The cleric, Sheik Abdullah ibn al-Jebreen, believed to be in his mid-70s, is one of the most influential clerics in Saudi Arabia and a devotee of Wahhabism, a strict form of Islam.

Gudben is a village with something of a reputation. People outside and inside Dagestan say that this village, in the Karabudakhkent District, is a ‘Wahhabi' nest and have tales aplenty to tell about what goes on there.

That doesn't mean other aspects of US policy were not incoherent. The US helped promote the worst form of Wahhabi extremism among the mujahideen.

Historians differ on the detail of Abdul Wahhab’s life, but it is widely agreed he was born in the town of al-Uyayna, in the Nejd , in 1703. Tutored by his father in the strict Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, Wahhab studied in Basra in southern Iraq, where debates with Islamic scholars led him to decide reform was needed.

Wahhabi volatility, which generated al Qaeda, is based on an essential dissonance in the history of the Arabian fundamentalists. Primarily interested in wealth, and then in control over the global Sunni sect, Wahhabis were always willing to unite with the West against the traditional Muslims they despised.

A single rough Bedouin could so radically reinterpret Islam that his followers got away with destroying the tomb of Prophet Muhammad at Madina in 1803 and later stripped the sacred Kaaba at Makkah of the treasures that pilgrims had adorned it with.

Wahabbism, the radical Islam currently advancing around the globe, originated in the 18th century as a philosophy designed to counter the moderate, syncretic Islam that was the heart of Turkey's culture, and which the Ottoman Empire had disseminated among its principalities, including those in the Arabian Peninsula.

This approach is underpinned in the deeply conservative Wahhabist school of Islam, the basis of the Saudi state, where the patriarchal royal family rules with the support of powerful clerics over a heavily tribal and family-based society.

But when it comes to the third element -- Wahhabism -- a world without the Saudi regime is hardly an upsetting thought. Years after the September 11 attacks, the kingdom is still a center of ideological indoctrination, incitement, and terrorist financing. "If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,"...

Wide as the horizons of their global ambition doubtless were, and dedicated as they were to using Iraq as a platform for reinforcement of Wahhabism in their own country, the Saudi radicals who streamed north were primarily interested in striking at the coalition,...

Saudis speak of two al-Awdas – pre-prison and post-prison. Born in Buraida, a town deep in Saudi Arabia’s conservative heartland, al-Awda became a key figure in al Sahwa – Arabic for awakening – a revivalist movement which called for the reasserting of purist Wahhabi traditions.

But other, and much more dangerous tendencies, are also evident in recent U.S. outreach to the Muslim world. To flirtation with Tehran, the attempted installation of Chas Freeman, a prime apologist for Saudi Wahhabism, as head of the National Intelligence Council,...

Since 1999, there is a growing phenomenon of mushroom growth of kindergarten Madrassas [Islamic religious kindergartens] in almost all the Muslim nations, preaching Wahhabism, which greatly encourages people towards jihad and killing of Jews and Christians.

Musliu, who has recovered from the ambush, had previously denounced the Wahhabi takeover of a library in a local school, and has now closed the mosque in Lower Zabel until things calm down. But he has also pledged to confront the radicals no matter how many people they succeed in buying off.

The House of Saud today faces a distinctive predicament. Over recent decades, the Saudi kingdom has single-handedly pumped millions upon millions of US Dollars to fund the Wahhabi sect of Islam around the world. The Saudi monarchy which came into power on the crest of Wahhabi fanaticism, resolved to export Wahhabi ideology from 1979...

The high-living plutocrats and playboys of the Saudi ruling clan long ago made a deal with the obscurantist Wahhabi clerics of Arabia. The plutocratic playboys would get the religious cred needed to "justify" their repressive, corrupt rule, while the Wahhabis would see their narrow-minded zealotry protected and promoted by state...

"Wahhabism is a tribal form of Islam coming from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia," he says. "This may be very attractive to the tribes in the frontier, but it will never find resonance in the established societies of Pakistan."

Kosovar contempt for the Wahhabis, as expressed in online reactions to the assault on the moderate mullah, proved this point, and was profoundly heartening. The majority of commentators on the Express website supported Osman Musliu and indignantly repudiated Wahhabi ambitions in Kosovo.

First of all, Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, does not have a codified criminal law and modern courts do not exist. Usually it is a cleric or the police who pass verdicts against criminals. Besides, the King and his clan are the law. They rule whimsically, supported by Wahhabism, a stone-age Islamic version of Islam.

In the weeks since the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon we have heard a great many people say that these crimes were committed by people who embrace a “perverted version of Islam,” or by those who have “hijacked Islam.”

ISNA has close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist group, and was named an un-indicted co-conspirator in U.S. v Holy Land Foundation, a case that uncovered covert financing of the terrorist group Hamas. Since her election as ISNA president in 2006, Mattson's apologias for the radical Wahhabi sect of Islam have gained a much wider audience.

There is finally a growing, albeit late, consensus toward the obvious that Wahhabism, and moreover Salafism, are profound threats to the security of Western-style governments. Conversely, successful nation states founded in the essence of religious freedom for all and the separation of organized religion and governance are the greatest ideological...

Throughout this period, the U.S. has traded national security and massive wealth for a steady flow of oil. Saudi Arabia, in return, has used billions of petrodollars to fund the expansion of its repressive Wahhabi-Salafist doctrine throughout the world and funded the terrorist activities of Palestinian groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and HAMAS.

“Centuries-old local mosques are being replaced by modern, Wahhabi-built mosques. Old imams who survived the communists are being replaced by Wahhabi clerics. This is not only true for predominantly Muslim countries like Tajikistan, but also for autonomous regions inside of Russia like Bashkiria and Tatarstan,...

The sharp-sighted reader could have noticed that on the very same home page of the Jama't-ud-Da'wah web site, within the featured "Da'wah section", a posture of the " The Ideological Attack" book was presented. This famous book consists the teachings and Fatwas...

It is possible to look at the history of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a long struggle with religious forces. The very existence of the country is premised on a Faustian bargain of sorts between Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and Muhammad Ibn Saud (head of the House of Saud from 1744-1765),...

A similar Wahhabi zeal for reviving Islam expressed itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- less in missionary activities than in militant action to suppress what Wahhabi preachers deemed idolatrous practices, particularly those connected with Sufism, Shi‘ism, and the veneration of saintly tombs.

Wahhabis hold that some Muslim groups such as Shia Islam follow novel or non-Islamic practices.Wahhabi theology advocates puritanical and legalistic stances in matters of faith and religious practice. Wahhabists see their role as a movement to restore Islam from what they perceive to be innovations, superstitions, deviances, heresies and idolatries.

Reports of Saudi-brokered talks between Afghan officials and the Taliban in late 2008 prompted a new round of speculation about the role Riyadh might play in the future of Afghanistan. Amid U.S. calls for a regional approach to the Afghan crisis,...

Khouj represented the Muslim World League (MWL), founded in Saudi Arabia in 1962 as an international agency for the propagation of Wahhabism. In 2006, relief branches of the MWL in Southeast Asia would be designated by the U.S. Treasury as financing fronts for al Qaeda.