Don’t Be Friends With Christians or Jews: Saudi Texts Say
HASSAN FATTAH

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, May 23 — Despite years of work aimed at changing Saudi Arabia’s public school curriculum, the country’s latest textbooks continue to promote intolerance of other religions, a new study said Tuesday.

 This New York Times article on the issue of Saudi textbooks (as reported in the Sunday Washington Post gives a far more useful look at the problem.

 Yes, the textbooks are being cleaned up, but the job’s not done and there are probably some things in the new texts that should still be removed. But doing so isn’t simply a matter of the government’s saying, “Do it!” The article continues:

It is an uphill battle to revise the curriculum because the resistance by well-established conservative pockets is so fierce,” Mr. Zulfa said.

One Saudi official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, also cited religious conservatives. “We know what needs to be taken out,” he said. “But it’s not that easy to do it.”

Hamza al-Mozainy, a professor of linguistics and a columnist who has campaigned for education reform, said the seeming clash between Islam and the West creates a tough environment for change.

“What makes changing the curriculum so difficult is that the people are living in the middle of a conflict,” he said. One of the easiest ways conservatives have of attacking him is to say he is serving America by demanding the change, he says.

“As we discuss change, they say, ‘Look what America is doing to us, look what Israel is doing,’ ” he said.

But even if the textbooks were changed, the effort might not amount to much unless the country’s teachers were retrained, a far more difficult matter.

 

 Many Americans have the gravely mistaken view that the Saudi King has full, autocratic control over what happens in the country. He does not. While his powers are not limited by a formal constitution, they are very much limited by the “art of the possible”. I noted in comments to my earlier post on the textbooks, there are a handful of real and important constraints on the monarch:

 Other family members
 The Ulema
 Tribal interests
 Major business families
 The Council of Ministers
 The Shoura Council
 Increasingly, public opinion

 Several of these can be played off each other—sometimes—but they can’t all be ignored simultaneously. And given the ebb and flow of politics, sometimes one of these parties will have more influence—or have a greater need to be politically assuaged.

 A further mistake people make is to assume that the Saudi government speaks with one voice, that all the bureaucrats are on board with whatever the government program happens to be. Would that the world worked like that! Saudi bureaucrats–whether deep within the ministries or standing in front of a classroom–have their own opinions about how things should be. If they don’t like the way things are going, they have their ways (well known to bureaucrats since five minutes after bureaucracy was invented) to  stop things dead in their tracks, to subtly shift the policy direction, to subvert the policy, or simply ignore the policy.

This problem is worse in Saudi Arabia than in the US, but not as bad in some other developing countries. It comes down to the fact that real professional competence doesn’t run very deep in the Saudi government. The decades of being the “employer of last resort”, essentially guaranteeing any Saudi a government job, is showing some of its downsides right here.