Saudi Love--bin Laden Style

Saudi Arabia bans roses on Valentine’s Day because they are un-Islamic. Now is that any way to portray Muhammad’s love for his women and people? Wouldn’t he have given them a red rose if, in his time, it was the practice to show love?

Muhammad’s youngest and favourite wife, Aisha, vigorously contested the chauvinism of early Muslim clerics. She was the first Islamic feminist.

In 2008, Saudi religious police arrested and prosecuted Fawza Falih who was accused of witchcraft and supernatural occurrences by a man’s claim that he became impotent after being bewitched by her. Witchcraft is considered an offence against Islam in Saudi Arabia. She was sentenced to death.

The House of Saud depends on the most radical southern and eastern clans for their political base. The southern faction is the center of popular support for al-Qaeda and the Taliban because it is the home of the most extreme Muslim sect, the Wahabbis. Ninety percent of the Muslim world rejects the Wahabbi religious tenets as utterly repugnant to the teachings and examples of the prophet as written in the Hadith.

Since most Wahabbis are functionally illiterate, they cannot read about this conflict on their own. Typically they memorize a few passages of the Koran taken out of context, and are unaware of the explanations contained in the accompanying Hadith. The Wahabbis, for example, are taught that Jews are sub-humans and should be killed as a religious duty. In contrast, the Hadith explains that the Prophet Muhammad honoured Jews, married a Jewish woman and forbade forced conversions of Jews, or any religion. He always bowed in respect when a Jewish funeral passed, and promised that good and faithful Jews would go to paradise just as good Muslims and Christians would. He taught that the Jews had their holy place in the west, meaning Jerusalem, while Muslims had their holy place in the east ─ Mecca.

The austere teachings of Mohammad bin Abd al-Wahhab have been prevalent in Saudi Arabia for more than two centuries. The House of Saud owes its control of the fractious tribes of the Arabian Peninsula to the fact that ancestors championed his teachings. Bookshops in Mecca and Medina sell 1,265-page souvenir tomes of his “greatest hits” fatwas or religious edicts. Most are rulings mandating the shunning of non-Muslims: do not smile at them, don’t wish them well on their holidays and don’t call them “friend.” Muslims living in foreign lands are ordered to “harbor enmity and hatred for infidels.” If we didn’t have to fill up our SUVs, would we have to bother with these people? And would these people have enough money to be a bother anyway?

The Saudi royal family and their Wahabbi protagonists have decreed that women cannot work or even sit in the front seat of a car ─ and that includes the Saudi Queen. In contrast, the Hadith records that the prophet worked for his wife, and that she drove her own caravans in international commerce. The prophet forbade racism, whereas the Wahabbis practice it, especially against their non-Arab Shiite minority. The Wahabbis discriminate viciously against women. The prophet, who lovingly raised three daughters, insisted that women should have essentially equal rights in contract, ownership and divorce.

The Arab-Saudi, Wahabbi and Sunni custodians of Islam and Mecca are creating as big a divide in the Middle East as their Texas protectors did in America. They actually fore-wrote it.
Muslim Reformation must do to Islam what the Scottish Reformation did to the Catholic Church: Break the theocratic monopolists. Improving knowledge is about understanding others and improving relations.