Saudi Concerns
Dean
Mary notes, with much justification, that Saudi funding of hate literature continues unabated (really, go read her whole piece).
To be clear, it is not just any money, but Saudi Government money. (And please, let's have no bullshit about what constitutes hate-literature: calling people who intentionally blow up hospitals "terrorists" is not hate-literature, but calling upon Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and to kill Muslims who disagree certainly is.)
It is in reading things like this that I become somewhat less sanguine about the significance of the recent Saudi municipal elections.
John over at Crossroads Arabia was much impressed recently about a (quite good) editorial in the Arab News by a Saudi woman, about the need for change. Yet honestly, I have seen many such columns in the Arab News over the last few years and I have to ask:
Did that column appear anywhere in Arabic?
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You might be interested in reading my post--the the comments--about the Saudi publications. I think it explains--though doesn't excuse--a lot.
I'm told by the Saudi embassy--and you can value that as you will, though I do value it--that they are no longer sending those materials out, though clearly they had in the past.
The embassy will not go as far as to repudiate those publications, which is a pity. But seeing that they are not policy makers, I can also understand their situation. Bureaucrats are not going to take on the religious establishment because all that would happen would be that they would lose their jobs. The bureaucrats have no standing as religious scholars, and to decry senior religious scholars, whether or not they agree, might be a brave political act, but would be without effect. That is something that very senior government officials would have to do.
And those officials are probably not secure enough to do that in any categorical way. It's not dissimilar to a situation where Bush is not going to repudiate Franklin Graham in public, whether or not he agrees with everything that comes out of his mouth. Except, of course, the difficulty is an order of magnitude higher in this case: church and state are not separate.
I am also told that the Saudi Embassy has asked the mosques to remove those publications from their shelves. I'd like to see a Freedom House follow-up study in a year's time.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me make it clear: those are odious, hateful publications. They are the result of xenophobic, frightened minds. While it may be politically impossible to repudiate them today, the very least that can be done is to get them off the shelves if they no longer represent current thinking.
Most of what I’ve learned about the Wahhabi-inspired hate and their extremist interpretation of Shariah law, I’ve learned from moderate Sufis and Shi’ites. They’ve suffered under Wahhabi influence for many years. Since 9/11, Americans have only begun to wake up to the problem.
Were you to say that both Adbul Wahhab and the Muslim Brotherhood were influenced by Ibn Tamayya, I'd have no argument whatsoever. Even if you disregard the fact that they took different messages from him.
But where you keep trying to dump all thing bad in Islam on Wahhabis, you ignore the very real influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and--what is far worse in my opinion--the Deobandis. The Taleban, after all, were not Wahhabis, but Deobandis, as any credible research will reveal.
This complicates the black/white image you'd prefer, but facts have a way of doing that to a person.
The real Wahhabis have enough problems in cleaning up their act. And clean it up the absolutely need to do. But they are neither the sum nor source of all evil in the Islamic world.