Bulldozers for Allah

 
So much for Tancredo’s option. In a short while there won’t be anything to nuke. The Saudis, those Wahhabist preservers of antiquities, are in the process of reducing thousands of years of antiquities to rubble. Remember when their Afghan Taleban adherents blew up the Buddhist statues near Bamiyan? Same general principle.

Islam is a hard concept to get your mind around, but the Wahhabi version is the strangest of them all. Had it not been for petroleum, we’d never have heard of their austere nihilism. They could be dismantling Mecca and Medina and we’d shrug and go about our business. Unfortunately we get to witness this pathological destruction up close.

How must it feel for other Muslims, those who care deeply about their pilgrimages to the Holy Places, to have these sites eradicated in the name of some punitive and destructive theology that abhors history, reverence for the past, and love of place?

Writing in the Independent (subscription required) Daniel Howden describes the unprecedented destruction of a holy place by its own people:

	Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.
	Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades.
	Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

According to Sami Angawi, an expert on regional Islamic architecture, the last days of Mecca and Medina are imminent. There are fewer than twenty structures left that date back to Mohammed’s time, and those which remain are set to be bulldozed, too.

This strange Wahhabi visionary annihilation in the name of holiness descended on Saudi Arabia with the victory of the al- Saud tribe in the 1920’s. They are fanatics — as we have witnessed in their clinging to slavery, the slaughter of those who fail to adhere to the Wahhabi tenets, and their world-wide dissemination of money to fund the teaching of Wahabbi Islam from Afghanistan to Indiana.

Thus they destroy their history in order to prevent idolatry. Pilgrims making their way to Mecca or Medina might unwittingly worship the place and not the god, Allah. From this theological mistake could arise polytheism, tolerance, and who knows what else?

So Medina and Mecca must go.

As John R. Bradley notes in his new book Saudi Arabia Exposed, the practice of idolatry in the kingdom remains, in principle at least, punishable by beheading. And Bradley also points out this same literalism mandates that advertising posters can and need to be altered. The walls of Jeddah are adorned with ads featuring people missing an eye or with a foot painted over. These "deliberate imperfections" are the most glaring sign of an orthodoxy that tolerates nothing which fosters adulation of the graven image. Nothing can, or can be seen to, interfere with a person's devotion to Allah.

The Wahhabi answer to the threat of history is a bulldozer and concrete.

For once, though, this is not America’s problem. It is an Islamic problem. What’s your guess as to how it will be solved?


Hat tip to Jeff in the comments section of the Lebanese Political Journal blog