Johann Hari: We All Fund This Torrent of Saudi BigotryThe following article was published in The Independent in 2007. However, it is still so pertinent that I feel it should be re-read. It really is a truly excellent article. – MarkTHE INDEPENDENT:
Junkies don't talk back to their dealers. We are addicted to the Saudi oil supplyWhich glossy brand name has been the biggest winner on the planetary roulette wheel of globalisation? Most of us could reel off a dozen eligible mega-corporations: Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, the Nike swoosh. They are all wrong. The check-in-your-chips champion of globalisation is in fact a puritanical desert-nomad from the sands of Arabia who died in 1792, and the evidence was there in this week's Islamic panic front pages.
In his 18th-century oasis, Mohamed ibn Abd al-Wahhab Wahhab had a dream. He dreamed of an Islam stripped down to a cold list of mechanical rules, strictly enforced, severely upheld. He ordered whippings and beheadings of Muslims to "purify" the faith. He smashed up and burned down the worship places of the softer, more mystical Muslims all around him. And - his smartest move - he cut a deal. He met the chief of the desert bandits who lived in the nearby long stretch of sand called Najd - a man named Mohamed Saud - and offered him his allegiance, in return for enforcing his severe, new brand of Islam. The Saud ruling family and the Wahhabi doctrine have been locked in a stiff waltz ever since.
More than two centuries later, oil was discovered under the territory of these bandits, and billions of dollars began to soak into the Kingdom. True to their ancestor's deal, the House of Saud used this black gold to promote the ideas of Wahhab, no longer merely on their own sands, but across the world.
By paying for thousands of schools, mosques and trained imams, they dispersed the ideas of one reactionary little preacher to every continent. It has been a corporate strategy that leaves Ronald McDonald looking like a puffing, obese slouch. Slowly, steadily, they are succeeding in eroding other, gentler forms of Islam. They are globalising Wahhabism - and your petrol purchases are paying for it.
Which brings us to the swish, swanky classrooms of the King Fahd Academy in west London, in the year 2007. A Muslim teacher called Colin Cook has revealed that children there are taught, via Saudi textbooks, that Jews are "repugnant" and Christians are "pigs". Exercises for five-year olds include the charming exercise, "Mention some repugnant characteristics of Jews". Cook repeatedly heard children in the playground idolising Bin Laden. Challenged on Newsnight about whether she will stop using these racist books, the headteacher, Sumaya Alyusuf, said, "No... I cannot withdraw them. There are good chapters in the books."
Why are we surprised? The King Fahd Academy is not a freak. It is part of a deliberate globalised project, led by the House of Saud, that has been documented a hundred times. Azzedine Gaci, the head of the regional Muslim council, in Lyon, France, explains: "When Saudi Arabia gives you €1m with one hand, with the other they give you a list of what you must say or not say." Here's some of the things you can say, taken from standard-issue Saudi textbooks. For 10-year-olds: "The whole world should convert to Islam and leave its false religions lest their fate will be hell." For 12-year-olds: "There is a Jew behind me - come and kill him!"
And what can't you say? Anything about freedom for women, which is, the textbooks explain, "a continuation of the Crusades". A woman can only be taught to "enable her to be a successful housewife, an exemplary wife and a good mother". No need for maths or technology, shabibi, there's the kitchen. They are banned from any form of physical education, because it would be "obscene" for them to change their clothes outside the home. Besides, "they might become attracted to each other if they saw each other in leotards", in which case they would have to be killed.
>>> Johann Hari | Thursday, February 08, 2007
