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Heresy and History


(American Spectator) Angelo M. Codevilla - The war on terror will be won only when Islam's Wahhabi heresy is defeated - by orthodox Islam. Anti-Western terrorism results from a war within Islam that is more serious for Muslims than for the rest of us, because the Wahhabis' ideas imply irreconcilable enmity against other Muslims first, and then against others. What drives "fundamentalists" is the tendency to affirm orthodoxy. By contrast, the heretics we are concerned with slip the bounds of orthodoxy and endow themselves with boundless, revolutionary discretion. That the Saudi family could mount a theological campaign against Wahhabism is as inconceivable as its adopting the Spartan lifestyle that Wahhabism preaches. Without the Wahhabis, the Saudi royal family would not be lords of the peninsula, or of anything at all. The Saudis are bonded to the tiger they ride. From the northern edges of black Africa, to Bosnia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, estimates of the percentage of the new mosques and schools financed to Wahhabi specifications vary from a third to three-fourths. No other form of Islam enjoys anything like the flood of money that comes from Saudi sources.
2004-05-18 00:00:00
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