretation of certain passages in the Koran would still promote violence. After all, when bin Laden and friends issued their 1998 declaration of war, they weren’t quoting from a textbook when they wrote: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).”
