On Saturday a columnist in Okaz newspaper wrote about something dangerous that happened in one of our government girls’ intermediate schools. In a class of girls under 15, a Saudi home economics teacher was spreading some very wrong and dangerous information. The teacher was telling her students that the terrorists responsible for the deaths of dozens of Saudis and non-Saudis in the Kingdom since May, were “mujahedeen” — fighting a holy war — and not terrorists as everyone said they were. The teacher went even further by distributing leaflets and tapes from religious extremists who expounded the “tafkeer” ideology. This means calling people infidels and saying it is permissible to wage war against them. Those same men who had expressed those beliefs later recanted on Saudi TV but according to what the teacher told her students, their doing so was not genuine. The teacher is not a religious expert or a well-known religious scholar. She is a teacher, paid by the government to teach home economics so what led her into areas far beyond her abilities? The columnist concluded that in order to root out terrorism in our country, we must begin by looking carefully at our education system. We must look at textbooks that do not encourage tolerance and teachers who take advantage of their jobs to spread poisonously destructive bile and venom.

After reading his column I sighed. This was not the first time I had heard such a story. In fact, shortly after the May 12 attacks in Riyadh, an acquaintance who teaches at the Girls College told me of something frightening that she had personally experienced. One day during a discussion class in the English department where she teaches, she asked her students: If you had the chance to be anyone in the world, who it would be and why? Students of course gave all kinds of answers, each idolizing someone she wanted to be — from parents to a statesman to a scientist. One reply, however, left her speechless. “I want to be one of the bombers. They are doing so much for the country.”

Imagine a 22 year-old college student whose ultimate desire is to become a suicide bomber! The killer of scores of people who believed that not only would she go to heaven but that the act would also be good for the country since it would plant fear in the hearts of infidels, causing them to leave the country! This same college student with her twisted ideas may one day be a mother, responsible for rearing a few members of another generation of Saudis. It is a frightening possibility but also a very real one which must be confronted and overcome.

As a journalist who has reported the terrorist attacks in our country, I have always believed that our war against terror is really a war against an ideology. Yes, we have accomplished much in finding the terrorist cells in major cities and rounding up hundreds of suspects, but if we do not attack the root of the problem, it is only a matter of time before other terrorist attacks take place.

The root, however, cannot be attacked given our continuing state of denial that we are beyond error and shortcoming. In fact, the very denial that we have a major extremist problem in the country has only helped the problem to grow. We have awakened to find the country full of sleeping terrorist cells.

The first step, as many Saudis who debated fiercely in the National Forum for Dialogue held in Makkah, is to change our school textbooks. Not only are the books breeding a sectarian culture but they fail to encourage diversity, dialogue, tolerance and harmony among different groups of Saudi society. The second step should be a change in the methods of teaching. And the third — this may be the most important — is to teach that those who differ with our opinions, even when it comes to religious matters, are not our enemies. Differences of opinion are signs of a healthy society, not a backward one. Early Muslim societies were models of tolerance and we would do well to emulate them.

The road to unity, prosperity and reform is not an easy one to travel but we must go down it. The alternative is to stay where we are, develop even more problems which are never addressed and so find ourselves victims of stagnation, frustration and despair.