As Saudi kids head back to school on September 11, the kingdom is moving to reform its education system, dogged by Western claims it fuels extremism and incites hatred of other religions.
Some school officials defend the current curricula, while others acknowledge that it teaches children to frown upon non-Muslim faiths but doubt the system could be changed in the near future.
Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz told educators Sunday to avoid promoting extremist concepts within a school system that has come under fire, particularly from Washington, for allegedly fuelling the kind of extremism that led to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.
Fifteen of the 19 presumed suicide hijackers were Saudi.
Officials in the kingdom, which is battling a deadly wave of terror on its own soil that it blames on Islamist militants, have tirelessly stressed that Islam is a tolerant religion, unrelated to the "deviant thinking" of fanatics.
"The first thing (teachers should do) is serve religion and the homeland, nothing else - neither serving terrorism nor external principles that come to us and which we don't accept," Abdullah told education officials during a meeting marking the new academic year.
He told teachers to stick to teaching the Muslim holy book, Quran, and the Sunna (the Prophet Mohammed's deeds and sayings) and avoid interpretations that led to unwanted consequences.
He was apparently referring to interpretations that justify resorting to terror, namely the ideology of "takfeer" under which other Muslims are branded as infidels in order to legitimise violence against them.
But the headmistress of an all-female state school said: "I don't think there's hope for change in the near future because Islamists control the education authority. "All influential positions in the ministry of education are held by Islamists," she told AFP, requesting anonymity. "Our curricula is full of texts inciting hatred, not only towards other religions but also other Muslim sects," she added.
However, an official at the prestigious private Kingdom Schools, which caters to some 1,500 sons and daughters of princes and businessmen, earlier discarded any idea that certain texts breed a hatred of other faiths.
"Every believer in any religion believes that other religions were annulled with the arrival of his religion," said Hamud al-Subaie, the school's public relations director.
"This might be interpreted as antagonising other religions," he said, adding that in fact Islam encouraged relations with these religions, including inter-marriage.
Subaie, speaking to AFP on the school's modern Western-style grounds, said: "Teaching Wahhabism in schools is more of a narration of history and does not say kill Jews or slaughter Christians."
Wahhabism, the creed of terror chief Osama bin Laden, is a puritanical form of Islam that emerged in the Arabian peninsula and has spread to central Asia with Saudi Arabia's oil money.
Also addressing education officials on Sunday, Saudi King Fahd spoke of "learning from the best experiences of other nations" and adhering to educational methods that teach a student his duties towards God, his compatriots and homeland.
"We are a Muslim nation. A Saudi person, man or woman, should be filled with belief in God," said the monarch.
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