Word: wahhabist
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...Within Islam, something also very profound occurred in 2006. Until earlier this year, Islam had found itself represented by essentially one faction in global politics and propaganda: the anti-Western vision of al-Qaeda's Wahhabist ideology. The power of its ability to marshall Arab and Muslim resentment against the West - and against non-Muslims more generally - drowned out milder, more moderate forms of Islam and masked deep divisions within Islam itself...
...such wan and infrequent holidays today? The answer, simply put, is that in one historical setting after another, traditional celebrations were deliberately suppressed. The ancient Roman élite slaughtered worshippers of Dionysus with as much zeal as when, in later years, they went after Christians. Reformation Protestants criminalized carnival. Wahhabist Muslims, the ideological antecedents of al-Qaeda, battled ecstatic Sufism...
...steel and concrete as metaphor - tied, on one shoreline, to a truce struck between the Saudi ruling family and religious traditionalists in the kingdom. The Sauds get virtually limitless wealth, a healthy chunk of which they share with their dour clerical partners and their Wahhabist accountants. In exchange, the royals receive a stamp of religious approval, as the true protectors of the Holy Sites of Mecca and Medina, as well as an understanding that 25,000 or so members of the royal family can do, more or less, anything they please, while the country's 27 million citizens live under...
...Arabs who followed a different form of Islam. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had been suspicious of Shi'ites but learned to work with them. In al-Zarqawi's eyes, Iraq's Shi'ites were apostates because their practice of Islam differs from the extreme Wahhabist version he embraced. For that, they deserved even more gruesome punishment than nonbelievers. Fighters from his inner circle told TIME he lost his cool only when discussing Shi'ites. "He really hates [them], even more than the Americans," says a mid-ranking al-Qaeda operative. Although al-Zarqawi taunted...
What the Sauds have not done is provide their people with an alternative to the insular world view peddled by the country's Wahhabist clerics. Saudi liberals like Professor Enazy who seek to counter the extremists still find themselves muzzled. Drinking coffee in the refuge of a Riyadh hotel room, Enazy says the government has warned him not to criticize the kingdom's religious establishment. "If I publish anything, I'll get kicked out of a job," he says. "And yet they allow the extremists to get away with anything they want." The U.S. has provided little support to those...