Manning the Barricades: Islam According to Saudi Arabia's School Texts
2003; Middle East Institute; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-3461
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish Identity and Society
ResumoThe Saudi educational system has been criticized in the United States for allegedly inciting anti-Western sentiments, but is this criticism deserved? The present article is based on a reading of the kingdom's mandatory religion texts in the subjects of Islamic jurisprudence, hadith, and tawhid for the 9th through 12th grades. It reveals that, while the texts do include repetitive warnings about dealing with non-Muslims, much of the criticism reflects a selective reading and imputes hostile messages to the texts when, on the whole, it is fear and defensiveness that are implied. The article suggests that the religion curriculum fails to give Saudi students an adequate appreciation of the varieties of Islamic interpretation, and that the method of instruction does not serve the development of critical thinking skills. Since the events of September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia's religion curriculum has been targeted in the US media for allegedly fostering against non-Muslims, exclusivity among Muslims, and incitement toward military jihad.1 At the same time, the Saudis have been accused of exporting this curriculum abroad in an attempt to claim their home-grown version of Islam as normative for all Muslims.2 Since fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia, an implication of these charges is that the Saudi government was indirectly complicit in the attacks on the United States. But does Saudi Arabia's religion curriculum deserve all this criticism, or have accusers simply cherry-picked through school texts and taken information out of context? Would reading school lessons in their entirety, including interpretative materials and study questions, give a different view of the messages endorsed within the national curriculum? After reading the textbooks of the mandatory religion courses, grades nine through twelve, it seems to me that there is no clear-cut answer to these questions. The religion curriculum is extensive, incorporating four separate courses and designed to occupy more than a third of students' weekly classroom hours in elementary and middle school, and at least four hours a week in high school.3 In two of these courses, Hadith and Islamic Culture [hadith are narratives of the life of the Prophet] and Fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence], defensiveness in relation to non-Muslims is pervasive, but lessons that could be cited as expressing outright toward non-Muslims are few in number. However, another course of study, called Tawhid, or Islamic monotheism, is all about boundaries between non-Wahhabi Muslims and other Muslims, and disassociating from non-Muslims.4 A further complication is that there are two separate sets of textbooks for religion, one published by the now-defunct General Presidency for Girls' Education,5 and the other by the Ministry of Education, and the two are not exactly the same. In some cases texts that are parallel in terms of grade level and course title deal with completely different subjects, and where issues of hostility arise, the General Presidency's text tends to be more strident. The hadith and fiqh texts are focused on teaching correct behaviors, ritual obligations, and moral values with reference to examples from the life of the Prophet and passages from the Qur'an. In the hadith texts the instructional method is to cite a single hadith, parse its vocabulary, explain its meaning and then elaborate on the hadith's implications for behavior with reference to proofs, citations from the Qur'an and additional hadith. The fiqh lessons, on the other hand, begin with a behavioral or ideological issue, followed by selective evidence from Qur'an or hadith marshaled to support conclusions about behavioral choices. The tawhid texts introduce the life and scholarly work of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab and his role in the founding of the Al Sa'ud's political leadership. Their focus, however, is on awakening students to the dangers of polytheism which lurk in all sorts of ritual acts from the veneration of saints to magic tricks and sorcery to Sufi mysticism and Shi'i mourning for Husayn, although neither Sufi nor Shi'i are mentioned by name. …
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