WRITTEN
STATEMENT OF NINA SHEA

DIRECTOR,
HUDSON INSTITUTE’S

CENTER
FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

BEFORE
THE

INTERNATIONAL
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM CAUCUS

OF
THE

US
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

BRIEFING
ON

“
SAUDI ARABIA : FUELING RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AND
EXTREMISM”

December
1, 2010

.

Last
Sunday, a December 2009 cable that was cited by the New York Times but has not
yet been posted by Wikileaks says that Saudi
donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups such as Al
Qaeda.

America’s top
financial-counterterrorism official, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey,
believes there’s a strong link between education and support for terror. As he
wrote in the Washington Post last June, to end support for such terror, among
other steps,

“we must
focus on educational reform in key locations to ensure that intolerance has no
place in curricula and textbooks. . . . [U]nless the next generation of children
is taught to reject violent extremism, we will forever be faced with the
challenge of disrupting the next group of terrorist facilitators and
supporters.”

Saudi
Arabia is one
such “key location.” The kingdom is not just any country with problematic
textbooks. As the controlling authority of the two holiest shrines of Islam ,
Saudi Arabia is able to disseminate its religious materials among the millions
of Muslims making the hajj to Mecca each year. Such teachings can, in this
context, make a great impression. In addition, Saudi textbooks are also posted
on the Saudi Education Ministry’s website and are shipped and distributed free
by a vast Sunni infrastructure established with Saudi oil wealth to many Muslim
schools, mosques and libraries throughout the world. In his book The Looming
Tower, Lawrence Wright asserts that while Saudis constitute only 1 percent of
the world’s Muslims, they pay “90 per cent of the expenses of the entire faith,
overriding other traditions of Islam." Others estimate that, on an annual basis,
Saudi Arabia spends three times as much in exporting its Wahhabi ideology as did
the Soviets in propagating Communism during the height of the Cold War. From the
Netherlands and Bosnia , to Algeria and Tunisia , to Pakistan and Afghanistan ,
and to Somalia and Nigeria , nationals of these countries have reported that
over the past twenty to thirty years local Islamic traditions are being
transformed and radicalized under intensifying Saudi influence.  The late
President of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid wrote that Wahhabism was making inroads
even in his famously tolerant nation of Indonesia .

To
understand why Jim Woolsey and other terrorism experts call Wahhabism as it
spreads through the Islamic diaspora “kindling for Usama Bin Laden’s match,” it
is important to know the content of Saudi textbooks.  They teach, along with
many other noxious lessons, that Jews and Christians are “enemies,” and they
dogmatically instruct that that it is permissible, even obligatory, to kill
various groups of “unbelievers” — apostates (which includes Muslim moderates who
reject Saudi Wahhabi doctrine), polytheists (which can include Shias and Sufis,
as well as Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists.), Jews, and adulterers. The texts
also teach that the “punishment for homosexuality is death” and discusses that
this can be done by immolation by fire, stoning or throwing the accused from a
high place.

Under the
Saudi Education Ministry’s method of rote learning, these teachings amount to
indoctrination, starting in first grade and continuing through high school,
where militant jihad on behalf of “truth” has for years been taught as a sacred
duty.

The
“lesson goals” of one of the text books is to have the children list the
"reprehensible" qualities of Jewish people and another, that Jews are pigs and
apes.

Reformist
Muslims can also be labeled as “apostates,” and thus they can be killed with
impunity. In the opening fatwa of a Saudi government booklet distributed to
educate Muslim immigrants in 2005 by the Saudi embassy in the United States ,
the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia (a cabinet level government post) responded to a
question about a Muslim preacher in a European mosque who said “declaring Jews
and Christians infidels is not allowed.” The Grand Mufti accused the unnamed
European cleric of apostasy: “He who casts doubts about their infidelity leaves
no doubt about his own infidelity.”

As Saudi
analyst Ali Ahmed recently wrote in the Guardian: “The current textbooks do not
spare most Muslims from the accusations of polytheism, deviance, hypocrisy, and
outright apostasy. For example, the 12th grade book on ‘monotheism’ claims that
many in the Muslim world community have returned to polytheism. …In the
classical Takfiri (declaring others to be outside of religion's bounds) style,
the text allows for the killing of apostates and polytheists, and it does not
take much to qualify as one or the other.”

The
intellectual pioneer of  takfiri doctrine is the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn
Tamiyya. He is cited as a moral guide in the Saudi textbooks – including in the
newly edited, heavily redacted texts used in the Islamic Saudi Academy, a school
operated in Fairfax County , VA , by the Saudi embassy. Students of Saudi high
school textbooks are instructed to consult his writings when they face vexing
moral questions. West Point ’s Center for Combating Terror found that Ibn
Tamiyya’s are “by far the most popular texts for modern
jihadis.”

Saudi
foreign-affairs officials and ambassadors do not dispute the need for education
reform. Their reactions, though, have alternated over the years between
insisting that reforms had already been made and stalling for time by stating
that the reforms would take several years more to complete, maybe banking on the
hope that American attention would drift.

Four years
ago, the Saudis gave a solemn and specific promise to the United States . Its
terms were described in a letter from the U.S. assistant secretary of state for
legislative affairs to Sen. Jon Kyl, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security: “In July of 2006,
the Saudi Government confirmed to us its policy to undertake a program of
textbook reform to eliminate all passages that disparage or promote hatred
toward any religion or religious groups.” Furthermore, the State Department
letter reported that this pledge would be fulfilled “in time for the start of
the 2008 school year.”

Saudi
Arabia has
failed to keep its promise to the United States . One Wikileak cable from the US
embassy reports that Saudi education reform seems “glacial.” In its newly
released 2010 annual report on religious freedom, the State Department itself
asserted, albeit with diplomatic understatement, with respect to Saudi Ministry
of Education textbooks: “Despite government revisions to elementary and
secondary education textbooks, they retained language intolerant of other
religious traditions, especially Jewish, Christian, and Shi'a beliefs, including
commands to hate infidels and kill apostates.” (emphasis added.) 

Saudi
government misrepresentations on its failure to reform national textbooks was in
full display last month in the BBC Panorama’s expose of  40 Saudi part time
schools in the UK, where it tried to deny that the schools were in any way
connected to Riyadh.  The television journalists investigated and found that in
fact the Saudi Cultural Bureau, which is part of the embassy, did indeed have
authority over the network  To be clear, these 40 Saudi schools in the UK teach
from the Saudi national curriculum, which was revealed on the show to include
the lessons on killing apostates, polytheists and homosexuals, as well as on
violent anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile,
Saudi royals have stepped up their philanthropy to higher education around the
world, for which they have garnered many encomiums and awards. Hardly a month
goes by without a news report that one of the princes is endowing a new center
of Islamic and Arabic studies, or a business or scientific department, at a
foreign university. The king himself recently founded a new university for
advanced science and technology inside Saudi Arabia .

These
efforts have bought the royal family much good will, but they should not
distract our political leaders from the central concern of the Saudi 1–12
religious curriculum. This is not the time for heaping unqualified praise on the
aging monarch for promoting “knowledge-based education,” “extending the hand of
friendship to people of other faiths,” promoting “principles of moderation,
tolerance, and mutual respect,” and the like, (phrases with which our diplomatic
statements on Saudi Arabia are replete).

The State
Department needs to begin regular and detail reporting on the remaining
objectionable and violent passages in Saudi government textbooks and to press in
a sustained manner for the kingdom to keep its 2006 pledge to us regarding
textbook reform.  As USCIRF recommends, the administration should also lift the
indefinite waiver of any action pursuant to the designation of Saudi Arabia as a
“Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act –
the only “CPC” to receive an indefinite waiver.

In one of
the Wikileaks cables written earlier this year on Saudi King Abdullah to
Secretary Clinton, US Ambassador James Smith makes the following
observation:

“Reflecting
his Bedouin roots, he judges his counterparts on the basis of character,
honesty, and trust.  He expects commitments to be respected and sees actions,
not words, as the true test of commitment….” 

Bedouin or
not, we should start demanding the same from him.