Word: islamics
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Many of the madrasahs, or Islamic schools, in Pakistan that produced Taliban extremists and affiliated Pakistani radicals are Saudi funded. So are some of the more strident Islamic schools in Indonesia called pesantren, after a strain of Islam close to Wahhabi thinking. Abu Nida, a cleric in Piyungan, Indonesia, says Saudi funding--he won't say from which group--enabled him to start his Bin Baaz Islamic Center. "The first prerequisite is that you have to be a Salafi pesantren to receive the money," he says...
...Matroudi, of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, is vehement that the government never attaches ideological strings to its overseas aid and does not promote Wahhabism abroad. "No, no, no," he says. "[We have] nothing to do with that at all. Our understanding is for our own country. These people who are asking for help, we never ask them to practice Islam according to our understanding." Foreign Minister Saud says it's possible there are individual Saudis who have contributed money to Wahhabi schools abroad. "But if there are," he says, "we want the information. The man will...
...version of Islam that Wahhab conceived in the 1740s is now the state religion of Saudi Arabia. These days, many would interpret that premonitory dream in a darker light. Is Wahhabism somehow synonymous with terrorism, dictating war on the West as part of its doctrinal underpinnings? Or have terrorists distorted Wahhabism to give a false legitimacy to their militancy? In his book on Islam in Saudi Arabia, Stephen Schwartz suggests that where Wahhabism is the official creed, there must be a terrorist state. Many religious historians and sociologists, however, see a more subtle picture: a faith founded on rigid...
Wahhab was born in a small central Arabian town in 1703 as the Ottoman Empire, which had dominated Islam's majority Sunni branch for centuries, was in its long, final decline. His seminal text, The Book of Unity, attempted to recover what he saw as the original, pristine state of Islam by pruning out "innovations" that had polluted its essential monotheism. Wahhab's list of corruptions was sweeping; it included Shi'ism, the faith's minority strain, and Sufism, its mystical tradition. He discarded most of the interpretations of Islam's four great legal schools in favor of an exceedingly...
...most hospitable ally for al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq remains Ansar al-Islam, the militant group of Afghan-trained fighters that was based in northern Iraq before the war; hundreds of Ansar members fled to Iran after a U.S.-led assault on their base in March. Since then, says a security chief in Kurdistan named Khasraw, the Ansar fighters have returned to Iraq and established cells in Fallujah and Baghdad, with the aim to "attack U.S. interests everywhere on orders from outside, namely al-Qaeda." U.S. agencies believe that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a suspected al-Qaeda operative and senior...