Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "International propagation of Salafism and Wahhabism" in English language version.
The Kingdom's 70 or so embassies around the world already featured cultural, educational, and military attaches, along with consular officers who organized visas for the hajj. Now they were joined by religious attaches, whose job was to get new mosques built in their countries and to persuade existing mosques to propagate the dawah wahhabiya.
The Muslim Brothers agreed not to operate in Saudi Arabia itself, but served as a relay for contacts with foreign Islamist movements. The MBs also used as a relay in South Asia movements long established on an indigenous basis (Jamaat-i Islami). Thus the MB played an essential role in the choice of organisations and individuals likely to receive Saudi subsidies. On a doctrinal level, the differences are certainly significant between the MBs and the Wahhabis, but their common references to Hanbalism ... their rejection of the division into juridical schools, and their virulent opposition to Shiism and popular religious practices (the cult of 'saints') furnished them with the common themes of a reformist and puritanical preaching. This alliance carried in its wake older fundamentalist movements, non-Wahhabi but with strong local roots, such as the Pakistani Ahl-i Hadith or the Ikhwan of continental China.
In the melting pot of Arabia during the 1960s, local clerics trained in the Wahhabite tradition joined with activists and militants affiliated with the Muslims Brothers who had been exiled from the neighboring countries of Egypt, Syria and Iraq ... The phenomenon of Osama bin Laden and his associates cannot be understood outside this hybrid tradition.
Before the 1970s, the Saudis acted as if Wahhabism was an internal affair well adapted to native needs of Saudi society and culture. The 1970s became a turning point in that the Saudi government decided to undertake a systematic campaign of aggressively exporting the Wahhabi creed to the rest of the Muslim world.
The guardians of the Islamic tradition were the jurists.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
... in the wake of the oil boom Saudis had money, ... [and it] appeared to validate them in their Saudi-ness. They believed that they deserved their windfall, that the treasure the kingdom sits on is in some ways a gift from God, a reward for having spread the message of Islam from a land that had hitherto seemed barren in every respect. The sudden oil wealth entrenched a sense of self-righteousness and arrogance among many Saudis, appeared to vindicate them in their separateness from other cultures and religions. In the process, it reconfirmed the belief that the greater the Western presence, the greater the potential threat to everything they held dear.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
Ayman he fled to Saudi Arabia in 1985.
I wrote this Fatwa and it was originally larger than its present size. I showed it to our Great Respected Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Bazz. I read it to him, he improved upon it and he said "it is good" and agreed with it. But, he suggested to me to shorten it and to write an introduction for it with which it should be published. ... Likewise, I read it to Sheikh Mohammed Bin Salah Bin Uthaimin and he too signed it.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
In 1984 the presses of Medina's massive $130 million King Fahd Holy Koran Printing Complex rolled into action. That year and every year thereafter, a free Koran was presented to each of the two million or so pilgrims who came to Mecca to perform their hajj, evidence of Wahhabi generosity that was borne back to every corner of the Muslim community. `No limit`, announced a royal directive, `should be put on expenditures for the propagation of Islam.` The government allocated more than $27 billion over the years to this missionary fund, while Fahd devoted millions more from his personal fortune to improve the structures of the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Vast white marble halls and decorative arches were raised by the Bin Laden company at the king's personal expense to provide covered worshiping space for several hundred thousand more pilgrims.
Starting in the 1950s, religious institutions in Saudi Arabia published and disseminated new editions of Ibn Taymiyya's works for free throughout the world, financed by petroleum royalties. These works have been cited widely: by Abd al-Salam Faraj, the spokesperson for the group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981; in GIA tracts calling for the massacre of `infidels`during the Algerian civil war in the 1990s; and today on Internet sites exhorting Muslim women in the west to wear veils as a religious obligation.
A wide range of institutions, whether schools, book publishers, magazines, newspapers, or even governments, as well as individuals, such as imams, teachers, or writers, learned to shape their behavior, speech, and thought in such a way as to incur and benefit from Saudi largesse. In many parts of the Muslim world, the wrong type of speech or conduct (such as failing to veil or advocate the veil) meant the denial of Saudi largesse or the denial of the possibility of attaining Saudi largesse, and in numerous contexts this meant the difference between enjoying a decent standard of living or living in abject poverty.
Rida's liberal ideas and writings were fundamentally inconsistent with Wahhabism ... the Saudis banned the writings of Rida, successfully preventing the republication of his work even in Egypt, and generally speaking made his books very difficult to locate. ...
Another liberal thinker whose writings, due to sustained Saudi pressure, were made to disappear was a Yemeni jurist named Muhammad al-Amir al-Husayni al-San'ani (d.1182-1768)
I have focused here on Sulayman's treatise in which he criticized his brother and the Wahhabi movement because of the historical importance of that text. Not surprisingly, Sulayman's treatise is banned by Saudi Arabia, and there has been considerable effort expended in that country and elsewhere to bury that text. Presently, this important work is not well known in the Muslim world and is very difficult to find.
The reaction to al-Ghazali's book was frantic and explosive, with a large number of puritans writing to condemn al-Ghazali and to question his motives and competence. Several major conferences were held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to criticize the book, and the Saudi newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat published several long article responding to al-Ghazali ...
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
The Failure of Political Islam muslim world league.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam.
The Taliban were effectively placing themselves under Saudi sponsorship, asking for Saudi money and materials, and according to Ahmed Rashid they received it. `The Saudis provided fuel, money, and hundreds of new pickups to the Taliban,` he wrote in his book Taliban, published in 2000, the first significant history of the movement. `Much of this aid was flown in to Kandahar from the Gulf port city of Dubai.`
"Prince Turki Al-Faisal flatly denies this. `The Saudi government gave no financial aid to the Taliban whatsoever, .... The Taliban got their assistance from Pakistani intelligence and also from outside businesspeople and well-wishers. Some of those came from the Gulf -- from Kuwait and the Emirates -- and some of them many have been Saudis.` ....
the Afghan jihad was being fought over again, with pure, young Salafi warriors. Abdul Aziz bin Baz .... a particular enthusiast. ... It is not known ... which of the family of Abdul Aziz privately parted with money at the venerable shiekh's request, but what was pocket money to them could easily have bought a fleet of pickup trucks for the Taliban.
`I remember` says Ahmed Rashid, `that all the Taliban who had worked or done hajj in Saudi Arabia were terribly impressed by the religious police and tried to copy that system to the letter. The money for their training and salaries came partly from Saudi Arabia.` Ahmed Rashid took the trouble to collect and document the Taliban's medieval flailings against the modern West, and a few months later he stumbled on a spectacle that they were organizing for popular entertainment. Wondering why ten thousand men and children were gathering so eagerly in the Kandahar football stadium one Thursday afternoon, he went inside to discover a convicted murderer being led between the goalposts to be executed by a member of the victim's family.
"At the end of July [1998] the Taliban used their new trucks, enhanced with machine guns to finally capture the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif .... Ahmed Rashid later estimated that 6000 to 8000 Shia men, women and children were slaughtered in a rampage of murder and rape that included slitting people's throats and bleeding them to death, halal-style, and baking hundreds of victims into shipping containers without water to be baked alive in the desert sun." (p.209-10)
Muslims should be proud of smashing idols.
Well before the full emergence of Islamism in the 1970s, a growing constituency nicknamed `petro-Islam` included Wahhabi ulemas and Islamist intellectuals and promoted strict implementation of the sharia in the political, moral and cultural spheres; this proto-movement had few social concerns and even fewer revolutionary ones.
founded in 1962 as a counterweight to Nasser's propaganda, opened new offices in every area of the world where Muslims lived. The league played a pioneering role in supporting Islamic associations, mosques, and investment plans for the future. In addition, the Saudi ministry for religious affairs printed and distributed millions of Korans free of charge, along with Wahhabite doctrinal texts, among the world's mosques, from the African plains to the rice paddies of Indonesia and the Muslim immigrant high-rise housing projects of European cities. For the first time in fourteen centuries, the same books ... could be found from one end of the Umma to the other... hewed to the same doctrinal line and excluded other currents of thought that had formerly been part of a more pluralistic Islam.
Hostile as they were to the `sheikists`, the jihadist-salafists were even angrier with the Muslim Brothers, whose excessive moderation they denounced ...
Prior to 1973, Islam was everywhere dominated by national or local traditions rooted in the piety of the common people, with clerics from the different schools of Sunni religious law established in all major regions of the Muslim world (Hanafite in the Turkish zones of South Asia, Malakite in Africa, Shafeite in Southeast Asia), along with their Shiite counterparts. This motley establishment held Saudi inspired puritanism in great suspicion on account of its sectarian character. But after 1973, the oil-rich Wahhabites found themselves in a different economic position, being able to mount a wide-ranging campaign of proselytizing among the Sunnis (The Shiites, whom the Sunnis considered heretics, remained outside the movement). The objective was to bring Islam to the forefront of the international scene, to substitute it for the various discredited nationalist movements, and to refine the multitude of voices within the religion down to the single creed of the masters of Mecca. The Saudis' zeal now embraced the entire world ... [and in the West] immigrant Muslim populations were their special target."
The war of October 1973 was started by Egypt with the aim of avenging the humiliation of 1967 and restoring the lost legitimacy of the two states' ... [Egypt and Syria] emerged with a symbolic victory ... [but] the real victors in this war were the oil-exporting countries, above all Saudi Arabia. In addition to the embargo's political success, it had reduced the world supply of oil and sent the price per barrel soaring. In the aftermath of the war, the oil states abruptly found themselves with revenues gigantic enough to assure them a clear position of dominance within the Muslim world.
"the financial clout of Saudi Arabia ... had been amply demonstrated during the oil embargo against the United States, following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. This show of international power, along with the nation's astronomical increase in wealth, allowed Saudi Arabia's puritanical, conservative Wahhabite faction to attain a preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam. Saudi Arabia's impact on Muslims throughout the world was less visible than that of Khomeini's Iran, but the effect was deeper and more enduring. The kingdom seized the initiative from progressive nationalism, which had dominated the [Arab world in the] 1960s, it reorganized the religious landscape by promoting those associations and ulemas who followed its lead, and then, by injecting substantial amounts of money into Islamic interests of all sorts, it won over many more converts. Above all, the Saudis raised a new standard-the virtuous Islamic civilization-as a foil for the corrupting influence of the West.
The propagation of the faith was not the only issue for the leaders in Riyadh. Religious obedience on the part of the Saudi population became the key to winning government subsidies, the kingdom's justification for its financial pre-eminence, and the best way to allay envy among impoverished co-religionists in Africa and Asia. By becoming the managers of a huge empire of charity and good works, the Saudi government sought to legitimize a prosperity it claimed was manna from heaven, blessing the peninsula where the Prophet Mohammed had received his Revelation. Thus, an otherwise fragile Saudi monarchy buttressed its power by projecting its obedient and charitable dimension internationally.
The ideology of such regimes has been pejoratively labelled by some `petro-Islam.` This is mainly the ideology of Saudi Arabia but it is also echoed to one degree or another in most of the smaller Gulf countries. Petro-Islam proceeds from the premise that it is not merely an accident that oil is concentrated in the thinly populated Arabian countries rather than in the densely populated Nile Valley or the Fertile Crescent, and that this apparent irony of fate is indeed a grace and a blessing from God (ni'ma; baraka) that should be solemnly acknowledged and lived up to.
In Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami proved a natural and enthusiastic ally for the Wahhabis. Maududi's writings, while more anti-establishment than Saudi Arabia's self-protecting monarchy might tolerate at home, nonetheless promoted many of the Islamic moral and social transformations sought by Saudi clergy.
... a shift in the balance of power among Muslim states toward the oil-producing countries. Under Saudi influence, the notion of a worldwide `Islamic domain of shared meaning` transcending the nationalist divisions among Arabs, Turks, Africans, and Asians was created. All Muslims were offered a new identity that emphasized their religious commonality while downplaying differences of language, ethnicity, and nationality.
The House of Saud believed that by coupling its image as the champion of Islam with its vast financial resources, petro-Islam could mobilize the approximately six hundred million Moslem faithful worldwide to defend Saudi Arabia against the real and perceived threats to its security and its rulers. Consequently, a whole panoply of devices was adopted to tie Islamic peoples to the fortunes of Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud has embraced the hajj ... as a major symbol of the kingdom's commitment to the Islamic world. ... These `guest of God` are the beneficiaries of the enormous sums of money and effort that Saudi Arabia expends on polishing it image among the faithful. ... brought in heavy earth-moving equipment to level millions of square meters of hill peaks to accommodate pilgrims' tents, which were then equipped with electricity. One year the ministry had copious amounts of costly ice carted from Mecca to wherever the white-robed hajjis were performing their religious rites.
Almost two decades of such Saudi funding had made the state's largest Islamic institution even more conservative. Many ulema had worked in Saudi Arabia, among them Mufti Tantawi, Egypt's chief sheikh, who had spent four years at the Islamic University of Medina.
... it is important to refer to the position of Shikh `Abdil-Halim Mahmud (d.1978) Shikh of al-'Azhar ... towards Saudi Arabia. Shikh Mahmud had an ideological affinity with the Saudi interpretation of Islam. Due to his links with Saudi Arabia, he moved loser to al-Ikhwan al-Muslimum. This position contrasted with the position of al-`Azhar in the 1960s...
Tapping the financial circuits of the Gulf to finance a mosque usually began with private initiative. An adhoc association would prepare a dossier to justify a given investment, usually citing the need felt by locals for a spiritual center. They would then seek a `recommendation` (tazkiya) from the local office of the Muslim World League to a generous donor within the kingdom or one of the emirates. This procedure was much criticised over the years ... The Saudi leadership's hope was that these new mosques would produce new sympathizers for the Wahhabite persuasion.
For many of those returning from the El Dorado of oil, social ascent went hand in hand with an intensification of religious practice. In contrast to the bourgeois ladies of the preceding generation, who like to hear their servants address them as Madame .... her maid would call her hajja ... mosques, which were built in what was called the Pakistani `international style`, gleaming with marble and green neon lighting. This break with the local Islamic architectural traditions illustrates how Wahhabite doctrine achieved an international dimension in Muslim cities. A civic culture focused on reproducing ways of life that prevailed in the Gulf also surfaced in the form of shopping centers for veiled women, which imitated the malls of Saudi Arabia, where American-style consumerism co-existed with mandatory segregation of the sexes.
For example, a Saudi agency that had taken charge of the `restoration` of the Gazi Husrev Beg mosque in Sarajevo ordered the ornate Ottoman tilework and painted wall decorations stripped off and discarded. The interior and exterior were redone `in gleaming hospital white`.
To examine this infrastructure, it is useful to consider the case of Zakir Naik, perhaps the most influential Salafi ideologue in India.
This first sphere [of Islamic banking] supplied a mechanism for the partial redistribution of oil revenues among the member states of OIC by way of the Islamic Development Bank, which opened for business in 1975. This strengthened Islamic cohesion -- and increased dependence -- between the poorer member nations of Africa and Asia, and the wealthy oil-exporting countries.
Around 1975, young men with college degrees, along with experienced professors, artisans and country people, began to move en masse from the Sudan, Pakistan, India, Southeast Asia, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria to the Gulf states. These states harbored 1.2 million immigrants in 1975, of whom 60.5% were Arabs; this increased to 5.15 million by 1985, with 30.1% being Arabs and 43% (mostly Muslims) coming from the Indian subcontinent. ... In Pakistan in 1983, the money sent home by Gulf emigrants amounted to $3 billion, compared with a total of $735 million given to the nation in foreign aid. .... The underpaid petty functionary of yore could now drive back to his hometown at the wheel of a foreign car, build himself a house in a residential suburb, and settle down to invest his savings or engage in trade.... he owed nothing to his home state, where he could never have earned enough to afford such luxuries.
[Arab "nationalists split into two fiercely opposed camps: progressives, led by Nasser's Egypt, Baathist Syria, and Iraq, versus the conservatives, led by the monarchies of Jordan and the Arabian peninsula. ...[in] the Six Day War of June 1967. ... It was the progressives, and above all Nasser, who had started the war and been most seriously humiliated militarily. [It] ... marked a major symbolic rupture.... Later on, conservative Saudis would call 1967 a form of divine punishment for forgetting religion. They would contrast that war, in which Egyptian soldiers went into battle shouting `Land! Sea! Air!` with the struggle of 1973, in which the same soldiers cried `Allah Akhbar!` and were consequently more successful. However it was interpreted, the 1967 defeat seriously undermined the ideological edifice of nationalism and created a vacuum to be filled a few years later by Qutb's Islamist philosophy, which until then had been confined to small circles of Muslim Brothers, prisoners, ..."
Official Wahhabism may not encourage antistate violence, but it is a particularly severe and intolerant interpretation of Islam ... The Saudi elites should consider just what role such a severe doctrine and the vast religious infrastructure they have built around it played in bin Laden's rise.ion[permanent dead link]
... money that brought Wahabis power throughout the Arab world and financed networks of fundamentalist schools from Sudan to northern Pakistan.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (help)A number of Islamists claim that Bin Laden has no connection with Wahhabism and also point to his Yemeni background, which is typically non-Wahhabi.
Many aspects of the Saudi curriculum were not fully modernized after the 1960s. Some Saudi textbooks taught Islamic tolerance while others condemned Jews and Christians. Anti-Christian and anti-Jewish passages remained in grade school textbooks that use rhetoric that were little more than hate literature. The same was true of more sophisticated books issued by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Practices. Even the English-language Korans which were made available in the hotels which were located in the Kingdom contained parenthetical passages which condemned Christians and Jews, passages that were not contained in any English language editions of the Koran which were published outside Saudi Arabia.
Some Western writing since "9/11" has blamed Saudi Arabia for most of the region's Islamic fundamentalism, and used the term Wahhabi carelessly to describe all such movements. In fact, most such extremism is not based on Saudi Islamic beliefs. It is based on a much broader stream of thought in Islam, known as the Salafi interpretation, which literally means a return to Islam's original state, and by a long tradition of movements in Islam that call for islah (reform) and tajdid (renewal).
It is undoubtedly true that the extremely strict, intolerant version of Islam that is taught and practices in Saudi Arabia created the milieu from which Osama bin Laden and his recruits emerged.
Since 2009 Bangladesh has been sending to Saudi Arabia an average of only 14,500 people... That decline, ... will be worth about $200m a year in remittances alone. ... Bangladesh appears somehow to have fallen out of favour as a source of labour with the Saudis. ... Saudi Arabia silently disapproves of the imminent hangings of the leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the religious party that serves as a standard-bearer for its strand of Islam in Bangladesh.
Since 2009 Bangladesh has been sending to Saudi Arabia an average of only 14,500 people ... Bangladesh appears somehow to have fallen out of favour as a source of labour with the Saudis. ... Saudi Arabia silently disapproves of the imminent hangings of the leadership of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the religious party that serves as a standard-bearer for its strand of Islam in Bangladesh. ... The current prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, ... has brought back an explicitly secular constitution under which religious politics has no space. It will not have escaped the Saudis' notice that Bangladesh's foreign minister likened the Jamaat, a close ally of theirs, to a terrorist organisation in a briefing with diplomats in Dhaka on March 7th. ... As long as relations are what they are with the Saudis, Bangladesh must keep scrambling to find alternative venues for its migrant labourers. ... as far as Saudi retribution is concerned.
Although Sunni‐extremist fervor dissipates the further one travels from the wellsprings of Cairo and Riyadh, Salafist (and very similar Wahhabi) teaching is prominently featured at thousands of worldwide schools funded by fundamentalist Sunni Muslim charities, especially those from Saudi Arabia and those which are based across the Arabian Peninsula.
Lastly, the Saudis spent tens of billions of dollars throughout the world to pump Wahhabism or petro-Islam, a particularly virulent and militant version of supremacist Islamism.
It was during the "Arab Cold War," which broke out in the 1960s, that Saudi rulers began to transform Wahhabi doctrines into a militant, pan-Islamic ideology. The Saudi kingdom felt threatened by the secularist nationalism epitomized by Nasser's Egypt, and by liberal, socialist, and Marxist currents within Arab and Islamic societies more widely. With the backing of the United States, Britain, and other Western nations, Saudi Arabia entered into proxy wars against leftist regimes and developed a globalized Wahhabist ideology in response to the Cold-War ideologies of communism and liberal democracy. Saudi rulers and clerics also found common cause with Islamist ideologues like Mawlana Maududi in South Asia and Muslim Brotherhood circles associated with the Egyptian Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb. After Qutb's execution in Egypt, Saudi Arabia provided asylum to Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid's brother, and other radicalized members of the Brotherhood and provided some of them university positions and an increasingly sophisticated global platform.
Although Saudi Arabia is commonly characterized as aggressively exporting Wahhabism, it has in fact imported pan-Islamic Salafism. Saudi Arabia founded and funded transnational organizations and headquartered them in the kingdom, but many of the guiding figures in these bodies were foreign Salafis. The most well known of these organizations was the World Muslim League, founded in Mecca in 1962, which distributed books and cassettes by al-Banna, Qutb and other foreign Salafi luminaries. Saudi Arabia successfully courted academics at al-Azhar University, and invited radical Salafis to teach at its own Universities.
A whole generation of Muslims, therefore, has grown up with a maverick form of Islam [i.e. Wahhabism] that has given them a negative view of other faiths and an intolerantly sectarian understanding of their own. While not extremist per se, this is an outlook in which radicalism can develop.
IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism
The Saudi export of Wahabiism has helped bring about the current Islamist milieu. Saudis must reform their educational system and they must create a modern education system.t
The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.
More than 6,000 Saudi nationals have been recruited into al Qaeda armies in Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen since the Sept. 11 attacks. In Iraq, two years after the U.S. invasion, an estimated 3,000 Saudi nationals fought alongside Al Qaeda in Iraq, comprising the majority of foreign fighters targeting Americans and Iraqis.
[MB founder Hasan al-Banna] shared with the Wahhabis a strong revulsion against western influences and unwavering confidence that Islam is both the true religion and a sufficient foundation for conducting worldly affairs ... More generally, Banna's [had a] keen desire for Muslim unity to ward off western imperialism led him to espouse an inclusive definition of the community of believers. ... he would urge his followers, `Let us cooperate in those things on which we can agree and be lenient in those on which we cannot.` ... A salient element in Banna's notion of Islam as a total way of life came from the idea that the Muslim world was backward and the corollary that the state is responsible for guaranteeing decent living conditions for its citizens.
Saudi Arabia has donated £49 billion in aid in the past three decades [1975-2005] - making it the world's most generous donor nation per capita - but the cash has previously been earmarked only for Muslim countries.
Unlike many Sunnis in Iraq, most Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have embraced the puritanical and fundamentalist Islam of the Wahhabi mullahs from Saudi Arabia who wage a ruthless war not just against western "infidels" but also against fellow Muslims they consider to be apostates, in particular the Sufis. ... in the 1980s ... during the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion, elements in Saudi Arabia poured in money, arms and extremist ideology. Through a network of madrasas, Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi Islam indoctrinated young Muslims with fundamentalist Puritanism, denouncing Sufi music and poetry as decadent and immoral.
Take Qatar. There is evidence that, as the US magazine The Atlantic puts it, "Qatar's military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra", an al-Qaida group operating in Syria. Less than two weeks ago, Germany's development minister, Gerd Mueller, was slapped down after pointing the finger at Qatar for funding Islamic State (Isis). While there is no evidence to suggest Qatar's regime is directly funding Isis, powerful private individuals within the state certainly are, and arms intended for other jihadi groups are likely to have fallen into their hands. According to a secret memo signed by Hillary Clinton, released by Wikileaks, Qatar has the worst record of counter-terrorism cooperation with the US.
... money that brought Wahabis power throughout the Arab world and financed networks of fundamentalist schools from Sudan to northern Pakistan.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (help)A whole generation of Muslims, therefore, has grown up with a maverick form of Islam [i.e. Wahhabism] that has given them a negative view of other faiths and an intolerantly sectarian understanding of their own. While not extremist per se, this is an outlook in which radicalism can develop.
It was during the "Arab Cold War," which broke out in the 1960s, that Saudi rulers began to transform Wahhabi doctrines into a militant, pan-Islamic ideology. The Saudi kingdom felt threatened by the secularist nationalism epitomized by Nasser's Egypt, and by liberal, socialist, and Marxist currents within Arab and Islamic societies more widely. With the backing of the United States, Britain, and other Western nations, Saudi Arabia entered into proxy wars against leftist regimes and developed a globalized Wahhabist ideology in response to the Cold-War ideologies of communism and liberal democracy. Saudi rulers and clerics also found common cause with Islamist ideologues like Mawlana Maududi in South Asia and Muslim Brotherhood circles associated with the Egyptian Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb. After Qutb's execution in Egypt, Saudi Arabia provided asylum to Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid's brother, and other radicalized members of the Brotherhood and provided some of them university positions and an increasingly sophisticated global platform.
Many aspects of the Saudi curriculum were not fully modernized after the 1960s. Some Saudi textbooks taught Islamic tolerance while others condemned Jews and Christians. Anti-Christian and anti-Jewish passages remained in grade school textbooks that use rhetoric that were little more than hate literature. The same was true of more sophisticated books issued by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Practices. Even the English-language Korans which were made available in the hotels which were located in the Kingdom contained parenthetical passages which condemned Christians and Jews, passages that were not contained in any English language editions of the Koran which were published outside Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi export of Wahabiism has helped bring about the current Islamist milieu. Saudis must reform their educational system and they must create a modern education system.t
Some Western writing since "9/11" has blamed Saudi Arabia for most of the region's Islamic fundamentalism, and used the term Wahhabi carelessly to describe all such movements. In fact, most such extremism is not based on Saudi Islamic beliefs. It is based on a much broader stream of thought in Islam, known as the Salafi interpretation, which literally means a return to Islam's original state, and by a long tradition of movements in Islam that call for islah (reform) and tajdid (renewal).
A number of Islamists claim that Bin Laden has no connection with Wahhabism and also point to his Yemeni background, which is typically non-Wahhabi.