Quotes About Wahhabi

The political alliance between the House of Saud and the conservative Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, and the alliance has resulted in billions funneled to and through the Wahhabi movement.

The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.

Saudi Arabia, we should remember (as we turn to Indonesia and southern Thailand), in addition to flooding postrevolutionary Egypt with cash and hijacking the political process in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, is also pushing for Jordan and Morocco to join the Gulf Cooperation Council, giving rise to the nightmare scenario of a sort of Greater Wahhabi Kingdom from the borders of Israel to the Atlantic. Just

This is the story everywhere in the wider Muslim world. Students go to the Middle East on generous scholarships and study Salafi or Wahhabi doctrine, and they learn there that jabbering on at top volume about martyrs and violent jihad is a highly effective way of whipping up religious fervor. In the home country, hardline religious schools spring up, like the one I visited in Thailand, and spread their obsession with ritual, code, dress, and other apparent trivia.

Egypt is now a deeply conservative country that, over the past two decades, has so pervasively succumbed to the Wahhabi customs promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood that, in some cities, you might as well be in Saudi Arabia. After the revolution, a poll in Egypt suddenly reported that 75 percent of the people support the Muslim Brotherhood.23 That seems an implausible conversion rate from a mere 30 percent before the revolution.

Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.

The Wahhabi movement is a form of radical Islam that people here say did not exist before in Bosnia, where Islam had co-existed with other major religions and was much softer and more liberal.

Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina.