About 2,000 teachers have been transferred to administrative positions outside education over the last two years for promoting extremist ideology, an adviser to Prince Muhammad Bin Naif, Assistant Interior Minister for Security Affairs, has said. Abdul Rahman Al-Hadlaq, who is also the Ministry of Interior's head of the General Administration for Intellectual Security, said the teachers “turned the educational message of study subjects into an administration for the promotion of deviant ideology”. “For example, one teacher accused an English teacher colleague of being an unbeliever, saying he was teaching the language of the kuffaar,” Al-Hadlaq said. The ministries of Civil Service, Interior and Education reportedly worked together to extend jurisdictions and transfer “for the public good” teachers involved in cases of security, moral or professional concern to positions outside the realm of education without recourse to the Teachers' Committee. Al-Hadlaq denied accusations of extremism leveled at the public education curriculum. “Many of us have gone through the same curricula and have not become extremist, and if you look at countries that don't teach our curricula you'll find that they have extremists,” he said. Al-Hadlaq added that he had not found any examples of extremism in the curricula but on the contrary had encountered a “consolidation of the proper intellectual ideas”. Instead, Al-Hadlaq said, there is a “need to review scholarships abroad and their negative intellectual effect”. According to Al-Hadlaq, a study by the General Administration for Intellectual Security showed that most persons associated with deviant ideology were “young in age, of the middle income group, and of middle to lower class”. Recruitment, he said, was conducted through gatherings in mosques and universities, meetings of relatives, and religious activities, while intellectual deviancy was evident in “religious immoderation, turning to terrorism, ill-thinking of others, and issuing their own fatwas”. The reasons for deviancy, he said, were a “lack of Shariah awareness, a lack of balance, and suspect sources information”. “The study showed they had poor knowledge of Shariah, even their theorists and leaders,” he said. Al-Hadlaq added that a strategy of intellectual confrontation was in place at the Prince Muhammad Bin Naif Center to “protect, rehabilitate and supervise” through dialogue and courses to address any doubts detainees may have and oversee their emotional and social conditions.
