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According to Tom Carter, Wahhabism is a puritanical form of Islam that teaches intolerance of anyone who does not conform to its worldview, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steal, but they cannot dent the steel of Americans resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining”. — President George W. Bush It was reported on June 27, 2003 that al- Qaeda’s second...

Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter in the last years of the Cold War, posed an interesting question the other day. He noted that on Feb. 22, 1946, a mere six months after the end of World War II, George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow, sent his famous 5,000-word telegram that laid out the stakes of the Cold War and the nature of the enemy, and that that "Long Telegram" in essence shaped the way America thought about the conflict all the way up to the fall of the Berlin Wall four decades later. And what Mr. Robinson wondered was...

So many of the administration's present problems derive from squeamishness about ideological confrontation that any effective Long Telegram would have to address. When President Bush declared a "war on terror," cynics understood that he had no particular interest in the IRA or the Tamil Tigers, but that he was constrained from identifying the real enemy in any meaningful sense: In the fall of 2001, a war on Islamic this or Islamic that would have caused too many problems with Gen. Musharraf and the House of Saud and other chaps he wanted to keep on side. But it's one reason, for...

RIYADH (Reuters) - Hundreds of camels have died in Saudi Arabia this week from a mystery ailment. The Agriculture Ministry has said 232 camels died in the space of four days in the Dawasir Valley, 400 km (250 miles) south of Riyadh. King Abdullah has promised compensation for owners, who say the real number of deaths is far higher. Agriculture ministry officials have denied an infectious disease caused the deaths and blamed them on animal feed supplied by food storage authorities.

There is an insidious program featuring a white-washed, and thus untrue, version of Islam that has permeated our educational institutions, beginning in kindergarten, winding its way through the 12th grade, and into our universities. In circuitously slick ways, the Saudi government has managed to insinuate its own version of Middle Eastern culture and history, and strictly positive views of Islam, upon millions of American students thus indoctrinating them to a biased, pro-Islamic position when the full truth is far more complex and, not surprisingly, not quite as glowingly favorable. Journalist Stanley Kurtz has explored the depth of this interference and...

July 26, 2007 Fight to save teenage maid from beheading Jeremy Page in Delhi When Rizana Nafeek left her war-torn village in Sri Lanka two years ago, aged 17, she hoped to find a new life of peace and prosperity working as a maid in Saudi Arabia. Instead, she is on death row, facing possible decapitation in the next few months for allegedly strangling the baby son of her Saudi employers. Executions are commonplace in Saudi Arabia: there have been 109 so far this year, including four Sri Lankans who were beheaded for armed robbery. But Nafeek’s tender age, summary...

The Sunnis of Anbar, both sheikhs and ordinary folk, deeply resent the attempted imposition of an extreme Sunni order on them and are prepared to conciliate with Iraqi Shias and cooperate with the U.S.-led coalition to prevent it from happening. So why pull out now? Why do Westerners remain so reticent about Wahhabism and its Saudi backers?

BAGHDAD — "Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers." "About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the...

Western civilization, freedom and democracy are under attack around the world. The battle is taking place along all its borders and from within the countries who still remain within the fold. I have no concerns about our democratic and free military forces’ ability to defend us against our visible enemies. I am very concerned however by the mounting, almost unnoticed attacks from within, particularly here in my home, the United States. As the feminist author Tammy Bruce would say, I was raised to believe in prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, charity, democracy and the American way of life. I...

Lately in Sarajevo, it has become common to see vans with tinted windows in which women in black hijab and children are escorted, usually by two bearded men in the traditional Wahhabi short trousers. Only until six months ago, Nermina from Sarajevo was one of those women dressed in hijab. For five years she was a follower of the Wahhabi movement and wore a long black dress concealing her entire body and a veil covering her hair, neck and face. She also had to wear gloves. Nermina (not her real name) left the movement and abandoned the hijab after feeling...

Four members of an ultraconservative Muslim sect, known as Wahhabis, have been arrested following a raid on a mountain terrorist training camp in the Rashka region of south-western Serbia on March 18. A large supply of weapons, ammunition, hand grenades, facemasks and plastic explosive with detonators was also discovered at a cave at Ninaja Mountain, 30 kilometres from Novi Pazar. A judge ordered the four to be detained for 30 days to allow police and intelligence officials to investigate their alleged activities at the training site. Dragan Jocic, the Serbian interior affairs minister, said: “We are determined to prevent any...

Perhaps no single figure better represents the lamentable situation of Middle East studies (MES) today than Professor Natana J. DeLong-Bas, a Georgetown graduate who currently teaches at Brandeis University and Boston College. Her specialty happens to be Wahhabism, the ultrafundamentalist Islamic sect and state religion in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism inspires al-Qaida and its variants--including the Sunni jihadists currently murdering U.S. and coalition troops, as well as Shia Muslims, in Iraq. DeLong-Bas is a professional apologist for Saudi extremism. She recently reached a depth of mendacity about radical Islam it is hard to imagine her exceeding. In an...

In the last few years, the critique of Wahhabism has gained unprecedented momentum in Saudi Arabia. First formulated by a heterogeneous group of prominent liberal and Islamist intellectuals, it seems to have received the approval of at least part of the ruling elite who have taken a few official steps towards socio-religious reform. But is Saudi Arabiayet ready to enter the era of Post-Wahhabism? Huge changes have recently taken place in Saudi Arabia, especially within the local political-intellectual field. Significant among these is the rise to prominence of a group of "islamo-liberals," who are "made up of former Islamists and...

What's in a name . . . WHEN THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY of the global war against Islamist extremism is written, it may well be recorded that one of the psychological victories by al Qaeda and its Saudi financiers and commanders was to convince Western governments and media that Wahhabism, the fundamentalist Sunni sect that is the state religion in the desert kingdom, should not be mentioned by its name. After September 11, 2001, Islamist adherents on our shores first denied that Wahhabism existed. There was, they insisted, just Islam. Excision of the W-word from Western discourse was a serious hit....

RUSH: (story) "Russia, in March, will start delivering nuclear fuel for a plant that it is building in Iran, the head of the state company in charge of the project said Monday." Now, I thought that Iran was a country rich in oil and in fuel. The head of the outfit here, Sergei Shmatko, "said during a trip to Tehran that he and Iranian officials had discussed financial problems related to the completion of the nuclear plant in Iran's southern port of Bushehr... Shmatko said his company would start preparations in January for nuclear fuel deliveries to Bushehr, and begin...

Mr. Allen is an historian who has written several books on Central Asia and the British colonial period, including Soldier Sahibs and The Buddha and the Sahibs. He recently received the Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal for his work in "stimulating public interest in Britain's imperial encounter with Asia." His latest book is God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (Perseus Books). He lives in England. There is a widely held view in the West that the violence perpetrated by Muslim jihadists is a response to Western imperialism: a defence of Islam that will cease...

In America Alone, Mark Steyn presents us with a doomsday scenario backed by impeccable science and research, and he does it in such a clever manner that we are actually amused as we read of the impending demise of Europe-as-we-knew-it, Japan, and Canada. Why are they failing? Procreation, or more pointedly, the lack thereof. Populations in Russia, Italy, and the Low Countries may have already passed the point of no return. Canada is on the borderline. America, on the other hand, appears to have a sustainable reproductive level, a fact that ought to make some Canucks wish that General Hull...

In the last few years, the critique of Wahhabism has gained unprecedented momentum in Saudi Arabia. First formulated by a heterogeneous group of prominent liberal and Islamist intellectuals, it seems to have received the approval of at least part of the ruling elite who have taken a few official steps towards socio-religious reform. But is Saudi Arabiayet ready to enter the era of Post-Wahhabism? Huge changes have recently taken place in Saudi Arabia, especially within the local political-intellectual field. Significant among these is the rise to prominence of a group of "islamo-liberals," who are "made up of former Islamists and...

NVM: Modules     Volume 3, Issue 14 (July 15, 2005) | Download PDF Version Understanding the Origins of Wahhabism and Salafism By Trevor Stanley The phenomenon of Islamic terrorism cannot be adequately explained as the export of Saudi Wahhabism, as many commentators claim. In fact, the ideological heritage of groups such as al-Qaeda is Salafism, a movement that began in Egypt and was imported into Saudi society during the reign of King Faisal. The official ‘Wahhabi’ religion of Saudi Arabia has essentially merged with certain segments of Salafism. There is now intense competition between groups and individual scholars...

Pope Benedict XVI recently cited a Byzantine-era critique of Islam, and the usual hubbub of outrage ensued. Various self-appointed and official Islamic spokesmen (they're always men), including the head of Turkey's religious affairs directorate (why does Turkey have one?), responded sharply in the name of their faith. One might argue that a confident, evolved religion welcomes all kinds of open debate. Or one might in tone gravely that the West continues to mishandle its relations with the umma -- the sphere of active Muslim believers -- with the implied assumption that there is such a unified entity of tens of...