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"Petro-Islam, The Cause Of Middle East Instability"
Sand Trap
Bush's Mideast trip has little chance of success, and risks being overshadowed by Iran
This week, U.S. President George W. Bush turns his attention to the search for a comprehensive peace between Arabs and Israelis, flying to the Middle East as his own nation increasingly focuses on the question of who will succeed him. Like his predecessor, Bill Clinton, and his father, George H.W. Bush, the president enters his final year in office with newly minted peace negotiations under way. As he made clear in his January 5 radio address , Bush holds the view that U.S. security depends at least in part on solving the ancient enmity in the Holy Land.
Coming less than six weeks after the launch of the Annapolis peace process, much of the president's agenda will be devoted to moving talks forward between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have held follow-up talks aimed at advancing the Joint Understanding agreed to in November 2007 at Annapolis. Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security advisor, says three important changes in the Middle East provide reasons for optimism-most of all, "a dramatic change in the Israeli assessment of their strategic position and their long-term interests."
White House optimism aside, doubts proliferate. Steven Erlanger, chief Jerusalem correspondent of the New York Times, tells CFR.org in a new interview that Israelis have little faith that Bush's trip or the Annapolis process itself will bear fruit. In the Washington Times, Chuck Freilich, a former Israel national security adviser now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, judges the prospects for the Bush trip as being so poor that "the stage is set for dark comedy."
If achieving progress there-no sure bet-was all the mission had to accomplish, odds would be long enough. But myriad other challenges will intervene as Bush moves from Israel and the West Bank to the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. The long-term stability of U.S.-allied governments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan remain uncertain. Efforts by France and the Arab League to broker a solution to a constitutional crisis in Lebanon also remain in play, and major nonstate actors, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda, will strain every muscle to prevent diplomatic success on Bush's watch.
Not on the itinerary, but very much on the agenda, is Iran. In Israel, Defense Secretary Ehud Barak has been promising a session with Bush that will lay out Israel's serious disagreements with the recent shift U.S. intelligence agencies made on Iran's nuclear program. A National Intelligence Estimate made public late last year concluded Iran suspended its effort to build a nuclear weapon in 2003.
And it is not only Israelis who question Washington's new tack on Iran. Sunni-led Arab states worry about Iran's rising influence in the region-its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon, its toehold in Gaza via support for Hamas, and its influence on the Shia-dominated Iraqi state. Gulf Arabs, including the Saudis, fear the recalibrated U.S. intelligence on Iran might signal Washington's weakness and embolden Tehran. Iran's future ambitions, nuclear or not, will figure prominently in Bush's talks with Saudi King Abdullah and with the leaders of the Gulf Emirates, too. Mark A. Heller, a national security specialist at Tel Aviv University, suggests Bush would be better off canceling his Arab visits and flying, instead, to Tehran.
Sunni-Shiite conflict dates to 7th century
Thursday, September 1, 2005
The tension between the Sunni and Shiite Muslim communities in Iraq has been largely a secular fight for political dominance since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but one with deeply religious underpinnings.
Under Saddam, the minority Sunni Arab sect in Iraq was dominant and brutally oppressed the majority Shiite sect and rebellious Kurds in the north of the country. Now, the largely Sunni insurgency in the country is fighting to regain its political standing.
Sunni leaders have, by and large, rejected the country's newly drafted constitution as a document that gives them too little political power. The draft was primarily the work of Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds.
Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population, while Sunnis are a 20 percent minority. In the larger Muslim and Arab world, the vast majority of believers are Sunnis.
The Iraqi Shiites, many of whose leaders took refuge in neighboring Iran during the Saddam era, have major backing from Tehran. There, a Shiite theocracy has run the country for a quarter century. But the possibility of Iranian influence in Iraq is an anathema to the Sunni-dominated Arab world.
Islam has been divided into the orthodox Sunni and minority Shiite sects since shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the religion, in 632.
Sunnis accepted Abu Bakr, a respected contemporary of the prophet, to lead what was then an international political as well as spiritual empire. A small group, the "shi'at Ali," or party of Ali, followed the much younger Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law.
Ali would eventually head the Islamic empire. But the rivalries between his followers and supporters of others who claimed leadership in the generations after Muhammad's death periodically exploded into violence.
In a 7th-century battle, Sunnis killed Hussein -- Ali's son and Muhammad's grandson -- and his 72 companions on the plains of Karbala in what is now Iraq. Shiites mark Hussein's death in emotional annual rituals.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr
Wahhabism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wahhabism (Arabic: Al-Wahhābīyya الوهابية) or Wahabism is a conservative 18th century reform movement of Sunni Islam founded by Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, after whom the movement is named.[1] Wahhabism formed the creed upon which the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded [1] and is the dominant form of Islam found in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, as well as some pockets of Somalia, Algeria and Mauritania. It is now often referred to as a "sect" [2] or "branch" [3] of Islam, though its supporters reject such a designation.
The appeal of Wahhabism to Muslims has been described as stemming from Arab nationalism, which was attracted by the Wahhabi attack on the Ottoman Empire; reformism, which was attracted to a return to al-salaf al-salih; their control of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which gave Wahhabis great influence on Muslim culture and thinking; and the discovery of Persian Gulf oil fields, which after 1975 allowed Wahhabis to promote their interpretations of Islam using billions from oil export revenue. [12]
Some Wahhabist books and pamphlets teach that Muslims should reject absolutely any non-Muslim ideas and practices, including political ones. A study by the NGO Freedom House found wahhabi publications in a number of mosques in the United States preaching that Muslims should not only "always oppose" infidels "in every way," but "hate them for their religion ... for Allah's sake," that democracy "is responsible for all the horrible wars of the 20th century," and that Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslims were infidels.
What connection, if any, there is between Wahhabism and jihadi salafis is hotly disputed. Some, such as Daniel Pipes, claim there is "a direct line between the Wahhabis and Osama bin Laden." Dr. Nanata De Long Bas, however, argues "The militant Islam of Osama bin Laden does not have its origins in the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and is not representative of Wahhabi Islam as it is practiced in contemporary Saudi Arabia, yet for the media it has come to define Wahabbi Islam in the contemporary era. However, "unrepresentative" bin Laden's global jihad of Islam in general and Wahhabi Islam in particular, its prominence in headline news has taken Wahhabi Islam across the spectrum from revival and reform to global jihad.”
According to Western observers like Gilles Kepel, Wahhabism gained considerable influence in the Muslim world following a tripling in the price of oil in the mid-1970s. Having the world's largest reserves of oil but a relatively small population, Saudi Arabia was in a position to spend tens of billions of dollars throughout the Muslim world promoting Islam, and in particular Wahhabism, which was sometimes referred to as "petro-Islam".
Its largess funded an estimated "90% of the expenses of the entire faith," throughout the Muslim world, according to journalist Dawood al-Shirian. [21] It extended to young and old, from children's maddrassas to high level scholarship. [22] "Books, scholarships, fellowships, mosques" (for example, "more than 1500 mosques were built from Saudi public funds over the last 50 years") were paid for. [23] It rewarded journalists and academics who followed it; built satellite campuses around Egypt for Al Azhar, the oldest and very influential Islamic university. [24]
The financial power of Wahhabism, according to observers like Dawood al-Shirian and Lee Kuan Yew, has done much to overwhelm less strict local interpretations of Islam [25] and set the Saudi-interpretation as the "gold standard" of religion in many Muslims' minds.
If the Bush Administration would do a little homework, it would perceive that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes far beyond the borders of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The age old enmity between Sunni and Shiites plus the oil financed spread of Wahhabism is at the core of Middle East instability and unrest. America's dependence on Middle East oil is fueling the radical Islamist elements, such as al-queda, Hezbollah and Hamas. Some sort of truce and recognition between Israel and Palestine is desirable but even such a detente would not bring real peace and stability to the Mideast region. I believe only when Wahhabism or "Petro-Islam" can no longer prosper from the America's oil dependence can secular, pro-western Muslims wrest their religion from the hands of the medieval "sharia law" of Wahhabism and the Shiite Ayatollahs.
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