A New Look at Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia

By Douglas Farah

The Washington Post carries on a prominent academic who argues that wahhabism in Saudi Arabia emerged not solely from religious motivation, but from political considerations as well.

This reinterpretation core Saudi history by Khalid al-Dakhil has been largely blocked from publication in Saudi Arabia and around the Gulf because it weakens one of the fundamental articles of faith of _Wahhabi_ legitimacy: that the Wahhabi movement was purely and divinely a relgious movement ordained to bring wandering Muslims back to the true way.

Al-Dakhil argues that the religious component of the Wahhabists was a supplement to their political motives of establishing a single state on the Arab peninsula at at time when the region was governed by dozens of micro-states.

As one analyst told the _Post_, such a fundamental questioning of the divine origins of wahhabism would be akin to finding that the Pilgrims were in fact atheists. My full blog is here.

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