I went to see the minister of education at his home in Riyadh. Mohammed Ahmed Rasheed and half a dozen deputies, men in long white robes and headdresses, arrayed themselves on chairs against the walls and worried their beads. They talked fondly about time spent at American universities — Stanford, Indiana, Oklahoma, Michigan; Khedir al-Qurashi, the vice minister for girls' education, spoke of his love of Hoosiers basketball.

They were defensive about American suspicion of the religious hard-liners' influence on boys' schooling. "Why don't you go to Israeli math textbooks and see what they're saying — `If you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?' " demanded one deputy. Agreed another: "If 5 or 8 percent of our curriculum has to be changed, then 80 to 90 percent of the content of American media has to be changed."