Riyadh: Accused of promoting religious radicalism that inspired the September 11 attacks, Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to reform its school curriculum, but clerical opposition means change will be slow, analysts say.
King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz appointed a new team to lead the education ministry this year in a surprise reshuffle in the Islamic state, where reformers say promises of change have amounted to little.
Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah, a former intelligence official, took over as education minister with Faisal Bin Muammar, who headed a body set up in 2003 to promote social and economic reforms, as his deputy.
"We have been calling for such changes for a long time," said Mohammad Yousuf, a professor of education at King Abdul Aziz University who wrote a book in 2004 on restructuring the Saudi education system.
The United States zeroed in on Saudi schools after it emerged that 15 of the 19 attackers who killed some 3,000 people there on September 11, 2001 were Saudi. They acted in the name of an Islamist group, Al Qaida, headed by a Saudi, Osama Bin Laden.
Foreign and Saudi critics said Saudi educational material encourages the killing of non-believers and promoted the idea of cleansing Muslim countries from Western cultural influences.
Saudi government concerns deepened after Al Qaida-linked militants launched a campaign to destabilise the kingdom in May 2003, targeting government buildings, energy installations and foreign residential compounds in suicide bomb attacks. Yousuf said "national dialogue" discussions presided over by new deputy education minister Bin Muammar had helped the government mobilise support for a new approach.
"It became clear that one of the most important causes of terrorism is the monopoly of a certain group of people ... over building the curriculums in the kingdom," he said.
In 2005 King Abdullah launched a 9 billion riyal project for "education development", laying the ground for bigger changes in the Islamic Studies curriculum.
The curriculum changes will rephrase certain principles depicted in the textbooks, allowing for a more moderate interpretation, said Ahmad Modi, a Sharia expert and writer.
"There are certain individuals who have extremist views in Islam. The changes (to textbooks) have ushered in a realistic view, that Islam is a hospitable religion," he said.
