Saudi Arabia Once Published a Textbook with Photoshopped Yoda Next to the King
Saudi school children opening their social studies textbooks in 2017 were surprised to see a picture of King Faisal sitting next to Yoda from Star Wars at the United Nations.
To this day, the incredible blunder remains unexplained, with the artist who created the image still at a loss to explain how it occurred.
At the time, Shaweesh was making a photo series in which he took icons of American pop culture and composited them into real photographs of historical events. They included characters like Captain America and Darth Vader.
After a friend told him that Lucasfilm was just 15 minutes away from the United Nations headquarters, it gave him the idea to edit a photo of King Faisal signing the United Nations charter in 1945.
“Naturally I combined the two ideas,” he tells Dazed Middle East. “Yoda is a character who is respected and beloved, the same as King Faisal, may God have mercy on him. I used Photoshop at first, then I used a technique called photo-etching.”
Sometime after the artwork was completed, Shaweesh got a call from his mom to tell him that his work was in a social studies textbook being handed out to millions of Saudi kids.
The inclusion of the Yoda image became a huge story internationally and led to Shaweesh having to defend his work, insisting that he meant no offense to the king who is credited with modernizing Saudi Arabia into a global player.
“He was wise and was always strong in his speeches,” Shaweesh told The New York Times back in 2017. “So I found that Yoda was the closest character to the king. And also Yoda and his lightsaber — it’s all green,” referring to Yoda being the same color as the Saudi flag.
The inclusion of the Yoda image in the textbook led to an official apology and the firing of a senior education official and other supervisors. Reuters reports that the Yoda image was not the only error in textbooks handed to students that year.
Image credits: Shaweesh
