ISIS middle-school curricula treated Wahhabism’s central text as their most heavily weighted subject.

Evidence

Despite the denials by Saudi rulers, Wahhabi doctrine has inspired and driven militant movements from al-Qaeda to al-Qaeda-in-Iraq to the Islamic State (widely known as ISIS). Indeed, ISIS made Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahha¯b’s Kita¯b al-Tawh˙ı¯d a core requirement for middle school students throughout its territories (ages 12–15), and the importance attached to that particular work shows through clearly in an ISISrequired curriculum in the Syrian town of Mayadin: Kita¯b al-Tawh˙ı¯d (179 pages); Mathematics (64 pages); Biology (37 pages); Arabic Language (30 pages); English Language (30 pages); and Physics and Chemistry (25 pages) (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights 2015). — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 1934

Categorization

• SHARE: The page-count curriculum comparison is perfect fodder for a friend working on extremist education systems or textbook securitization policy.
• XREF: connects to: Saudi wealth transformed Wahhabism into a global ideology under the guise of Salafism — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1842