Imprimis has run a good piece by Bernard Lewis about Islam (does Lewis write about anything else?). The guts of the piece is a fairly common overview of the modern Muslim world, but it's worth reading if you're a little sketchy on the facts (as I was). Plus, there are these two notable excerpts:
First, for those who claim Islam needs a reformation (a notion that Catholics have properly derided):
That there has been a break with the past is a fact of which Arabs and Muslims themselves are keenly and painfully aware, and they have tried to do something about it. It is in this context that we observe a series of movements that could be described as an Islamic revival or reawakening. The first of these–founded by a theologian called Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who lived in a remote area of Najd in desert Arabia–is known as Wahhabi. Its argument is that the root of Arab-Islamic troubles lies in following the ways of the infidel. The Islamic world, it holds, has abandoned the true faith that God gave it through His prophet and His holy book, and the remedy is a return to pure, original Islam. This pure, original Islam is, of course–as is usual in such situations–a new invention with little connection to Islam as it existed in its earlier stages.
Wahhabism was a reformation, at least theologically, embracing many of the same thrusts of the Reformation. And Wahhabism, due to the House of Saud's influence over Islam because of its control of the holy sites and oil money, became the spear point of Muslim militancy and terrorism (as Lewis explains in this piece).
Interesting:
What is worse, its influence spreads far beyond the region. When Muslims living in Chicago or Los Angeles or Birmingham or Hamburg want to give their children some grounding in their faith and culture–a very natural, very normal thing–they turn to the traditional resources for such purposes: evening classes, weekend schools, holiday camps and the like. The problem is that these are now overwhelmingly funded and therefore controlled by the Wahhabis, and the version of Islam that they teach is the Wahhabi version, which has thus become a major force in Muslim immigrant communities.
Let me illustrate the significance of this with one example: Germany has constitutional separation of church and state, but in the German school system they provide time for religious instruction. The state, however, does not provide teachers or textbooks. They allow time in the school curriculum for the various churches and other religious communities–if they wish–to provide religious instruction to their children, which is entirely optional. The Muslims in Germany are mostly Turks. When they reached sufficient numbers, they applied to the German government for permission to teach Islam in German schools. The German authorities agreed, but said they–the Muslims–had to provide the teachers and the textbooks. The Turks said that they had excellent textbooks, which are used in Turkey and Turkish schools, but the German authorities said no, those are government-produced textbooks; under the principle of separation of church and state, these Muslims had to produce their own. As a result, whereas in Turkish schools in Turkey, students get a modern, moderate version of Islam, in German schools, in general, they get the full Wahhabi blast. The last time I looked, twelve Turks have been arrested as members of Al-Qaeda–all twelve of them born and educated in Germany.
