Whenever gunmen kill expatriate workers in Saudi Arabia, they set off alarm bells in international oil markets. But louder bells should be ringing throughout the Muslim world over the cost to Islam of the ongoing conflict between the Saudi royal family and the Wahhabi zealots it helped create and who now vow to overthrow it.

In late May, militants launched two audacious attacks against foreign oil workers, killing seven in Yanbu on Saudi Arabia's west coast and 22 in the oil-rich Eastern Province. At least three foreigners have been killed in the past week alone, and an American, Paul Marshall Johnson, has been abducted, apparently by Al-Qaeda.

Of all the countries in the region where governments have struggled to put down militants, Saudi Arabia is the most pivotal, and not just because it can determine the next emergency OPEC meeting. Islam was born in what is now Saudi Arabia. King Fahd is referred to as the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" of Mecca and Medina, which millions of Muslim pilgrims visit every year. If oil has been Saudi Arabia's trump card on the international stage, then Islam has given it plenty of prestige on the Muslim one.

So when the gunmen who recently took over a housing complex in Khobar told terrified foreign oil workers that they were looking for "infidels" during an hours-long shooting spree that left 22 dead, including a 10-year-old Egyptian schoolboy, and claimed that it was in the name of Islam that they dragged the corpse of a 62-year-old Briton through the streets and slit the throats of nine hostages, the Muslim world cannot remain silent.

It is long past the time when Muslims should have questioned the puritanical Wahhabi ideology prevailing in Saudi Arabia, and which is pulling the rug out from under Saudi life. For this is the same ideology that militant movements have adopted for years throughout the Muslim world.

For one small but recent example one need look no further than Saudi Arabia's neighbor, Iraq. Recent press reports suggest that the town of Fallujah has turned into an Islamic mini-state - anyone caught selling alcohol is liable to be flogged and paraded throughout the city; men are encouraged to grow beards and barbers are warned against giving "Western" hair cuts; women rarely appear in public, and when they do they are covered from head to toe.

The men enforcing this alleged public piety bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Saudi Arabia's mutawwaiin, or morality police - officers of the Kafkaesque-sounding Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The best way to describe the mutawwaiin is to consider them the godfathers of the Taleban. It is the Wahhabi ideology of the mutawwaiin that gave birth to the Taleban and the misery they unleashed on the people of Afghanistan. That same misery seems to be taking hold in Fallujah.

While there is little doubt that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and now the American occupation of Iraq, fuel many a militant's fire in the Middle East, Wahhabi Islam can be found in most of the embers.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for six years in the 1980s and know how all-pervasive Wahhabism is. It was on posters lining the corridors of my women-only university showing how a "good Muslim woman" should dress - in black from head to toe - and it made sure that gender apartheid kept those same good Muslim women in the back two rows of public buses. It was in shopping malls patrolled by mutawwaiin ready to arrest shopkeepers who didn't close their stores for prayer time. And it was in the grim Friday news tallies of the day's public beheadings.

And it is still there today in the matters occupying the time of Saudi clerics. Two weeks before the Khobar rampage, a Saudi friend forwarded me a copy of a fatwa, or religious ruling, issued by senior clerics. The fatwa banned the giving of flowers when visiting the sick in the hospital. The ruling observed: "It is not the habit of Muslims to offer flowers to the sick in hospital. This is a custom imported from the land of the infidels by those whose faith is weak. Therefore it is not permitted to deal with flowers in this way, whether to sell them, buy them or offer them as gifts."

Wahhabi militants operate in that great chasm between a mindset that bans the giving of flowers to the sick and life as we know it at the start of the 21st century. Osama bin Laden may be Wahhabism's most recognizable face, but the ideology does not lack for followers or for hatred, and not just directed against "infidels" - women and non-Wahhabis are equally disparaged.

The Saudi royal family has its own reckoning with Wahhabism. It took suicide bombings in Riyadh last year for the government to finally acknowledge the existence of homegrown extremism, but the rest of us gained no satisfaction from saying that it was only a case of the chickens coming home to roost. By giving Wahhabis a free hand over Saudi Arabia's religious and educational sectors, the royal family brought about the current showdown. Instead of fostering a liberal and intellectual class that despises the Wahhabis and that could have been an important ally against them, the Saudi regime has, instead, imprisoned those calling for liberal reform.

Last year, Crown Prince Abdullah brought together Saudi intellectuals, including women and members of the country's Shiite minority, to debate much-needed reform as an antidote to a Wahhabism run amok. However, every discussion of reform is routinely tempered with the caveat: "It cannot be too fast." But what is "too fast" when militants kill a BBC cameraman and critically injure a journalist in broad daylight as they did earlier this month? What is "too fast" when car-bombs are killing Saudis and non-Saudis, Muslims and non-Muslims, alike?

"I am scared," a Saudi man told me after the Khobar attacks. "There is no clear vision for where my country is heading. We want to progress, but we also want to live like the good Muslims did 1,400 years ago. We want to change, but we believe that change is the road to hell. We want the people to have a role in leading the country, but we don't want democracy. We want to have dialogue with the West, but our preachers are preaching every Friday that all Westerners, or non-Muslims, go to hell."

The Muslim world must speak up not only for its religion, but also for those Saudis caught between the rock of the royal family and its absolute rule and the hard place of the Wahhabis and their unforgiving brand of Islam

https://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=5381