While discussing Wahhabism with an aquaintance of mine, it struck me that it is like an infection of the body. It has been around for six hundred years, and for most of that time, its been a minor infection in a couple of places. A few times it has blossomed up, as it did in Arabia in the nineteenth century, and in India a few decades earlier. But for most of those six hundred years, the immune system of the Islamic world, the highly trained jurists whose learning and complex knowledge of Koran, hadith and precedent-making fatwas make them the bulwark against facile rip-off Islams, has successfully detected Wahhabism and neutralised it before it became anything more than a local nuisance.
But since the early twentieth century, three things have changed. The Ottoman empire ceased to be the Caliphate. The house of Saud, and minor and extremely backward clan from the backwoods of Arabia, created a nation on the Arabian peninsula. And thirdly, Oil became a world-wide commodity. These three things have conspired together to provide the first opportunity ever for Wahhabism to supplant the main branches of Islam, Sufi, Sunni and Shia. Saud money has gone out all over the world, like poisened spore, to promote what up until very recently was considered to be a disgusting and perverted non-Islam, and clothe it in respectability. Poverty-stricken youths all over the Muslim world are being 'educated' by Wahhabists trained in Saudi Arabia, and sent forth from madrassahs like Wahhabist shock troops. They go back to their communities, and immediately challenge the old Islams, using every mafia trick to destroy existing Mosque hierarchy and replace it with their own 'pure' Wahhabist Islam.
We, as in the western world, have been comically slow to put all this together. None of the old Islams were an existential threat to us, and if we had been able to cut off Saudi influence, and protect the old Islams from the Wahhabist onslaught, there would be virtually no worldwide jihad to talk about. Instead, a huge pool of Wahhabist footsoldiers exist in every Muslim country, and in many western countries too. All of them have been infected with this poisonous non-Islam, and seek to destroy everything in the world that isn't Wahhabist Islam. It is by definition a suicidal enterprise, as 99% of the world isn't Wahhabist Islam. That does not mean (see Wahhibisms history) that they will stop or in any way relent. First the Muslim world will be rent asunder, like a body desperately trying to stop the infection that is half-way to conquering it, and next we will be in the firing line. The Wahhabists can't win- at no point in their history have they done so for any length of time- but that doesn't matter to them. If they all die trying to destroy the Satanic evil that the whole world is bound up in, so be it.
But we had better start fighting this infection properly because there are millions and millions and millions of dirt-poor, ignorant Muslim youths all over the world, waiting for a fascistic death-cult like this to give them something to do, some reason to feel superior, some cause to ally with. I believe we've only seen the first 5% of the wave- the rest of it could cause world-wide devastation before it is halted and subsides.
A first step would be- get rid of the House of Saud, and hand back Islams holiest places to trustworthy husbandmen.
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