On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (22 page)

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, King Fahd, who served as the kingdom’s first minister of education, as we have seen, gave the religious establishment free rein to dictate what went on in educational institutions—and nearly every other aspect
of Saudi life. By 1991, when U.S. troops entered Saudi to help evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, the beehive of fanatics bred during the preceding decade turned on the royal family—and on the religious establishment that supported the Al Saud. These radical Islamic critics saw the established religious scholars as tools of the Al Saud and the Al Saud as lackeys of the American infidels. In short, King Fahd (and the royal family) was hoist on his own petard.

The rulers imprisoned some of their critics and bought off others, believing they had suppressed extremists, but in reality these radical religious fundamentalists simply went underground, only to erupt with deadly attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and, of much more direct concern to the Al Saud, bombings and other terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia in 2003.

Belatedly awakened to terrorism’s threat, the royal family in recent years seriously has sought to combat extremism to protect itself. Curbing extremism, they realize, requires changing the educational system both to teach a more tolerant version of Islam and to prepare Saudi youth to qualify for jobs. Even the king, however, has found it hard to institute reforms that significantly challenge the entrenched religious-educational bureaucracy.

“
Invading a country is easier than changing educational curriculum,” the late Ghazi al Gosaibi, a confidant of King Abdullah, quipped when asked why the king couldn’t make more progress with his education reform agenda. Gosaibi, a poet and novelist whose day job for nearly forty years included various ministerial and ambassadorial posts, was an outspoken intellectual almost always out of step with the kingdom’s religious conservatives. His books, often critical of regimes in the region and the lack of freedoms in Saudi, were banned in that country until just a few weeks before his clearly impending death from cancer in 2010. “
I always referred to Abdullah as the ‘loyal opposition,’ ” he once told me, “because in the eighties Abdullah wrote a long memo to the king describing how poor Saudi education was.”

Abdullah finally got his chance to try to reform education
once he became king in 2005. He announced a 9-billion-Saudi-riyal ($2.4 billion) project to transform the way the kingdom’s 5.5 million students are taught. This so-called
tatweer
, or reform project, was set up outside the educational bureaucracy. Some fifty boys’ and a like number of girls’ schools were selected to serve as models.
Teachers were sent to retraining to help them abandon memorization methods in favor of teaching students critical thinking aimed at solving problems.

To get an idea of what, if anything is changing, I visit a
tatweer
school in Buraidah, a town in central Arabia so conservative that parents there protested the introduction of girls’ schools in the 1960s. In the 1980s, Buraidah still was so insular I was not permitted to visit; religious fundamentalism was ascendant there and across the kingdom. Even now my translator and I are met at the guarded checkpoint to the city and followed in marked cars by agents of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Education to “assure our security”—and keep track of our movements.

At the school, a group of young Saudi women dressed in native costumes is singing the national anthem. This in itself is a bit of a reform, because Wahhabi religious scholars object to any celebration of nationalism as being in conflict with their view that believers belong only to the
umma
, or community of believers, which transcends borders and polities. (In an effort to build national identity among Saudis, King Abdullah has insisted on celebrating the kingdom’s founding on September 23, 1932, with a national holiday, even though religious leaders oppose any holiday other than celebrations marking the end of Ramadan and Hajj.)

This token innovation, followed by readings from the Koran, sadly is paralleled in the classroom. While teachers point proudly to their new electronic “smart boards,” most, on this day at least, are using them only as props, not for pedagogy. Indeed, as far as I can see from visiting half a dozen classrooms, education, notwithstanding expensive new gadgetry, still consists largely of the old memorization—hear and repeat. The educational process seems as ritualized as
the ceremonial tea and dates graciously offered by the school principal.

A second
tatweer
model school in Riyadh is somewhat more promising. Tatweer 48, located near King Saud University, is attended by the upper-class offspring of university professors. Principal Moddi Saleh al Salem proudly observes that this is the only
tatweer
girls’ school in Riyadh. The girls, all dressed uniformly in gray floor-length jumpers and gray-and-white-striped blouses, are a world apart from the reticent young women in Buraidah. There the English teacher read her class a word from the text, and in unison the girls repeated it. Here, in a tenth-grade English class, girls are asked to come to the front of the class in teams of four to present clever video scripts they have written and produced to supplement a chapter in their text on how to order in a restaurant. Each team of girls is composed, confident, and at ease presenting to a classroom of forty fellow students plus their school principal, Al Salem.

One particularly lively foursome discusses how to set the table. As their chosen narrator describes how to lay the plates, silverware, and glasses, her narration is illustrated on a screen behind her by a video that her group created with pictures pulled from the Internet. “
If you are serving more than one wine,” the narrator continues reading from her script, “start the glasses from the right. Just remember L E R D—left for eating and right for drinking.” The teacher glances toward me, clearly chagrined that a visitor should hear her students discussing how to serve forbidden alcohol, yet she can’t hide her obvious pride in the quality of their spoken English, which, after all, is what she is responsible for teaching.

Under the umbrella of reform, the kingdom also has begun an even more controversial revamp of curricula to enhance math and science and to curb extremism in religious teaching. A committee that included government-selected religious scholars rewrote religion textbooks at government behest to encourage more tolerance of other religions, or at least to curtail teaching of intolerance against Christians, Jews, and Shia Muslims. For instance, the new religion textbook recounts
how the Prophet visited a sick Jewish neighbor even though that man had thrown garbage at the Prophet’s front door.
The new textbooks, which will be introduced into all Saudi schools by 2013, also define
jihad
as something only the ruler can declare rather than as an obligation on every Muslim, as asserted by Al Qaeda and fundamentalist religious scholars who support it.

Predictably, conservatives accuse the Ministry of Education of kowtowing to the West and undermining Islam, while modernizers see the textbook changes and the three extra hours of math and science a week as window dressing, completely inadequate to improve students’ preparation for the job market or to prepare them to practice a more tolerant Islam. Moreover, whatever the changes in curricula and texts, teachers are largely the same religious conservatives and are free to say what they will in a classroom.

“When you close the door, the teacher can always put the book aside and talk,” acknowledges Dr. Naif H. al Romi, deputy minister of educational planning and development, who helped lead the curriculum reform. “But that is true everywhere, not just in Saudi. With thirty thousand schools and half a million teachers, it is very hard to change a system quickly.”
By contrast, in the tiny adjacent Gulf state of Qatar, which modernizers often cite as an education model, there are only two hundred schools.

It is all too common for students to correct their parents’ religious habits based on lessons learned at school. One father complains that his daughters tell him he isn’t allowed to pray at home but only in a mosque. So says their teacher. Similarly, the teacher, aware that these preteen girls have a male Arabic tutor at home, tells the girls they are too old at ten and eleven to be alone with an unrelated male. A female professor at King Saud University, who wears a scarf but not a face veil, complains that her daughter’s teachers have turned her into a one-girl Gestapo on the necessity of her mother’s veiling whenever she leaves her house. Realizing that even modest reform of Saudi education will take at least a generation, King Abdullah has sought to shortcut the process. In 2006 he
began offering scholarships to male—and more surprisingly, female—students to go abroad for university studies.
While Saudis came to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s for university education, in the 1980s and 1990s the government, responding to the dictates of religious conservatives, stopped providing scholarships to study abroad and reduced sharply (from 10,000 in 1984 to 5,000 by 1990) the number of Saudis who could get an education outside the kingdom. After September 11, that number shrank still further (2,500 in 2003), as visas dried up and Saudis feared going abroad.
Determined to reverse that trend, King Abdullah launched his scholarship program, which in 2011 funded more than one hundred thousand Saudi students studying in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Almost all are expected to return home, creating a new cadre of educated Saudis. Whether they become a force for change upon their return, or don the mental blinkers of tradition along with their
abayas
and
thobes
, remains to be seen.

To try to jump-start reform in higher education at home, the king established the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST, at a cost of 10 billion Saudi riyals (nearly $4 billion), the country’s first co-ed university, created from scratch in only three years. With Saudi ARAMCO, the kingdom’s most efficient institution, in charge, the pristine new university opened on schedule in September 2009 with some six hundred students from around the world, including Saudis of both sexes. The founding president is Choon Fong Shih, a Singaporean and the only non-Muslim university president in the kingdom. Dr. Shih, a world expert in nonlinear fracture mechanics, earned his doctorate at Harvard and taught at Brown University.

A non-Muslim president and the mixing of men and women are remarkable innovations for Saudi Arabia. Equally jarring is the juxtaposition on campus of a mosque alongside a movie theater (the only cinema in the kingdom outside those on Saudi ARAMCO property).
On campus, most students are dressed in modest Western attire. The Saudi women on campus, however, wear long black
abayas
, albeit without veils
covering their faces. All the students receive full scholarships and pursue graduate studies in science with state-of-the-art laboratory facilities.

“
Throughout history, power has attached itself, after God, to science,” the king said at opening ceremonies for the new university, some eighty kilometers outside Jeddah.” Humanity has been the target of vicious attacks from extremists, who speak the language of hatred, fear dialogue, and pursue destruction,” he added. “We cannot fight them unless we learn to coexist without conflict—with love instead of hatred and with friendship instead of confrontation. Undoubtedly, scientific centers that embrace all peoples are the first line of defense against extremists.” It might have been Barack Obama or David Cameron speaking.

Notwithstanding the king’s noble sentiments, it took a tense confrontation with religious conservatives and the sacking of a prominent sheikh to protect the king’s “dream of more than twenty-five years.” While his intercession on KAUST was at least a small victory for reform, the king cannot intervene in every issue in every school and so, day in and day out, the religious-educational bureaucracy remains largely impervious to reform. Whether the issue is who teaches or from what textbooks, what makes up the curriculum or what actually is taught in the classroom, reform still exists more on paper than in practice.
By one estimate, fully 70 percent of the three thousand supervisors who directly oversee public schools around the kingdom are conservative Salafis, a more politically correct term for Wahhabis, whose priority is not educational reform but religious orthodoxy. Even at the university level, where reforms began and where reform arguably should be easiest, the obstacles are many and the results few.

“
There is no critical thinking even in university,” says one political science professor at King Saud University in Riyadh. “Students just memorize and repeat. All they want is a diploma and a job in government. They don’t care about their country or about the Arabs or about freedom.” A sociology professor at the same university similarly laments the
lack of curiosity among students. “
Students aren’t curious; they don’t read so they have no background or knowledge with which to discuss issues,” he says. “I asked my students after the earthquake in Haiti where is Haiti. Most guessed Africa.”

Some Western students might make the same mistake, but what these Saudi professors really are fighting is the result of the years of mindless memorization among students and, more broadly, the intellectual inertia of a conformist society that values neither curiosity nor independent thinking. Many books are banned, libraries often are locked, and at any rate volumes are not permitted to be taken home from most of them.

There also are physical restraints to reform.
The regime is seeking to make up for decades of neglect by funding the construction of more than 1,200 new schools across the kingdom in 2010 and completing construction of another 3,100 already under way. The funds are available, but ironically, given the vast size of this country, the land often is not. In or around population centers, much of the open land is owned by various princes or a few wealthy families who are holding it for future development and profit. So in many cases there literally is no available land on which to build a school. One might think royal princes would donate land or that the regime that gave it to them might demand some of it back. So far, neither has been the case.