Fact of the matter is that the Saudis are one of the closest friends of Pakistan and have always supported us.
SSGPA - lets not kid ourselves. We need to stop living in denial.
National Post
Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the attacks, is a native of Saudi Arabia and has long been a conduit for secret funds from members of the Saudi royal family to various Islamist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sudan.
But bin Laden is merely the most visible aspect of a far deeper connection: The Taliban, the extremist ruling regime in Afghanistan that harbours bin Laden, is in fact largely a Saudi creation. Members of the royal family armed and financed the Taliban's rise in the 1990s and, until recently, were among its strongest allies in the Arab world.
"The Saudis have a great deal to answer for," says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. "They are the main backers of the Taliban and tried to expand Wahhabi Islam around the world by promoting narrow-minded groups."
Those "narrow-minded" groups took their inspiration from Wahabism, a harsh and puritanical subset of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia.
The sect is named for Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahab, an 18th-century reformer whose descendants worked to unify the Saudi kingdom. Today, members of the Wahab family continue to occupy important positions in the country.
"Wahabism rejected other types of Islam and its reformist leaders imposed a puritanical order on the tribes they conquered," says Earle H. Waugh, a professor of religion at the University of Alberta. "Unlike other Muslims, the Wahabis said they would base society strictly on the Koran."
According to Prof. Waugh, Muslim societies were traditionally ordered through what he called "an intellectual consensus," which drew on precedents to establish laws and rules of governance. For instance, traditional Muslim legal scholars seeking to establish regulations governing landing rights at airports would bypass the Koran, looking for guidance instead to laws governing docking rights at medieval Islamic ports and adapting them to present-day circumstances. The Wahabis rejected this form of intellectual consensus and focused strictly on the Koran as the final arbiter.
Wahabism is, in fact, a kind of Islamist totalitarianism. It denies equal rights to women and invokes the death penalty as punishment for drinking or sexual transgressions. The sect rejects Western influence and does not permit mingling of the sexes, eating pork or interacting closely with non-Muslims. Wahabi mosques are traditionally simple, undecorated affairs, and Wahabis do not permit ostentatious displays of spirituality. Those who follow Wahabi teachings, such as bin Laden, believe their faith should be spread around the world and the Koran allows them to defend their brand of Islam by violence, if necessary. In the late 18th century, the cult was associated with the mass murder of all who opposed it. When the Wahabis took the city of Qarbala in what is now Saudi Arabia in 1801, they massacred 2,000 civilians in the streets and marketplaces.
Analysts say the impetus behind Saudi Arabia's recent export of Wahabism to central Asia came largely from a political decision on the part of the Saudi government to reduce the power of Wahabism at home by exporting it abroad.
Wahabism, says Mr. Rashid, "is increasingly undermining the authority of the royal family."
In recent years, Saudi Arabia "has proved incapable of evolving a rational foreign policy which suits its national interests rather than merely appeasing its domestic Wahabi lobby."
This policy of appeasement has prevented the Saudi government from co-operating too closely with the United States on investigations into a number of recent terrorist attacks, some of them committed on Saudi soil. Saudi authorities have only grudgingly complied with U.S. law enforcement officials over investigations into the 1996 suicide attack on the Khobar Towers, a military compound housing U.S. troops, which left 19 U.S. servicemen dead and hundreds injured.
They have also been slow to help U.S. investigators probe the Sept. 11 attacks despite the fact more than half of the suspected hijackers were Saudi nationals.
Having exported Wahabi extremism that helped to create the current climate of terror in the world, the Saudi government is now faced with containing strong Islamist fundamentalist pressures in their own country.
was an Islamic scholar born in Najd, in present-day Saudi Arabia. Despite never specifically calling for a separate school of Islamic thought, it is from ibn Abd-al Wahhab that the western world derived the term Wahhabism."
