The new Saudi anthem

Someone in the Buckingham Palace military band has an absolutely wicked sense of humour.

Today's Independent, meanwhile, has a lengthy piece describing how Saudi Arabia is aggressively promoting its ideology of hate in Great Britain and around the world:

Yahya Birt, an academic who is director of The City Circle, a networking body of young Muslim professionals, estimates "Saudi spending on religious causes abroad as between $2bn [£960m] and $3bn per year since 1975 (comparing favourably with what was the annual Soviet propaganda budget of $1bn), which has been spent on 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres and dozens of Muslim academies and schools".

More than that they have flooded the Islamic book market with cheap well-produced Wahhabi literature whose print runs, Birt says, "can be five to 10 times that of any other British-based sectarian publication, aggressively targeted for a global English-speaking audience." This has had the effect of forcing non-Wahhabi publishers across the Muslim world to close. It has put out of business smaller bookshops catering for a more mainstream Muslim market.

The Saudis have also reserved for foreigners 85 per cent of the places at the Islamic University of Medina, which boasts of having more than 5,000 students from 139 countries. Despite the fact that British students gained the reputation in Medina of being unreliable, lazy, and prone to dropping-out, there have so far been hundreds of British graduates who have returned to the UK espousing the rigid Saudi worldview.

The strategy has in one way backfired on the Saudis. They accelerated their aggressive missionary work – targeting China and Russia as well as the UK – in reaction to the activities of Iran in the 1980s which, after its theocratic revolution, was pumping out propaganda across the globe. The Saudis had already been pump-priming Islamic terrorists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, at the behest of the Americans and funding among other things the schools in Pakistan that gave rise to the radicalism of the Taliban.

But the Saudis lost control of this new global Wahhabism. During the First Gulf War in 1991 there were splits among Wahhabis, both in Saudi Arabia and outside, over whether it was right to allow infidel American troops to protect the land of Islam's two holiest shrines, at Mecca and Medina. Anti-Saudi Wahhabis, such as the infamous hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza in Britain pronounced that the Saudi king had broken his divine covenant with God. It was therefore the duty of scholars to charge him with unbelief and incite the masses to rise against him in rebellion. Groups such as the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir capitalised on an anti-Saudi sentiment which spread throughout the Wahhabi community.

The focus of violent Islamic radicalism has shifted from Wahhabis in Saudi to anti-Saudi Wahabis in Iraq and other conflict zones where jihadists have learnt the heady lesson that if you are brutal and narrow-minded enough you can defeat the most powerful army the world has ever seen.

Since 9/11 the Saudis have begun to row back on their funding of fundamentalism abroad, according to Mehmood Naqshbandi, the Muslim advisor to the City of London police. Too late. The damage has been done.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at November 1, 2007 06:50 AM