Overview

Establishing the link between Saudi political ideology and the proliferation of Wahhabi missions around the world, this fascinating tour de force includes a rigorous intellectual history of Muslim radicalism, from the Kharijite movement in early caliphal history through Wahhabism and Salafism to their violent synthesis in al-Qaeda. Among contemporary worldviews, Muslim radicalism poses the number-one threat to international security today. Saudi State, Wahhabi World: The Globalization of Muslim Radicalism analyzes the ideas and structures that have sustained and nourished Islam's radical thinkers and actors. It finds that radical Islam is unavoidably linked to the religious political life of Saudi Arabia, whether one examines ideology or the institutions and organizations that ensure the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. Over the past two decades, Naveed S. Sheikh explains, Wahhabism has reengineered the traditional theological norms of Islam so that we are left with a schismatic, and ultimately uncontrollable, form of religious anarchism. Wahhabism is sustained by a transnational regime of agents and organizations acting as twin conduits for funds and views—the former predominantly Saudi, the latter principally Wahhabic. In the process of manipulating the intellectual and political history of Islam, this book argues, the Kingdom has now itself become a target of the genie it let loose.

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9780275999148

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Naveed S. Sheikh is Honorary European Trust Scholar at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a lecturer in international relations at Keele University.

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