Educating Sectarianism: Saudi and Iranian Classrooms in the Iran-Iraq War

During the Iran-Iraq War, Saudi Arabia and Iran turned classrooms into instruments of sectarian mobilization. Saudi Arabia never formally entered the war, yet the Saudi state treated Khomeini’s revolution as a direct challenge to both Wahhabi religious authority and monarchical legitimacy. In response, Saudi educational materials intensified the language of tawhīd, casting Shia practices such as shrine visitation, mourning rituals, and tawassul as bid’a, shirk, and evidence of Iranian subversion. Iran’s postrevolutionary curriculum developed an opposing narrative, presenting Wahhabism and the Saudi monarchy as imperialist distortions of Islam aligned with the United States and Iraq. This paper traces how both states used textbooks, religious instruction, and wartime memory to teach children that the conflict was a sacred struggle over the future of Islam. The 1987 Mecca incident became a central example of this process: Saudi materials framed it as Iranian desecration of the holy sites, while Iranian schools remembered it as martyrdom under Wahhabi oppression. By examining these competing educational narratives, this paper shows how the Iran-Iraq War helped harden sectarian identity at the level of childhood formation. The war’s legacy survived because it was built into the stories children learned about religion, nationhood, and the enemy. Rather than treating education as the sole cause of later conflict, this paper argues that schools institutionalized and amplified antagonisms produced by both sectarian ideology and geopolitical competition.

The evidence used here is representative of official state priorities rather than every classroom experience. It draws on selected textbooks, ministry directives, educational programs, and later scholarly reviews. Because Iranian curricular materials are more accessible than Saudi wartime classroom records, the archive is uneven. These sources can show what each government sought to teach, but not that every teacher followed the curriculum identically or that every student absorbed it as intended.