So apparently Saudi textbooks are still teaching intolerance, or at least this is what a recent study has found. This should not come as a surprise to me, because even though a friend of mine, who has a direct connection to someone who worked to change the textbooks after 9/11, told me that these books are better now, I always thought they can’t be much better because they were so bad it is hard to imagine how they could be fixed. And just like Mochness, “I never thought of checking the books to make sure.”

I agree with Rasheed that one of the main problems with reforming the textbooks is that the government is facing a tough resistance from the religious conservatives who consider the calls for such thing a western conspiracy. In the same time, some liberals such as Hamza Al Mozaini and Mohammed Al Zulfa have been calling for education reform, but there calls went unheard so far. So, between the Americans, the conservatives, and the liberals, where are we going to go with our textbooks? I think that we have made some progress, but there is still a lot to do.