Posted on 03/21/2008 8:02:41 PM PDT by Clairity
remove militant sympathies in Osama bin Laden's homeland.
Officials in the kingdom have sought to manage hardline beliefs within the state-sponsored Wahhabist tradition in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on America. For years senior ministers alternated between outright denial of endemic militancy and the adoption of reforms demanded by the West.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a newspaper close to the reformist wing of the royal family, yesterday reported that Saleh al-Sheikh, the minister of Islamic affairs, planned to run seminars for every prayer leader.
Clerics will be required to attend lectures at the Centre for National Dialogue, which also operates a rehabilitation programme for former extremists, including those Saudis released from Guantanamo Bay.
Links between al-Qa'eda and Saudi Arabia's religious hierarchy moved from diplomatic liability to national crisis after the group carried out terrorist attacks in the kingdom in 2004 and 2005. Until these attacks, Mr Sheikh ruled out wholesale reforms as unnecessary.
If Saudi Arabia was as bad as its critics alleged, he said, it would harbour "tens of thousands of terrorists".
But in the past two years the leadership has had to sack up to 1,000 clerics, which has forced the adoption of a wider retraining programme.
Although few details of the retraining have been released, its impact could stretch across the Islamic world. Its outcome could be pivotal to the Saud dynasty, which owes its dominant position to an 18th century alliance with Wahhabism's founder, Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab. Wahhabism maintains the orthodoxies of early Islamic preachers.
The surge of oil revenues in the 20th century saw Saudi preachers spread across Islamic communities, displacing the often more benign local religious practitioners.
Bin Laden is a Wahhabi. This must rile him up something fierce.
We will be sending “the Reverend” Jeremiah Wright over on the next flight to get his training.
A useless gesture. Even if the taqqiya mouthers buy into it to the nth degree, all that’s needed is for one mullah to come along and start preaching islam as it’s actually written and the process starts all over again, again.
“We will be sending “the Reverend” Jeremiah Wright over on the next flight to get his training.”
He certainly needs retraining. And since he hates the US so much, why doesn’t he go back to Africa?
They can’t take this too far or radical Muslims will descend on the country to overthrow the kuffar.
Translation: When they attacked America, it was no problem. When they attacked us, it was a problem. We are attacking the problem in the traditional Saudi way, poorly.
The entire terrorist bankrolling, OPEC controlling, Wahhabist Saudi dictatorship should be overthrown.
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