M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India —
Wahabbism, the radical Islam currently advancing around the globe, originated
in the 18th century as a philosophy designed to counter the moderate, syncretic
Islam that was the heart of Turkey's culture, and which the Ottoman Empire had
disseminated among its principalities, including those in the Arabian Peninsula.
Quick to sense
the potential of the new faith in weaning away regional loyalties from the
Ottomans, Britain early on became a backer of the creed, thus ensuring its rise
to dominance within the Arabian Peninsula by the dawn of the 20th century.
Beginning in the 1980s it spread to much of the rest of the Muslim world.
Today, because
of the unstinted financial support of its principal adherents, Wahabbism has
become the fastest-growing faith on the planet. It has succeeded in taking over
many of the institutions, as well as the physical infrastructure, of the Sunni
branch of Islam. Even within the Shiite branch, it has found in the Khomeinists
an ideological twin that since 1979 has controlled the largest country in the
region, Iran.
Thus far, only
Turkey has remained immune to its relentless advance, steeped as that country
was in the Sufi traditions that underpin its culture.
Turkey is the
only country in the Muslim-majority world – since the Mongol invasions of the
continent nearly nine centuries ago – to have conquered territory in Europe.
The memory of this still makes a majority of Europeans flinch from accepting
this entirely deserving country into the European Union.
