In John’s section on Terrorism is this short segment on Education - which offers some useful background on how KSA Islamic education became so narrow:
Another factor, I think, was an error made nearly 50 years ago, as the country was taking its first steps toward development. Coming from a desert, tribal society with no infrastructure, Saudi Arabia realized that it needed schools to develop. It could build the physical fabric, the buildings, but it had no teachers. Teachers needed to be brought in as expatriate labor.
Finding teachers was problematic. The country was not an attractive place to live. Most building were constructed of mud, or at best coral blocks. There was no running water, no sewage system, no air conditioning, very little electricity. Potential teachers were not lining up to be hired.
There were groups of people who were available, however: religious ultra-fundamentalists (Muslim Brotherhood, Deobandis) who were being threatened with prison or death in their own countries in the face of rising nationalism, particularly in Egypt and Syria, Pakistan and India. Because they were being persecuted for their fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, it was somewhat natural that the Saudi government found it easy to employ them. The government believed that it could trust the education of Saudi children to people who were strict in their interpretation of Islam.
The Saudis got more than they bargained for, though, as these ultra-fundamentalists—with the support of the Saudi ulema—set the tone for an exceptionally narrow education that demonized any but the most fundamentalist beliefs.
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