Saudi State, Wahhabi World

by Sheikh, Naveed S.

• ISBN13: 9780275999148
• ISBN10: 0275999149
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-01-31
• Publisher: Praeger Security Intl

Summary

While extreme radicals of any persuasion or religion reject the current world order and pursue the utopian quest for a new, or rather an old, way of life, it is Muslim radicalism that among contemporary worldviews poses the number-one threat to international security today. But how do we understand Muslim radicalism? How did it come about? What shaped and sustained it? And how can it be curtailed? Any profound understanding of the fault-lines in contemporary religious and political conflicts must begin with the historical epicenter of Islamic fundamentalism: Saudi Arabia. ^ISaudi State, Wahhabi World^R explores the ideas and structures that have sustained Islam's radical thinkers and actors to the point where they threaten the West as never before.While extreme radicals of any persuasion or religion reject the current world order and pursue the utopian quest for a new, or rather an old, way of life, it is Muslim radicalism that among contemporary worldviews poses the number-one threat to international security today. But how do we understand Muslim radicalism? How did it come about? What shaped and sustained it? And how can it be curtailed? Any profound understanding of the fault-lines in contemporary religious and political conflicts must begin with the historical epicenter of Islamic fundamentalism: Saudi Arabia.^ISaudi State, Wahhabi World^R deals with the ideas and structures that have sustained and nourished Islam's radical thinkers and actors to the point where they threaten the West as never before. Naveed Sheikh finds that radical Islam is unavoidably linked to the religious political life of Saudi Arabia, in the past and in the present, whether one examines ideaology or the more mundane but nonetheless critical institutions and organizations that ensure the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.^L Wahhabism has managed to reengineer the traditional theological norms of Islam to such an extent over the past two decades that we are left with a schismatic, and ultimately uncontrollable, form of religious anarchism. In Muslim and Western regions, the various manifestations of Wahhabism have been sustained by a transnational regime of agents and organizations acting as twin conduits for funds and views--the former predominantly Saudi, the latter principally Wahhabic. In the process of manipulating the intellectual and political history of Islam, however, the Kingdom has now itself become a target of the genie it has let loose. While increasingly suspicious of official Saudi politics, local hybrids of Wahhabism and neo-Salafism across the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia serve to show a genealogical link between theology and terror.