A claim circulating on social media suggests that Saudi Arabia has incorporated the Ramayana and Mahabharata into its educational curriculum. The post presents an image implying that Union Minister Smriti Irani signed an agreement with her Saudi counterpart to support this assertion. In this article, we fact-check the validity of the claim put forth in the post.
Claim: Saudi Arabia has incorporated the Ramayana and Mahabharata into its educational curriculum.
Fact: Saudi Arabia did not incorporate the Ramayana and Mahabharata in their national curriculum. The viral image featuring Smriti Irani is related to the recently signed Bilateral Haj Agreement 2024 between India and Saudi Arabia. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
No reliable reports confirm the inclusion of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Saudi Arabia’s educational curriculum. If such a development had occurred, the media would have most likely covered it.
As for the viral image featuring Smriti Irani purportedly signing an agreement, it is related to the recently signed Bilateral Haj Agreement 2024 between India and Saudi Arabia. The image captures the moment when Smriti Irani, along with her Saudi counterpart, signed the agreement. Multiple news articles reporting on the event also featured this image (here & here). It appears that the image is inaccurately portrayed, falsely suggesting that she signed an agreement to incorporate Hindu epics into the Saudi Arabian curriculum.
Old claim :
The viral assertion has been circulating since at least 2021 (here & here) following a tweet by Padma Shri Awardee Nouf AlMarwaai. She posted a screenshot of her son’s school exam, featuring questions about Hindu epics and Buddhism. This sparked a discussion, with Indian media reporting that Saudi Arabia had included Hindu epics in its curriculum. The information reemerged on social media in October 2023.
Nevertheless, in the wake of the controversy surrounding her tweets, Nouf Almarwaai clarified in 2021 itself that her son is enrolled in an international school, and the questions were included as part of their curriculum, sanctioned by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education. She explicitly affirmed that it does not represent the national curriculum of Saudi Arabia.
International schools in Saudi Arabia have the autonomy to determine their curriculum:
Based on this clarification provided by Nouf Almarwaai, after further research regarding the curriculum of schools in Saudi Arabia, we came across a journal published on Research Gate. As per this journal, we learned that in Saudi Arabia there are (i) public (government) and Quranic schools; (ii) private schools teaching in Arabic medium with intensive English courses; (iii) International schools teaching in English medium. We further learned that a course is devoted to Arabic and Islamic studies in these international schools. This supports Almarwaai’s assertions that the curriculum featuring Hindu epics is associated with international schools and not part of the Saudi national curriculum.
Furthermore, our internet search led us to a tweet by Ibrahim Al-Sulaiman, a renowned columnist from Saudi Arabia, in which he affirmed that private international schools in Saudi Arabia have the autonomy to determine their curriculum and operate within their established frameworks. He also tweeted that it is inaccurate to assume that the curriculum in these schools aligns with that of private and local government schools.
In a separate tweet, Saudi professor Omar Al-Sabiyy mentioned that, based on his 25 years of teaching experience, all subjects are instructed in Arabic. All these establish that Hindu epics were not made a part of the Saudi Arabia Educational curriculum.
To sum it up, the national curriculum of Saudi Arabia does not incorporate the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
