Jamaati and Wahhabi

Know thy enemy.

Where Wahhabism, the Saudi state religion is reasonably well known, the Weekly Standard has a good short piece on the little known (at least in the US) Jamaati movement, the virulent anti-Western movement that dominates in Pakistan.

Pakistan produced the Jama'at-i-Islami (Community of Islam) movement, founded by Abu'l Ala Mawdudi, a theologian who died in 1979, strangely enough, in Buffalo, New York, at age 76. Known as Jamaatis, the followers of Mawdudi have attained exceptional influence in the Pakistani army and intelligence services, and were a key element in the Pakistani-Saudi alliance to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Western academics and journalists are often at pains to distinguish between the Jamaatis and Wahhabism, which is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. But differences in theological details, although they do exist, are secondary; mainly, the Saudi Wahhabis hold to a deceptive alliance with the Western powers, while the Jamaatis were always frontally anti-Western. The Jamaatis study in Saudi Arabia and share with the Wahhabis a murderous hatred of Muslims who do not conform to their ideology, considering those who reject their teachings to be apostates from Islam. They regularly massacre Shia Muslims, in particular, in Pakistani cities. They also completely reject participation by Muslim immigrants in the political and social institutions of Western countries in which they live, and they consider suicide terror legitimate. Pakistan has very few energy resources, and the Saudis have used cheap oil to support Wahhabi infiltration. In the system of radical Islam, if Saudi Arabia may be compared with the former Soviet state, Pakistan could be a parallel to the former East Germany.

For these reasons, the identification of four British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin as the perpetrators of the London atrocity comes as no surprise to those who have been paying attention to these matters. The seething, ferocious rhetoric heard in Pakistani Sunni mosques, at Friday services every week in outlying cities such as Leeds, is far more insidious, as the London events may show, than the antics engaged in by Arab loudmouths like the Syrian Omar Bakri Muhammad, the hook-handed Egyptian Abu Hamza al-Masri, or the bogus Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, all of who mainly perform for non-Muslim media attention.