The Saudi brand of fanaticism

Imagine if you will the delicious and absurd fantasy of the Beverly Hillbillies taking over the Vatican and proselytizing worldwide after striking crude oil. Stranger than fiction but closer to truth is the case of the House of Saud. Unlike the nouveaux riches of the television fable, the House of Saud has for many decades used its wealth to spread the most extreme and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, intolerant toward all those who do not share its narrow sectarian Wahhabi creed.

While the Wahhabi sect has been the state-supported religion in Saudi Arabia since the kingdom was established a century ago, its influence and reach have been invidious, gradual and largely unnoticed by the West. Wahhabism had even slipped under the radar screens of America's scholarly apparatus. One example is Princeton's eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who admitted to Charlie Rose in a January television interview on PBS that he vastly underestimated the dangers of Wahhabism: "I hadn't realized its importance until these last months ... this particular strain of Islam, which is very far from mainstream ... which suddenly becomes, if not dominant, at least extremely important."

Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, the sect's founder, was a puritanical 18th century "reformer" who militantly repudiated 1,400 years of Islamic tradition and culture while seeking to impose a version of Islam "cleansed" of what he deemed idolatrous and un-Islamic practices. (Incidentally, Wahhabis do not call themselves Wahhabis but salafis, or simply faithful Muslims, and accuse anyone using the term "Wahhabi" of smearing good Muslims with an epithet.) Wahhab also thought that all Shiites, Sufis and followers of sects of Islam other than his own were not Muslim. Further, he forbade the celebrations of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, the veneration of saints and the visiting of tombs. But above all, Wahhab and his followers loathed vocal or instrumental music in all its forms, a point that Stephen Schwartz, in his book "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror," finds to be "extremist to the point of derangement."

Schwartz recounts a recent instance of Wahhabi fanaticism, the story of 15 Saudi girls who perished this year in a schoolhouse fire. Religious police prevented the girls from leaving the burning school because they were not shrouded in abayas (black robes) and thus lacked "Islamic modesty." The girls were beaten back into the school while anguished parents looked on.