Weird World

Saudi school textbook withdrawn after accidentally using a photo of Yoda with the King

Poke Staff. Updated September 22nd, 2017

A social studies textbook used in schools in Saudi Arabia has been withdrawn after accidentally using a photo of King Faisal that had Yoda photoshopped into it.

(New York Times/Abdullah Al Shehri)

The photo is from the signing of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in 1945, and the artist who created said he has no idea how it got there.

“I am the one who designed it, but I am not the one who put it in the book,” Abdullah Al Shehri told the New York Times.

Shehri, who goes by the nickname Shaweesh, mixes pop culture figures into historic photographs. Another in the series features Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981, meeting Mickey Mouse during a trip to Disneyland and this shot of Darth Vader at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The Saudi education minister has since apologised for the “unintended mistake” and had the books withdrawn. Which is quite frankly a shame.