In How the Saudis betrayed Islam, Paul William Roberts reviews The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror by Stephen Schwartz:
Briefly, Schwartz’s thesis is this: The princes of Saudi Arabia share power and the fabulous wealth of their petro-dollars with a hereditary priestly hierarchy overseeing a cultic travesty of Islam known as Wahhabism, after its 18th-century founder. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a poorly educated, narrow-minded, homicidal fanatic whose idiosyncratic, austere and uncharitable vision for his religion flew in the face of its own teachings and those accorded to its Prophet. Schwartz writes:“The essence…came down to three points. First, ritual is superior to intentions. Second, no reverence of the dead is permitted. Third, there can be no intercessory prayer, addressed to God by means of the Prophet or saints….Prayers to God by means of a pious person or even honours to any individual other than God were condemned as idolatry, despite their acceptance by all previous generations of Muslims and the Prophet himself. At the same time, defying centuries of Islamic theology, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s followers ascribed a human form to God.”
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Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was soon ordering the graves of Muslim saints dug up and scattered, or turned into latrines. He also burned many books, arguing that Koran alone would suffice for humanity’s needs. Above all, and perhaps most telling, Wahhabism’s prophet and his followers despised music, viewing it as an incitement to forgetfulness of God and to sin.
I was familiar with Wahhabism — I knew it was Saudi, and I knew it was fundamentalist — but I didn’t realize just how much of “Islam” (as we know it in the west) is Wahhabism.