Saudi Arabia: The politics of education

Since 11 September Saudi Arabia's religious education system and its underlying ideology have been accused of contributing to anti–western sentiments and of providing fertile ground for Islamic extremism. While recognizing the economic necessity for educational reform, many Saudis have come out to defend their school system and officials adamantly reject any link between their curriculum and extremism. This article looks at the extent to which the Saudi education system has been shaped and used by religious, political and socio–economic forces and the factors that are undermining the current system. It also examines the content of the message propagated in the kingdom's schools and abroad and to what extent it may encourage anti–western sentiments.     

‘Gates’: a new archaeological site type in Saudi Arabia

The availability of high‐resolution satellite imagery of Saudi Arabia on publicly available platforms such as Google Earth and Bing Maps has been transformational for archaeology. Within just a few years tens of thousands of sites previously unrecorded and scarcely known to the academic world have been mapped. Especially rich in sites are the successive lava fields (harret) stretching from southern Syria through Jordan and down the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula to Yemen, and characterised by the stone‐built structures known to the Bedouin as the ‘works of the old men’. Sites now being revealed include many types familiar from previous research in the wider region but also others of a form previously unknown. ‘Gates’ are one such type, found in large numbers in and around the Harret Khaybar in west‐central Saudi Arabia. They are stone‐built, the walls roughly made and low as with other ‘works’, but quite unlike them in form. Identification, mapping, and preliminary interpretation imply an early date in the sequence of the works—perhaps the very earliest—but no obvious explanation of their purpose can be discerned. Fieldwork is a desideratum.     

From Yugoslavism to Serbism: The Serb National Idea 1986–1996

Abstract. During the 1986–96 period, the intellectual debate on Serb national goals was characterised by a previously unparalleled diversity of views. The draft of the Serbian Academy's Memorandum, which sparked this debate in 1986, advocated an ‘integrative’ Yugoslav federation whose primary aim would be to foster Serbism, that is, to facilitate Serb political and cultural unification. After 1988, the differences between Yugoslavism and Serbism became obvious as advocates of Serb unification rejected Yugoslavia as a costly mistake. In rejecting Yugoslavism, some Serb intellectuals insisted on the regeneration of Serbia and its population, while others argued for the primacy of the unification of all Serb-populated lands into one state. The resulting diversity of views may be perhaps explicable by a persistent disagreement among the intellectuals concerning the basis of Serb national identity, as well as by their focus on an exclusivist and collectivist view of national goals; the latter, it is suggested, is a result of the continuing use of the idea of Serb unification as a part of the programme of Serb national liberation from foreign domination.