Failing the test

Saudi Arabia | Jihadist textbooks live on in Saudi-supported Islamic schools | Priya Abraham

In Saudi Arabia, a first-grader learns in Monotheism and Jurisprudence class that Jews and Christians are destined for hellfire. Hating them becomes the foundation years later for 12th-grade textbooks that exhort him to wage militant jihad against infidels.

Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Gulf Institute, sums up the results of such indoctrination: "Five million students in 25,000 schools. Imagine if only 1 percent of them took to heart the content of these schools. That's 50,000 terrorists."

Mr. Al-Ahmed's group researched and provided passages from 12 textbooks for a May 24 Freedom House report on the progress of Saudi education reform. The report shows that, contrary to Saudi claims, little has changed in Saudi-funded textbooks and curriculum—which predominate at Islamic schools around the world—since 9/11, when it became evident that the kingdom's virulent brand of Islam, called Wahhabism, was fueling global terrorism.