With friends like these
The House of Saud may insist they're allies against fanaticism, but the reality is much more disturbing
Jason Burke
Wednesday October 31, 2007
The Guardian
In the spring of 2003, local imams in northern Iraq were worried. Not just about the impending war, but about the inroads that ultra-conservative, intolerant and aggressive strands of Islam were making among their traditionally moderate congregations. The enemy in this particular struggle was not Saddam, they said, but Saudi Arabia.
Since the Kurdish regions had established a de facto autonomy in the wake of the first Gulf war, the imam at the main mosque in Sulaymaniyah explained, hundreds of mosques had been built by Saudi Arabian religious foundations, their ultra-conservative imams imported from the Arabian peninsula. He and his fellow clerics simply did not have the means to compete with the massive aid being distributed by Saudi-based charitable organisations - aid contingent on attendance at special Qur'anic lessons, on wives or sisters wearing a veil and leaving secular political parties. Most damaging of all, he said, was the flood of pamphlets and books that pushed a worldview in which Jews, Christians, Shias and the west were cast as Muslims' sworn enemies.
The rolling hills and grassy plains of Kurdistan are a long way from Whitehall, the Mall and the trappings of a state visit. Yet they ought not to be so far from the thoughts of the various dignitaries warmly shaking the hands of the Saudi royals than they no doubt are.
What I heard in Sulaymaniyah should surprise no one. For many decades, Saudi Arabia has used its prodigious profits from oil not just to buy off domestic dissent but to fund the export around the world of one of the most conservative, rigorous and intolerant strains of Islam.
The origins of Saudi Arabia lie in an alliance between a tribal chief, Muhammad Ibn Al-Saud, and a fiery revivalist theologian and preacher, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab. The former needed fired-up, holy warriors to weld together a state. The latter needed shelter and a logistic base. When the new nation of Saudi Arabia solidified after two centuries of on-off conflict that deal was translated into a new arrangement by which the House of Saud kept secular power but al-Wahab's followers had a free religious hand. In foreign policy, the goal of disseminating Wahabism throughout the Islamic world has coincided perfectly with more secular aims such as countering the influence of Arab nationalism, revolutionary Shia, Iran and communism or, more recently, of extending influence into Africa, Asia and Europe.
In Britain, a struggle between religious doctrines has gripped immigrant communities, sharpened by propaganda bankrolled out of the Arabian peninsula. We have also suffered individuals educated in Saudi universities such as Sheikh Faisal, who was imprisoned for his anti-semitic and anti-western comments, and Omar Bakri Muhammad, the leader of the al-Muhajiroun group, whose members have been linked to militant activities ranging from jihadi fund-raising to suicide bombing. Bakri told me proudly, if somewhat bizarrely, that he was a "hardcore Wahabi" as we sat on Richard and Judy's green room sofa.
It would be wrong to go too far. The Saudis have made some reforms of school and university curriculum, have tightened up monitoring of funding and have attempted to co-opt radical local clerics. Others have been imprisoned. There is an innovative rehabilitation programme.
But the impression remains that the House of Saud has one strategic message for internal consumption, one for the west and one for the broader international Muslim community. And though the Saudis insist they are allies against intolerance, fanaticism and prejudice, for the moment it is understandable if the Kurdish clerics and millions of others who follow centuries-old moderate traditions of Islam remain unconvinced.
ยท Jason Burke is the author of Al-Qaeda: the True Story of Radical Islam
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2202156,00.html
Said I wasn't diplomatic enough. 
