Seneferu: All leads point to Wahhabism

[Update: see photos below.]

This article appeared last month in the Egyptian daily El Masry El Yom. I thought the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia wouldn't be too happy about the news it reported, but it was only later in that day that I learned of the explosion of this golden-domed mosque of Iraq that supposedly held the remains of the Imams Hassan and Hussein. Ever since, the Iraqi Sunnis and Shias have been engaged in this tit-for-tat mini civil war...

The article talks of a conference that was held in Al Azhar by the Sufi 'Azmiya sect, which called for the internationalization of all the sites in Saudi Arabia which had to do with the holy pilgrimage and Islamic heritage, which it said belonged to all the world's Muslims, with all their different sects, and not to the "extremist Wahhabis" alone, "who were dividing the world's Muslims from within, and weakening them abroad".

More importantly, and this was the essence of the conference, it called for the protection of these holy sites that were related to the lives and burial places of the Prophet and his family. Why, you may ask? Because the Wahhabis, ever since they came to power, have been intent on destroying them! According to them, all sanctification of these sites is considered a form of idolatry.

Wahhabism is the culture of the cave. Nothing runs there, from "post-Islamic" "inventions" of how to say hello, to even, as I suspect, terrorist leader and doctor-gone-mad Ayman El Zawahri's own inventive poetry from the cave.

Wahhabism - the degradation from all material means - is not invalid as a concept in itself. However the self-proclaimed fundamentalists of all the ages and creeds - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - have failed to grasp the idea that monasticism, while proving a necessary and even desirable path for the spiritual leaders of the faiths, was never meant to be set as a way of life for the multitude.

So in essence, the civil strife we see in the Islamic world today, from the furor over the cartoons, to the brewing civil war in Iraq, comes down to the very simple/tragic tenet of Wahhabism - that of idolatry. Both campaigns, I believe, are directed from above by few governmental and terrorist entities, but this doesn't change the fact that their malicious exploitations rest on the rock of this archaic and now misunderstood concept.