THE UNITED STATES took the bold step last week of formally designating Saudi Arabia a "country of particular concern" for its lack of religious freedom. In the words of the State Department's 2004 report on religious freedom worldwide, "basic religious freedoms are denied to all [Saudi citizens] but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam . . . commonly called Wahhabi." This incontrovertible statement of fact is a breakthrough in the diplomatic dance of many veils. It casts in a new and somewhat hopeful light certain forms of engagement the administration continues to pursue with the Saudi kingdom.

Thus, also last week, the State Department welcomed a group of professors of religion from Saudi Arabia on a three-week tour of the United States. The stated goal of the visit is to show the 15 guests how Americans handle various issues of public policy and civil society, including state and federal responsibilities in education, the accreditation, financing, and curriculum of public and private schools, the academic study of religions including Islam, religious diversity, and interfaith activities.

All this should indeed be strange and informative to visitors whose delegation is led by five professors from the Imam Mohammed Ibn-Saud Islamic University, a seminary for the training of clerics in Wahhabism. Familiarly known as the "terrorist factory," this institution was the alma mater of three of the 9/11 suicide hijackers. Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Rahman Al-Omari (who was on the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center) met and befriended several bin

Not only that, but the same seminary ran the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America (IIASA) as an extension campus in Fairfax, Virginia, under the supervision of the Department of Religious Affairs of the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Early this year, the State Department expelled 24 Saudis associated with this network for abusing their diplomatic passports to interfere with American religious life.

The most obvious window into the theology taught at Ibn-Saud Islamic University is the Wahhabi Koran, an edition of the Islamic scripture, with commentary, printed in every major European, Asian, and African language in paperback editions that are distributed free or at low cost throughout the world (and are available on the web at www.kuran.gen.tr/html/english3). The fifteenth revised edition of this work was published as The Noble Qur'ân in the English Language by Darussalam Publishers and Distributors in Riyadh in 1996. The translators are Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan, both affiliated with another extremist institution, the Islamic University of Medina, two of whose faculty members are also among the educators being hosted by the State Department.

The Wahhabi Koran is notable in that, while Muslims believe that their sacred text was dictated by God and cannot be altered, the Saudi English version adds to the original so as to change its sense in a radical direction. For example, the opening chapter, or surah, is known as Fatiha, and is recited in Muslim daily prayer and (among non-Wahhabis) as a memorial to the dead. The four final lines of Fatiha read, in a normal rendition of the Arabic original (such as this translation by N.J. Dawood, published by Penguin Books): Guide us to the straight path, / The path of those whom You have favored, / Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, / Nor of those who have gone astray.