The future of “burgeoning Wahhabism”
The story is about enemy soldiers coming from Syria into Iraq, but it is more interesting than just that in discussing the religious fervor at work in them. London Times:
He had no regrets about his impending death: “There is nothing stronger than my love for God and seeking martyrdom,” he said brightly. As for his wife, he had already thought of his last message to her: “If Allah accepts my martyrdom, then I shall ensure that you are one of those I name to be salvaged and brought to heaven when your time comes.”
These, then, are the factors driving the bombers inexorably onwards. First, fury over the occupation, fuelled by images of the dead on Arab TV stations and fundamentalist websites, and fanned by radical imams who damn the “infidels” and praise Al-Qaeda to the heavens. Second, burgeoning Wahhabism has played into the hands of Sunni extremist groups…
As we have been seeing in Anbar province, “burgeoning Wahhabism” can get tiresome for the locals pretty quickly. Wahhabism and its related viruses are parasitic in nature — they have to be subsidized, because a society fully adopting those rules can’t thrive on a stand-alone basis.
We heard Theodore Dalrymple wonder the other day if the Islamist threat to modernity, as evidenced in the Glasgow airport attack, was overrated, in the sense that the idea of driving a car though an airport window was just so stupid. We wouldn’t go that far, because there are some real threats out there, but it seems clear enough that if the West would stand up and act like a man, we could have done with this foolishness in reasonably short order.