A Saudi-funded Islamic school at the centre of a row over text-books that allegedly brand other faiths as “worthless” bowed to public pressure yesterday and pledged to remove the offensive pages from the books.

Although insisting that teachers did not use the extracts, in which an early Islamic scholar is quoted as saying “the monkeys are the Jews and the pigs are the Christian infidels at Jesus’s table”, Sumaya Alyusuf, the head teacher, said that the half-page of text would be cut from all 34 copies in the library of the King Fahd Academy in Acton, West London. She had said during an interview on Newsnight on BBC Two that the books were taught.

However, while King Fahd Academy sought to clear its reputation as a tolerant faith school yesterday, three people claiming to be former pupils accused it of being racist, on the website facebook.com

One contributor, who said that she was a former pupil now aged 21, said that she was taught that Jews were “monkeys”, while another, also 21, claimed that he was told that “people of other religions were not on a par as human beings with us”.

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