ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Page after page, activists are battling to purge school textbooks of Muslim-inspired hatred and intolerance that they fear is creating a new generation of Islamic extremists.
They flag hard-edged Muslim views toward other faiths, such as those describing past efforts by Hindus and Christians to “erase” Muslims. They note sections that speak of martyrdom and the duty to battle perceived religious enemies.
“We are fighting for the future of Islam. Children are sometimes being force-fed a diet of hate, anger and intolerance,” said Ahmad Salim, leader of a campaign to have Pakistan’s education establishment remove what activists consider extreme language and images from the curriculum.
Mr. Salim’s group, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, issued a report two years ago calling for broad revisions.
This month, it plans to issue an updated review of all Pakistan’s textbooks that reprimands authorities for failing to make serious changes.
It will be the latest example of widening appeals for textbook reform across the Islamic world.
Barely a whisper just a few years ago, the demands have begun to draw attention at the highest levels. Educators and activists argue that current battles against Islamic extremism are superficial without deep revisions of schoolbooks — similar to efforts to purge Balkan lessons of ethnic slurs after the wars of the 1990s.
In Jordan — the target of triple suicide blasts Nov. 9 claimed by al Qaeda — another overhaul is expected in next year’s textbooks, part of a process that includes making clear distinctions between terrorism and what that nation sees as legitimate struggles, such as the Palestinian uprising. Even Saudi Arabia has started to rewrite its highly conservative lessons after worries they were encouraging homegrown radicals.
Jihad a central concept
Much of the concern among reformers is how students learn about jihad — a concept that encompasses all acts on behalf of Islam. It’s clear the phrases in some textbooks pay homage — directly or indirectly — to violence.
“Recognize the importance of jihad in every sphere of life,” say the curriculum guidelines for Pakistan’s elementary schools. Critics claim the message is often interpreted in malignant ways, such as strong denunciations of Pakistan’s historical Hindu rivals in India or sympathy for Islamic militants in Kashmir and elsewhere.
In the Palestinian seventh-grade Arabic language book, a 1930s protest poem called “The Martyr” includes the lines: “And the flow of blood gladdens my soul. … And who asks for a noble death, here it is.”
The Palestinian 11th-grade “Islamic Culture” book has dozens of appeals for Islamic solidarity to confront “enemies” such as Israel, its allies and Western culture. “The Islamic nation needs to spread the spirit of jihad and the love of self-sacrifice among its sons,” reads one passage.
Fifth-graders read: “The martyrs kiss [the Palestinian flag] with their blood.”
Critics sound off
Nearly every section of the Palestinian textbooks touches on the intifada. “Peace with Israel is not mentioned at all,” according to a report by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, an Israeli-American group that examines schoolbooks throughout the Middle East.
“There is an incredible glorification of jihad (as holy war) throughout the entire Palestinian school curriculum,” said Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, a Jerusalem-based group that monitors Palestinian broadcasts and publications.
Israeli textbooks have undergone extensive reforms in the past decade to remove the most overt anti-Arab bias, but Arabs are still widely portrayed as opposed to gestures for peace. Meanwhile, books used by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews often give negative impressions of Arabs as shifty and violent.
In Saudi Arabia — guardian of Islam’s holiest sites — textbooks reflect the kingdom’s two main pillars: commitment to spread Islam and to follow Wahhabism, an austere Saudi interpretation of the faith.
Wahhabism spreads out
This puritanical brand of Islam has provided theological footing for the faith’s most extreme edges, including al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Its lessons also spill far beyond Saudi borders, since the Riyadh government funds hundreds of schools around the world.
The Saudi schoolbooks have been modified in the past two years to soften the descriptions of non-Muslims, other cultures and different branches of Islam, though critics say it still has a way to go.
Pressure for change came from two directions. The West, particularly the United States, began serious demands for textbook reforms after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But the overseers of Saudi education — heavily influenced by Wahhabi clerics and scholars — got serious about changes only after members of the royal family stepped in.
Saudis feel a jolt
Muslim militants, apparently inspired by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, began attacks on Saudi soil in May 2003 and rattled the kingdom’s pro-Western leaders. In a speech last year, Mohammed al-Rasheed, the Saudi education minister, told teachers and administrators to “stay away from extremism and fanaticism.”
A recent U.S. State Department report on global religious freedom noted that Saudi Arabia has “removed some disparaging references to other religious traditions” from schoolbooks, but the kingdom was still listed among the most restrictive religious settings.
The Saudi curriculum frames the world along rigid lines. Religious studies note Islam’s historical bonds with Christianity and Judaism, but declare that only Muslims practice the true faith and “other religions destroy their followers.”
Saudi seventh-graders also read that Judaism is a “corrupted religion.”
Lessons portray the Muslim world as under constant threat. In ninth-grade, geography studies describe centuries of “malice and hatred” toward Muslims, from the Crusades to recent conflicts in Kashmir, Chechnya and the Palestinian intifada.
Critics unimpressed
Such phrases were taught in Saudi classes as recently as the 2003-04 school year, according to international monitors. It’s not clear whether they will be removed in subsequent years.
“The recent changes in the Saudi textbooks do not offer any real improvement in the level of hatred that the schoolchildren are taught,” said Logan Barclift, an analyst at the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a Washington-based group that monitors politics and education in the Gulf. “As long as this continues, it will be much harder for a more tolerant view of Islam to take hold in the Arab world.”
Right now, Saudi education is directed by some of the most conservative forces in the kingdom. One petition, signed by some judges and clerics last year, denounced the reforms as American pressure aimed at taking “the kingdom along the path of infidels.”
Jordan has conducted one of the most sweeping revisions of its schoolbooks, which were also used by Palestinian children until the 1990s and had contained some of the most direct praise for martyrdom on behalf of Islam.
“We want to instill in [students] positive values of accepting the ’other’ and coexisting with other societies,” said Jordan’s education minister, Khaled Touqan. “It’s true that in today’s world, the reality may be far off.”
• AP writers Munir Ahmad in Islamabad, Diana Elias in Kuwait City and Jamal Halaby in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.
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