The Cult of Wahabism in America by Matthew Mainen

This is one of the best articles I have read that addresses the 'cult like nature' of Wahabism and it's Saudi Funding.

WAHABISM IN AMERICA

by Matthew Mainen

Traditionally in international politics, the word “invasion” is used to describe a situation in which a state forcefully penetrates the territory of another. But in a world in which non-state actors, especially terrorist organizations, play an increasing role in international politics, the word “invasion” can be used to describe far subtler actions.

Recently, a number of anti-Western texts, many of which were distributed by the Saudi Embassy, were discovered among authentic Muslim works at prominent Muslim institutions in the United States. This tactic carried out by extremists within the Saudi government represents an invasion on two fronts: the Muslim religion and the sovereignty of the United States. Although there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia has directly sponsored terrorism, it nonetheless is the largest contributor to the faith that breads it: Wahhabism, a fringe Islamic sect created more than 1,000 years after the time of Muhammad.

When such ideas posing as authentic Islam enter the United States, it can only serve to sabotage long-lasting American values. If the goal of social upheaval is achieved, it will be far more damaging than any incendiary device used in acts of terror.

The threat posed by Saudi Arabia’s interference in America’s religious affairs is not to be taken lightly, and requires immediate attention at the high levels of office.

The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom in the United States. Nearly 200 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified, the ideals of religious freedom and tolerance were codified in the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights. Although attempting to argue that Saudi Arabia is legally bound to respect religious tolerance is an arduous task, there is another option: Saudi Arabia, like all other countries, is legally bound to respect the sovereignty of the United States. By playing a direct role in the distribution of texts designed to erode domestic religious harmony, Saudi Arabia is illegally interfering with America’s internal affairs.

Wahhabism, especially as it attempts to influence American Muslims, is best described as a cult and should be dealt with as one. After all, fatwas published in materials distributed by the Saudi Embassy exhibit signs of fundamental cult practices. Muslims living in the United States are instructed to progressively isolate themselves for the sake of their purity. First, they must have almost no contact with non-Muslims. After this separation is complete, they are then instructed to distance themselves from Muslims who do not share the extreme beliefs of Wahhabism. Finally, they are to undergo a breaking down of their identities; such practices as celebrating a birthday are strictly forbidden. Young Muslims looking for spiritual guidance are duped into believing that these distorted teachings are the true path of Islam.

Once a person is stripped of their identity and the included morals, he becomes a puppet to the masters of whichever ideology is controlling him. None of the September 11 hijackers were born terrorists; they went through a similar process as what is being advocated to American Muslims by Saudi religious leaders. Cults, when they become dangerous to society, are not protected by the Constitution or international convention, and neither is Saudi Arabia’s role in bringing the philosophy of this cult to the United States.

In response to Wahhabist terrorism, non-Muslim Americans will often misdirect their aggression against Islam as a whole instead of the fringe faith. An increased amount of acts of intolerance against peaceful Muslim communities such as the burning of Korans in front of mosques is evidence of this. Thus, the Wahhabist claim that the West is waging a war against Islam becomes a fulfilled prophecy, giving extremists an opportunity to recruit more adherents at the expense of mainstream Islam. Once the belief of victimization becomes prevalent, acts of intolerance on the part of Muslims are all the more likely to occur. Thus, the cycle repeats itself, and at each successive stage, the prospects of violence increase.

So far, the American Muslim community has almost single-handedly protected the United States from such social turmoil by reporting to the proper authorities when they find extremist texts. But without the help of a higher power, the U.S. government, there is nothing guaranteeing that mainstream Muslim institutions will forever remain impervious to this invasion.

Even at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was unable to penetrate the United States with its ideology to the degree Saudi Arabia has. This issue cannot be ignored, as Wahhabist infiltration of mainstream Islam in the United States affects all people, not just Muslims. The foundation of terrorism is not the tools used to carry out attacks but its driving philosophy. The American Muslim community recognizes this; it is time the U.S. government recognize the same.

Matthew Mainen is a policy analyst at the Institute for Gulf Affairs.

NY TIMES: Don’t Fear All Islamists, Fear Salafis

Don’t Fear All Islamists, Fear Salafis

By ROBIN WRIGHT

Washington

THIS spring, I traveled to the cradle of the Arab uprisings — a forlorn street corner in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, where a street vendor, drenched in paint thinner, struck a match in December 2010 that ignited the entire Middle East. “We have far more freedoms,” one peddler hawking fruit in the same square lamented, “but far fewer jobs.” Another noted that Mohamed Bouazizi, the vendor who set himself on fire, did so not to vote in a democratic election but because harassment by local officials had cost him his livelihood.

As the peddlers vented, prayers ended at the whitewashed mosque across the street. Among the faithful were Salafis, ultraconservative Sunni Muslims vying to define the new order according to seventh-century religious traditions rather than earthly realities. For years, many Salafis — “salaf” means predecessors — had avoided politics and embraced autocrats as long as they were Muslims. But over the past eight months, clusters of worshipers across the Middle East have morphed into powerful Salafi movements that are tapping into the disillusionment and disorder of transitions.

A new Salafi Crescent, radiating from the Persian Gulf sheikdoms into the Levant and North Africa, is one of the most underappreciated and disturbing byproducts of the Arab revolts. In varying degrees, these populist puritans are moving into the political space once occupied by jihadi militants, who are now less in vogue. Both are fundamentalists who favor a new order modeled on early Islam. Salafis are not necessarily fighters, however. Many disavow violence.

In Tunisia, Salafis started the Reform Front party in May and led protests, including in Sidi Bouzid. This summer, they’ve repeatedly attacked symbols of the new freedom of speech, ransacking an art gallery and blocking Sufi musicians and political comedians from performing. In Egypt, Salafis emerged last year from obscurity, hastily formed parties, and in January won 25 percent of the seats in parliament — second only to the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Salafis are a growing influence in Syria’s rebellion. And they have parties or factions in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Yemen and among Palestinians.

Salafis are only one slice of a rapidly evolving Islamist spectrum. The variety of Islamists in the early 21st century recalls socialism’s many shades in the 20th. Now, as then, some Islamists are more hazardous to Western interests and values than others. The Salafis are most averse to minority and women’s rights.

A common denominator among disparate Salafi groups is inspiration and support from Wahhabis, a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia. Not all Saudis are Wahhabis. Not all Salafis are Wahhabis, either. But Wahhabis are basically all Salafis. And many Arabs, particularly outside the sparsely populated Gulf, suspect that Wahhabis are trying to seize the future by aiding and abetting the region’s newly politicized Salafis — as they did 30 years ago by funding the South Asian madrassas that produced Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Salafis go much further in restricting political and personal life than the larger and more modern Islamist parties that have won electoral pluralities in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco since October. For most Arabs, the rallying cry is justice, both economic and political. For Salafis, it is also about a virtue that is inflexible and enforceable.

“You have two choices: heaven or hellfire,” Sheikh Muhammad el-Kurdi instructed me after his election to Egypt’s parliament as a member of Al Nour, a Salafi party. It favors gender segregation in schools and offices, he told me, so that men can concentrate. “It’s O.K. for you to be in the room,” he explained. “You are our guest, and we know why you’re here. But you are one woman and we are three men — and we all want to marry you.” Marriage may have been a euphemism.

Other more modern Islamists fear the Salafi factor. “The Salafis try to push us,” said Rachid al-Ghannouchi, founder of Ennahda, the ruling Islamist party in Tunisia. The two Islamist groups there are now rivals. “Salafis are against drafting a constitution. They think it is the Koran,” grumbled Merhézia Labidi, the vice chairwoman of Tunisia’s Constituent Assembly and a member of Ennahda.

Salafis are deepening the divide between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and challenging the “Shiite Crescent,” a term coined by Jordan’s King Abdullah in 2004, during the Iraq war, to describe an arc of influence from Shiite-dominated Iran to its allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Today, these rival crescents risk turning countries in transition into battlefields over the region’s future.

The Salafis represent a painful long-term conundrum for the West. Their goals are the most anti-Western of any Islamist parties. They are trying to push both secularists and other Islamists into the not-always-virtuous past.

American policy recently had its own awakening after 60 years of support for autocratic rulers. The United States opted to embrace people power and electoral change in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Yemen. Yet Washington still embraces authoritarian Gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia, tolerating their vague promises of reform and even pledging the United States’ might to protect them.

Foreign policy should be nuanced, whether because of oil needs or to counter threats from Iran. But there is something dreadfully wrong with tying America’s future position in the region to the birthplace and bastion of Salafism and its warped vision of a new order.

Robin Wright, the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World,” is a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/opinion/dont-fear-all-islamists-fear-salafis.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Can Syria's Christians Survive?: Saudi Wahabi Funded Rebels Pouring Into Syria

Can Syria's Christians Survive?

In the land of St. Paul's conversion, ancient Catholic and Orthodox communities are finding themselves on the wrong side of an increasingly sectarian conflict.

Near the Syrian city of Aleppo, the Church of St. Simeon the Stylite commemorates the 5th-century ascetic who became an ancient sensation by living atop a tall pedestal for decades to demonstrate his faith. Krak des Chevaliers, an awe-inspiring castle near Homs, was a fortress for the order of the Knights Hospitaller in their quest to defend a crusader kingdom. Seydnaya, a towering monastery in a town of the same name, was probably built in the time of Justinian.

A nun there spoke about Syria's current crisis from within a candlelit alcove this week, surrounded by thousand-year-old votive icons donated by Russian Orthodox churchgoers and silver pendants in the shape of body parts that supplicants have sought to heal—feet, heads, legs, arms, even a pair of lungs and a kidney.

Photos: Holy Sites for Syria's Christians

Getty Images/Lonely Planet ImageKrak des Chevaliers, a castle near Homs, was a fortress for the order of the Knights Hospitaller in their quest to defend a crusader kingdom.

"It's not a small thing we are facing," she said, speaking as much about the country as her faith. "We just want the killing to stop."

Few places are as central as Syria to the long history of Christianity. Saul of Tarsus made his conversion here, reputedly on the Street Called Straight, which still exists in Damascus. It was in these lands that he conducted his first missions to attract non-Jews to the nascent faith.

A century ago, the Levant supported a population that was perhaps 20% Christian. Now it is closer to 5%. Syria today hosts vibrant, if dwindling, communities of various ancient sects: Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics and Armenian Orthodox.

But Syria's Christian communities are being severely tested by the uprising that has racked the country for more than a year. They think back to 636, when the Christian Byzantine emperor Heraclius saw his army defeated by Muslim forces south of present-day Damascus. "Peace be with you Syria. What a beautiful land you will be for our enemies," he lamented before fleeing north to Antioch. In the 8th century, a famed Damascus church was razed to make way for the Umayyad Mosque—today one of Islam's holiest sites.

Not a few Christians in modern-day Syria worry that the current crisis could end the same way for them if Bashar al-Assad and his regime are defeated by the rebel insurgency.

In many ways, it is an odd concern. Christians and Muslims have lived side-by-side with minimal friction during the decades of Assad family rule. Historically, local Christian communities have sometimes even welcomed Muslim overlords when they freed them of heavy-handed rule from Constantinople or Rome. In many places the two groups continue to reach out to each other even now. Even rebel extremists say that they don't have anything against Christians, either.

Yet as the conflict inside the country takes on ever-stronger sectarian overtones, as Christians largely side with the regime or at least decline to actively oppose it, some of the oldest Christian communities on earth are feeling squeezed.

"We have been leading a life that has been the envy of many," says Isadore Battikha, who until 2010 served as the archbishop of Homs, Hama and Yabroud for the Melkite Greek Catholic church. "But today fear is a reality."

Father Battikha is among the many staunch supporters of President Assad in the Christian church hierarchy.

From the very start of the current conflict, history and religion have played a key role in fueling passions on both sides in Syria. And this has become more pronounced as the conflict dragged on, turning bloodier and more vicious.

One of the oft-repeated assertions made by the Syrian regime plays effectively on ancient rivalries. The conflict, it says, is an attempt by neo-Ottomans in Turkey and expansion-minded Muslim ultraconservatives from Saudi Arabia—known as Wahhabis—to gain a foothold in Syria.

This narrative, one of majority Sunni Muslims overwhelming and dominating minorities, is now a staple of nightly news bulletins on Syrian state television. The regime knows well how this message resonates with Christians and other minorities.

The Ottomans, Turks who ruled Syria from 1516 until World War I, relegated Christians to a second-class citizen status. They were allowed to practice their religion and govern themselves in matters that didn't concern the Muslims. But they were also required to pay special taxes, and there were plenty of restrictions on them when it came to interactions with Muslims. Wahhabism, the ascetic and harshly conservative form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, is even tougher on Christians.

Rebels have made it easy for the regime to play on fears such as these. In an effort to inspire their own fighters and curry favor with foreign backers—primarily Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the only other country where Wahhabism is the state religion—some frame the conflict as a struggle to restore the glories of the Islamic caliphates and redeem Syria from the rule of the infidels.

This clearly comes through in the names adopted for the brigades of the Free Syrian Army—the loosely linked grouping of local militias and army defectors. Many of the militias are named after figures revered by Sunni Muslims like the third Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, whose main title was al-Farouq, meaning "distinguisher between truth and falsehood," and the Islamic warrior and military commander Khalid ibn al-Walid.

Syria in the Spotlight

Take a look back over the highlights of the past year in Syria in a timeline, and review the latest events in a map.

• More photos and interactive graphics

It was Ibn al-Walid, fighting for the Caliph Umar, that defeated Emperor Heraclius in 636 during the first wave of Muslim conquest to come from the Arabian Peninsula in the years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

The main target of the most sectarian-minded rebels isn't Christians. It is the Alawites, the minority group to which the Assad family belongs. Alawites, who make up about 12% of Syria's population, about the same as Christians, are a heterodox sect that branched off from Islam. They are considered by Muslim extremists to be heretical, far worse than Christians.

Nonetheless, many Christians fear any government that replaces the Assad regime might be dominated by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that could relegate them back to second-class status. They also worry their communities could be devastated in the crossfire between Syria's largely Sunni Muslim insurgency and the well-armed Alawite regime, just as Christians in neighboring Iraq have suffered mightily in the sectarian wars there over the past decade.

The expansion of the conflict to Syria's two biggest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, has amplified the fears of the Christians. They are under pressure from both the regime and rebels to take sides and make their allegiances known. Those who want to avoid taking sides are leaving.

For the time being many Christians, like Muslims and other refugees, have relocated to areas where they feel safer within Syria or in neighboring Lebanon. So far, the pattern in neighboring Iraq—where many Christians have left for good to Western countries—hasn't emerged.

The clearest examples of Christians taking the side of the regime have been in Homs. In the town of Qusayr, southwest of Homs, one Christian family helped aid the security forces by taking up arms and manning checkpoints. The result was a backlash against all Christians there, and the town has largely emptied of Christians since then.

In Wadi al-Nasara—the Valley of Christians, another enclave of some 30 villages west of the city of Homs—a family of pro-regime Christians has fought alongside Alawite loyalists, say residents who recently fled the area. Pro-regime Christians commandeered two palaces in the scenic valley that are owned by Gulf Arab diplomats, they said.

Nearby, Sunni fighters have made a base in the landmark 12th-century Crusader-era castle Krak des Chevaliers. "It is now impossible for a Muslim to come down to the valley," said a resident of the area.

Father Paulo Dall'Oglio, an Italian Jesuit priest who lived in Syria for three decades but was expelled by the regime in June, says many members of the church have long-standing ties with the regime and intelligence services that have shaped their stance.

"Many Christians in Syria believe that there's no alternative to the Bashar Assad regime," says Father Dall'Oglio.

Some Christians, though, are striving to bridge that divide, attempting to reach out to the opposition and rebels, or at least cross the sectarian gulf that increasingly separates them.

Basilios Nassar, a Greek Orthodox priest from the central city of Hama, was shot and killed by government snipers in January while he was helping evacuate the wounded in clashes in one neighborhood, Christian activists say.

They say the snipers probably mistook him for an Islamist fighter because of his beard and black robes. His church said he was killed by "an armed terrorist group."

Caroline, a Christian activist who asked to be identified by only her first name, was arrested by security forces in April in Damascus while distributing chocolate Easter eggs to the children of Christian, Sunni and Alawite families displaced by the fighting in Homs.

Paper strips bearing passages from the Quran and the Bible were attached to the eggs. Caroline said this act was part of her attempts to chip away at the barriers now separating Syria's religious groups because of the conflict.

Previously she made it a point to assist the wives and children of men killed in fighting in the predominantly Sunni town of Douma outside Damascus, handing out food provisions and cash envelopes.

She had also sought meetings with church leaders to ask them "not to impose one position on all Christians." She said the majority either scolded her for being against the regime or refused to meet with her.

Father Nawras Sammour, a 44-year-old Jesuit from Aleppo, runs a nationwide relief program known as Jesuit Refugee Services. The group is currently providing assistance to 6,000 Syrian families across the country who are displaced by the violence—Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Druze, Alawite as well as Christian.

He believes only by reaching out across religious divides will Christians continue to be a vibrant presence in these ancient lands. He recognizes the challenges, and says he understands Christian concerns.

"Look at Iraq, look at Egypt," he says, listing neighboring countries where political upheaval and the replacement of an authoritarian ruler with an Islamist resurgence has pummeled long-standing Christian communities. "But despite this we have to build bridges. These are the principles of the gospel. We can't just pick a side and go with them."

Alexander Haddad, a 66-year-old resident of the mountain hamlet of Maalula, is concerned about the fate of his ancient Christian community, but he takes the long view. Like other residents of the town, he speaks a variant of Aramaic, the language used by Jesus himself.

"A lot of people have passed through this country—the Byzantines, the Muslims, Tamerlane, the Mongols, the Ottomans," said Mr. Haddad, seated in the shadow of the convent of St. Thekla, the feminine hero of the biblical legend, the Acts of Paul and Thekla.

"Jesus was from just to the south. St. Paul came to Maalula," he says. "Christianity is very strong here."

Write to Bill Spindle at bill.spindle@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared August 11, 2012, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can Syria's Christians Survive?.

http://youtu.be/HyAYSZHKvKc

Disturbing: "Schwartz believes “the Islamic communities of the U.S. (dominated by the Saudis) . . . suffer under a totalitarian regime of thought-control” (Schwartz TCS). While Schwartz is quick to say that he doesn’t believe the majority of Muslims support Wahhabism, the implication is clear. Saudis control American Muslims; therefore American Muslims share the views of Saudi Arabian Muslims." http://artsci.drake.edu/dussj/austincody.pdf I assume the same is true of Canada, UK, and other countries the Saudis have poured money and resources into...