The Wahabi Terrorist Connection
With the advent of global Islamic terrorism, the word “Wahabi” has slowly crept into our vocabulary. Every time a terrorist strikes you will eventually hear someone mention the Wahabis. What is a Wahabi, and where did they come from? In order to effectively put into check the spread of Islamic terrorism around the world, one must first understand the religious movement that started it all.
Wahabism is an offshoot of the Islamic religion started by a man named Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab in 1736. It claims to be the “true” version of Islam, and in 1800, was established as the dominant religion of Saudi Arabia.
According to many experts, there are several attitudes or beliefs that set Wahabis apart from the rest of the Muslim world. They range from the inability to accept and co-exist with other people’s religions, to an extreme adherence to sexist beliefs, and a denial of all sciences, particularly human sciences like anthropology and psychology.
It is the first of these distinctions, the inability to accept and co-exist with other people’s religions, which seems to have the most influence on Islamic terrorists. A Wahabi believes that all “non-believers” must be converted to their form of Islam, or be destroyed. Likewise, other practitioners of the Muslim religion, like the Suni and Shia, who the Wahabis claim are practicing a “false” version of Islam, face the same fate as the non-believers. One need only log-on to the internet, perform a search for “Wahabi terrorists,” and they will discover a silent civil war within the Muslim community. All over the world, many innocent Suni and Shia have been assassinated by Wahabi extremists for practicing their “false” version of Islam.
As stated before, in the early 1800’s, Saudi Arabia became the single largest site of Wahabi worship in the world. After having been kicked out of several Islamic states for preaching his radical version of Islam, Mahammad al Wahhab was accepted with open-arms by the nomadic tribes of Saudi Arabia. Eventually a strong relationship between the Saudi Royal Family and Mahammad al Wahhab was developed, and although most members of the Royal Family are not Wahabi, this relationship has helped to strengthen both parties politically and financially.
When a vast amount of oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia that new found wealth was eventually funneled into the coffers of the Wahabi-run mosques. Suddenly, the extremist clerics running those mosques had the financial means to mount a global Wahabi campaign. New Islamic learning centers were financed all over the world with the poorest and least educated Islamic nations being the first to be targeted. With Wahabi money flowing into economically devastated countries, like Afghanistan and Somalia, those extremist Saudi Clerics were in a position to teach “their version” of Islam to millions of fellow Muslims around the world.
As more and more Muslims converted to the Wahabi version of Islam, those extremists in power began to turn their attention to the largest global centers of heretics and non-believers; the decadent Western World, and especially the United States. This eventually led to Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration that the United States is “The Great Satan”, and the terrorist flood gates were opened.
The rise of Wahabi influence in the Muslim world is not, of course, singularly responsible for all acts of Muslim terrorism. It is, however, the mechanism that allowed a once peaceful religious community to radically change its beliefs and embrace violence and terror as an acceptable means of serving their god. Understanding this will help us face these misguided people in the years to come.
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Vernon Mortensen is a professional writer and artist. He is retired from the U.S. Military, where he served in an elite special operations unit. His military service includes Operations Desert Shield/Storm, Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and the Global War on Terrorism.
