What kind of school following Osama bin Laden’s severe strain of Wahhabi Islam would hire principally Christian instructors? And what kind of Christian would work there?

Recent Associated Press and Washington Post stories have suggested an answer to these puzzlers: the Islamic Saudi Academy — the private, Saudi-run and -funded school in a Washington suburb that a federal committee and 12 U.S. senators say ought to be shut down until questions about the school’s curriculum can be answered. The AP’s Matthew Barakat has written that “most” of the school’s faculty is Christian. WoW was unable to reach him, but his source appears to be the school’s director, Abdalla Al-Shabnan, plus possibly several teachers. Barakat has been writing for weeks about the drama unfolding at “Terror High,” as some have dubbed it, and toured the facility.

The Washington Post meanwhile quoted the assistant principal of the girls’ school — who would have to share some responsibility in making sure curriculum on Islam was taught to the Saudi Ministry of Education’s satisfaction — saying she’s a “devout Christian.” She is, so far, the only self-proclaimed Christian at ISA to do so.

By e-mail yesterday, a spokeswoman for ISA would only confirm that the school “does hire Christians.” She intimated, however, that no one at ISA knows if Christians represent a majority on staff because, as an equal-opportunity employer, the school doesn’t hire “based on the applicant’s race, religion or gender.” But she ignored how a school following the standard Saudi protocol of separating boys from girls could not have a de facto hiring process based on gender, or why ISA would even want to pursue a policy of employing Christians, whom the school would have to trust to actively and irreconcilably contradict their own faith every day to adhere to the institution’s.

It further seems odd that an academy where more than a quarter of the students’ parents are from Saudi Arabia — a country where simply not being Muslim runs citizens afoul of the law’s very long arm — would chance hiring instructors whose religious ideology is by definition heresy to the paying parents’ philosophy. Up until a few weeks ago, the academy’s Web site said here that its Arabic program “follows the curriculum, syllabus, and materials established by the Saudi Ministry of Education.”

The school’s director, though, told the Post not to worry; he, not the Saudi government, “is in charge.” Ironically, when the ISA lost its accreditation in 2002 with both the local Virginia Association of Independent Schools and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, that took on new meaning; its curriculum is no longer subject to the review of any governing organization — besides the Saudi Ministry of Education and, now, a federal committee.