Fucking Saudis? Or Trustworthy Allies?

[ygsm]

##EFCODE##The Whole Article (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/international/middleeast/09SAUD.html)

[b]Saudis Plan to End U.S. Presence[b]
By PATRICK E. TYLER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 — Saudi Arabia\'s leaders have made far-reaching decisions to prepare for an era of military disengagement from the United States, to enact what Saudi officials call the first significant democratic reforms at home, and to rein in the conservative clergy that has shared power in the kingdom.

What odds do you want to give me that only the first step, and half of the second, end up getting accomplished?

[trollificus]

##EFCODE##I wouldn't bet against that, but...

Regarding step 3 above, a little history of the Wahabbi sect might be in order...read some of THAT recently, and I dunno why the Sauds would rely on that particular bit of revisionist Islamic nutjobbery anyway. Maybe the alliance of the al Sauds and the Whabbi fanatics made sense 600 years ago, but now I don't get it.

Time for a bit o' history, who knows, maybe they will be willing to rethink their commitment to the radicals. It's not like many of the al Saud princes actually FOLLOW the tenets of Islam generally or Wahabbism in particular anyway. Where's that link...

[trollificus]

##EFCODE##Here's an article (http://www.globebooks.com/servlet/ArticleNews/gbreview/TGAM/20030125/BKISLA/globebooks/PEglobebooks/globebooks-review) with some background on the Wahhabi sect.



Briefly, Schwartz's thesis is this: The princes of Saudi Arabia share power and the fabulous wealth of their petro-dollars with a hereditary priestly hierarchy overseeing a cultic travesty of Islam known as Wahhabism, after its 18th-century founder. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a poorly educated, narrow-minded, homicidal fanatic whose idiosyncratic, austere and uncharitable vision for his religion flew in the face of its own teachings and those accorded to its Prophet. Schwartz writes:

"The essence . . . came down to three points. First, ritual is superior to intentions. Second, no reverence of the dead is permitted. Third, there can be no intercessory prayer, addressed to God by means of the Prophet or saints. . . . Prayers to God by means of a pious person or even honours to any individual other than God were condemned as idolatry, despite their acceptance by all previous generations of Muslims and the Prophet himself. At the same time, defying centuries of Islamic theology, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's followers ascribed a human form to God."

If this was, loosely, what Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was for, then what he was against took up a good deal more room. His doctrines explicitly downgraded the status of Mohammed, yet he also claimed to live a life so close to the exemplar of Mohammed that he could stand as peer to the Prophet himself. "It seems clear," Schwartz writes, "that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab saw himself as an equal of the Prophet, a view that is also thoroughly heretical in Islam."

Some critics assert that he even saw himself as surpassing the Prophet. But, as seems common with heresies that gain a following, Wahhabism viewed everyone else as a heretic. Its leader denounced his opponents, and all Muslims unwilling to accept his views, as idolaters and apostates, and he abused the prophets, scholars, saints and other pious figures of the past.

Nor did he make any secret of his opinion that all Muslims had fallen into unbelief and that if they did not follow him, they should all be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated. Shias, Sufis and other Muslims he judged unorthodox were to be exterminated, and all other faiths were to be humiliated or destroyed.

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was soon ordering the graves of Muslim saints dug up and scattered, or turned into latrines. He also burned many books, arguing that Koran alone would suffice for humanity's needs. Above all, and perhaps most telling, Wahhabism's prophet and his followers despised music, viewing it as an incitement to forgetfulness of God and to sin. Only fundamentalist Christianity can boast of reaching such a nadir of extremist folly -- such that those adhering to it open themselves to the suspicion of insanity.

Music, it should be noted, was perhaps Islamic civilization's crowning glory -- without whose influence and instruments Western classical music would be unimaginably bereft -- and to this day the ancient tradition continues to produce some of the most profoundly moving songs and instrumental music, both sacred and profane, in the world. For the various Sufi orders, many of which still use music or dance to attain ecstatic union with the divine, an Islam without music would be like air without the fragrant winds of Spring.

Yet this is the Islam of Wahhabism, a bleak creed, in the words of Stephen Schwartz, "fit for the nothingness of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's birthplace in Najd, a part of Arabia the Prophet himself did not favor. . . [reportedly characterizing it thus in a Hadith, one of his sayings that govern the behaviour of Muslims] 'From that place will come only earthquakes, conflicts, and the horns of Satan.' "

A prophetic utterance indeed, for with the terrible doctrine of Wahhabism, Schwartz tells us, "the basis had been laid for two and a half centuries of Islamic fundamentalism, and ultimately terrorism, in response to global change."



The rise to power of the al Sauds, and with them, their Wahhabi allies, is as unlikely as anything in history. Seems that, with only a few Fremen troops and a couple of sandworms, they were able to...oh, sorry, wrong story.