The curriculum changes are part of the balancing act that Jordan’s monarchy has long attempted to appease its conservative citizens; the United States, a loyal ally that provides crucial aid; its noisy secular elite; and its influential Christian minority. (Even as the government issued the new textbooks, it arrested a Jordanian writer, Nahed Hattar, for sharing a cartoon on Facebook that many saw as mocking God. Mr. Hattar, 56, a prominent writer from a Christian family, was fatally shot when he showed up at a courthouse on Sept. 25 to face criminal charges of insulting Islam.)

The problem with the previous Jordanian curriculum, advocates for change said, was that Islam dominated every subject, without teaching children about the shared humanity of non-Muslims, including other Jordanian citizens. For instance, Jordanians are taught, “You are a Muslim, and therefore you are moral,” said Oraib al-Rantawi, director general of Al Quds Center for Political Studies, which argued for revisions. “So the question is, what of others? Non-Muslims? Are they moral?”

Pressure to change the curriculum came in 2015, after a Jordanian Air Force fighter pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a cage by ISIS militants. Some leading Jordanians hesitated to condemn his killing, appearing to sympathize with the militants. At the time, hundreds of Jordanians were already in neighboring Syria fighting for militant groups.

Government officials began to question how the education curriculum was influencing Jordanians, said Mr. Shteiwi, the sociologist. “We began feeling that what we are doing in our schools was an important factor,” he said.

Mr. Shteiwi, along with other academics and religious figures, was summoned by the Education Ministry in the spring. As they worked on the curriculum, a sense of urgency grew. In June, three intelligence officers and two government employees were killed at a Palestinian refugee camp. In November, a police officer fatally shot five security officials, including two American trainers, a South African and two fellow Jordanians, at a compound in Amman, bringing fears of infiltration by Islamist militants into one of the Arab world’s safest cities.

The curriculum changes were meant to give students a better chance “to enter the labor market, and to make them more immune to extremist ideas circulating against them,” said Mohammad Momani, a government spokesman.

It is unclear how effective the new curriculum will be in a country with around 1.7 million students and 30,000 teachers working in 4,000 schools, many of them overcrowded.