RIYADH, 24 September 2004 — A regional education authority has ordered the withdrawal of a schoolbook for containing text from the Old Testament that contradicts the Holy Qur’an, Okaz newspaper reported yesterday.
The authority in the region of Hail, 640 kilometers north of Riyadh, ordered schools and bookshops to return copies of a Lebanese textbook for containing “Jewish texts that clash with the content of the (Muslim holy) Book and Sunnah (Prophet Mohammed’s traditions).”
The book is entitled Almujam Al-Mufassal fi Al-Imlaa (The Detailed Dictionary for Dictation). “This step is in response to a circulated note from the undersecretary at the Ministry of Education”, Okaz reported.
Al-Watan daily had reported on March 29 that the ministry had already started withdrawing the same book from circulation after discovery of the controversial text by a librarian in a Riyadh school. Okaz said the Torah text tells “the story of the Prophet Abraham and his sacrificing of his son Ismail in a way contradicting the Qur’an.”
An Arabic excerpt of the text shown in Okaz read that Abraham was ordered by God to sacrifice “his son Isaac, the only son he had.” This contradicts the Qur’an, which stresses that Ismail — father of the Arab nation — was Abraham’s son also, and a half-brother of Isaac, father of the Hebrew nation. The Old Testament also recounts that Abraham had two sons — Ismail by Hagar, the servant of his wife Sarah, and Isaac by Sarah herself. Muslims believe that Ismail was the one that God ordered Abraham to sacrifice, while Jews hold that it was Isaac.
