The education of Osama Bin Laden occurred in his native Saudi Arabia at the schools of Jedda. He and other privileged students went to high school at the al-Thagh school, an “elite Western-style Saudi school,” (Burke 4). After graduating high school he shunned Western education like his brothers received in foreign schools and studied economics, management, and civil engineering at King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda. At both of these schools, Bin Laden was also extensively training in an extreme Islamic form of fundamentalism known as Wahhabism, based on the teaching of Sheikh Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab, founder of the Islamic Wahhabi movement in the 18th century (Stalinsky 1). Bin Laden, like many other disaffected Muslim youths, was particularly drawn to the Islamic studies components of the curricula. One component of these studies was video tapes recorded by a fiery Palestinian-born Jordanian academic known as Abdallah Azzam. The fiery rhetoric on the tapes and “Azzam’s recorded sermons had a powerful impact” on Bin Laden, (Burke 7).
Wahhabism is an extreme Islamic fundamentalism that advocates Muslims return to the fundamentals of Islam as practiced by the Prophet Muhammad. The concept of spreading Islam to every corner of the earth is a fundamental concept that underlies Saudi Arabia’s educational system. Wahhabi is a strict and conservative form of Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabian education includes the most pervasive themes in Islam. A book entitled Education in Saudi Arabia outlines Saudi education policy that dates back to the 18th century and the teachings of Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab. The book is published by the Saudi Cultural Mission to the U.S. and contains 236 principles that outline how students should promote Islamic loyalty by denouncing any system or law that conflicts with true Islamic law (Stalinsky 1). The book also teaches how students are to be taught Islam in the correct form and how to plant and ...