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WASHINGTON—Between 2011-2012, ICRD conducted its first study of Saudi public-school textbooks on behalf of the US State Department’s (DOS) Office for International Religious Freedom. This study reviewed nearly 100 Saudi textbooks from the entire K-12 curriculum to document the prevalence of intolerant and extremist content.
Over the next ten years, ICRD took an approach to the curriculum review process that focused on exhaustive studies of the Saudi curriculum based in an effort to build a relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Education, which would allow for an honest exchange of views and an effort to embed recommendations into the growing desire within the Kingdom to remove intolerance from their education.
Not only did ICRD provide a deep analysis to the State Department over the past decade, adding nuance and context to complement more general overviews published by the Hudson Center, IMPACT-SE, the Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Watch, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and others, the ICRD also provided real-time analysis to the Kingdom as they engaged in curricular review themselves.
ICRD’s review of the 2017 editions of the textbooks looked at 22 textbooks, of which 16 were found to have unique content, with the remainder comprised of duplicate lessons. ICRD conducted an exhaustive review of these 16 textbooks, and identified 120 lesson units containing content that was violent or expressed “social hostility”. At the request of the Saudi Ministry of Education (KSA MOE) and with the encouragement of DOS and the US Embassy in Riyadh, ICRD shared the ongoing findings directly with the MOE in bi-monthly briefs over the course of the review, which then were presented in full to DOS and MOE at the end of 2018.
In 2020, ICRD conducted a review of the 2019 editions of the high school level (grades 10-12) religious textbooks, focusing specifically on the Tawhid, Hadith, and Tafsir textbooks, which were previously found to contain the most intolerant content and the most graphic depictions of religious violence. This review was delivered in August 2020 and designed to be the first of a two-step review to evaluate the promised progress being made by the MOE in removing the intolerant and extremist content from the curriculum between 2019 and 2020.
In February 2021, ICRD completed a review of the Tawhid, Hadith, and Tafsir textbooks from the 2020 edition of the Saudi curriculum. This review found that, through a combination of (a) the removal of several textbooks that contained the most objectionable content in the curriculum and (b) several important edits to the remaining textbooks, the 2020 curriculum had successfully incorporated the overwhelming majority of the changes ICRD recommended in the review of the 2017 curriculum.
The report can be read in full here.