Amman, Jordan - By Middle Eastern standards, Jordanian schoolbooks are relatively free of bombast. But some textbooks used here to teach Islamic culture contain nefarious conspiracies that just will not go away.
There is the Western plot to divide the Muslim world. There is the conniving Jew seeking to destroy Islam. And there is the call for a return to the faith in response.
But if a committee reviewing the country's Islamic curriculum has its way, such talk, at least in the current form, is likely to become history. Facing growing extremism and rising security threats, educators are seeking to revamp their religious studies curriculum to cultivate a more thoughtful and open mind in a country that is among the more moderate of Arab states.
The effort to foster more moderate expressions of Islam is decidedly ambitious for an Arab government, but also very delicate.
Ostensibly, it seeks to inoculate Jordanian youth against extremism, although some critics complain that it is really an effort to ward off foreign pressure, especially from the United States, on which Jordan has grown increasingly dependent.
"We want to cultivate an enlightened youth who won't take their faith blindly," said Khaled Touqan, Jordan's minister of education. "We want them to be thoughtful about what they are doing, and teach them that violence for the sake of violence is against our faith."
Schoolbooks are being rewritten, curriculums reassessed and teaching techniques scrapped. The project is part of a broader reassessment of all school curriculums in Jordan, aimed at modernizing Jordan's education system and making its graduates competitive in the world economy.
Educators and religious leaders engrossed in the work call it "improvement," rather than reform, seeking to distance themselves from the far broader political efforts - seen as driven by foreign forces - to change segments of Jordan's economy and government.
Most of those on the committee for changing the Islamic curriculum agree that the best way to answer the tide of extremism is by describing Islam as an "open faith" and encouraging students to be more receptive to new ideas, while buttressing their understanding of the faith.
"If there is a lack of good education in the basics, it encourages confusion," said Abdul Nasser Abul Basal, head of the Islamic Law School at Yarmouk University in Jordan and a member of the reassessment committee. "Education is ultimately the solution to waywardness."
Here, Islamic education is one class out of many in the school day. Though mosques, which are tightly regulated, teach special religion classes at night and on weekends, the Ministry of Education remains in control of all religious curriculum in schools, and all students study from the ministry's textbooks.
Yet the current Jordanian curriculum, Abul Basal said, is outdated. Chapters on slavery, almost unheard of today in Jordan, mean little to students, he said. At the same time, Arab youths face oppression and conflict daily on their television screens and over the Internet, and extremists are harnessing their anger in the name of Islam, he said.
The new curriculum is intended to stimulate more free-form debate, and to encourage students to ask once-taboo questions about democracy, human rights and other subjects. Notably, the scholars say, the new curriculum seeks to steer students toward peaceful solutions to the region's difficult problems.
"You want to show that the peaceful solution is always better than the military one," said Adil Rawashdeh, who oversees the Islamic curriculum at the College of Islamic Science in Amman.
Members expect the reassessment effort to take about four years, but the recommendations that have already been made have been far-reaching.
For Jordan, discussion of democratic ideas under Islam is in while talk of the "Israeli enemy" is out, committee members say. Talk of a Muslim work ethic and striving for progress are emphasized; discussion of apostasy is out, to avoid encouraging hostility toward nonbelievers. And nonviolent resistance is in, as is respect for non-Muslim minorities, said Hassan al-Saqqaf, an Islamic scholar on the committee.