Will Turkey succumb to Wahabbism? (UPIASIA)

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.

Khomeinist Iran Turns to Pakistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — The Shiite branch of Islam is regarded as heresy by followers of the founder of Wahabbism, Abdel Wahab (1703-1792). Extreme adherents of this faith routinely visit violence on the Shiites, and every one of its preachers condemns the Shiites as un-Islamic.

However, the 1979 ascendance of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to absolute power in Iran meant the capture of one of the geopolitical pivots of the Shiite world – the other being Iraq – by a thinker whose teachings closely resembled the philosophy of Abdel Wahab.

These ideas had originally been designed to counter the control exercised by Turkish Sufi doctrine over the Arab Bedouin. The Wahabbis enjoyed the support of the British Empire and its successor in international reach, the United States, initially because this alienation from Turkish influence suited their interests.

This backing began to be withdrawn only after 9/11. Nearly nine years after that event, the prising away of Wahabbis from the state structures of key Muslim-majority states has been at best partial, and usually no more than cosmetic. Wahabbism continues to dominate the world of Muslim religious schools and sites by ensuring the elimination of clerics and scholars who subscribe to a moderate – if not Sufi – worldview.

Nowhere has this process secured deeper roots than in Pakistan. Apart from some locations in the Middle East and North Africa, Pakistan has become the most significant jihadi factory, turning out thousands each year. Education in the religious schools, or madrassas, is based on vilification of those not subservient to a Wahabbi mindset. Even regular school education in Pakistan has aped models in the "moderate" Middle East by including heavy doses of religion in what ought to be secular curricula.

Sabahism, not Wahabbism (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India, April 23 (UPI) -- Kuwait is a tiny sliver of land sandwiched between the three regional giants of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Unlike the three, the country is free from extremism and is showcasing economic rather than religious or ethnic issues to underline its identity. Local women go about the shopping malls in denims, although the emir of Kuwait has not been able to persuade Parliament to give voting rights to this better half of the Kuwaiti population.  But it is to be hoped that the next elections will witness both women candidates as well as voters.

The ruling family in Kuwait, the Al-Sabah, are close friends of their Saudi cousins, the Al-Saud. However, the two dynasties have followed entirely different paths in managing their respective countries. For one, the Al-Sauds have been much more proliferant, now numbering an estimated 27,000 -- not counting more distant relatives. They have also taken seriously the message implicit in the very naming of their country after themselves, helping themselves to 36 percent of the total wealth of the kingdom, leaving the rest mostly to the families close to the court.

Many Saudi citizens -- especially in the Shiite east -- enjoy neither running water nor electricity. In contrast, Prince Abdel Aziz Al-Saud, the favorite son of King Fahd, has just done his bit for reducing unemployment in the kingdom by building a new palace in Riyadh at a reported cost of $670 million. No 30-year-old can be content with just a single home, so the austere Saudi royal is building another palace in Jeddah, although this will cost a mere $540 million.

The skies over Europe are filled with private aircraft ferrying the Al-Sauds from one hotspot to the other, and the boutique stores in Paris and London would close down but for free-spending Saudi princes and princesses. Sadly for the Saudi people, such largesse does not extend to home.