SCARED OF WAHHABI ASSASSINS - BY UWE SIEMON-NETTO

News Analysis

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

UPI Religion Editor

WASHINGTON, April 26 (UPI) -- As soon as Sheikh Mohammed Mohammed Ali leaves his house in Baghdad for a drive around town, he takes off his white turban that marks him as a Shiite Muslim scholar, and places it on the seat next to him in his Toyota.

"Many Shiite clerics are doing this. It's safer that way," he told United Press International Monday in a telephone interview from his London home where he had just returned after an extended stay in Iraq.

"My turban would make me a target of Wahhabi assassins, who have already killed so many Shiite scholars. That's why I wear the turban only indoors -- and always in the mosque."

The Shiite clerics' turbans, which are distinct from the headgear of Sunni imams, come either in black or in white, depending on whether the bearer is a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed -- in which case black is the proper color -- or not. Mohammed Mohammed Ali wears white.

Wahhabis, a puritanical sect that originated in present-day Saudi Arabia in the 18th century, have traditionally not been part of the religious scene in Iraq.

"They have begun infiltrating the country already in the last 10 years of Saddam Hussein's regime," said Ali, who before the outbreak of the war was a leader of the London-based Iraqi National Council.

"The Sunni sects in Iraq used to be non-violent. But then the Wahhabis came and bribed Iraqi Muslims to join them. This way they took control of mosques even in Najaf and Karbala (the Shiites' holy cities), and in Basra in the South."

Complaints by Shiites that Wahhabi infiltrators target them for assassination have been common almost since the beginning of the current war more than a year ago. They also claim that adherents of this sect are intent on provoking a war between the Shiite majority and the Sunni minority.

But the sect's spokesmen angrily contest reports in some of the most respectable Western media, including London's Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor, that its agents are fanning the Iraqi insurgency.

A book titled "The Wahhabi Myth" authored by Maneef James Oliver and authenticated by Sheikh Naasirud-Deen al-Albaanee, a top religious leader in Saudi Arabia, attributes the extremism of Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorist to a different source.

"They are adherents of a newly risen sect called Qutbism, whose origins come from Egypt, not Saudi Arabia," he wrote. This movement is named after Sayyid Qutb who founded Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

As the London newspaper, The Independent, observed two years ago, this is not an Islamic tradition but very much a Western-based ideology.

In an article titled, "How Marx turned Muslim," the Independent's correspondent John Gray explained, "The inspiration for Qutb's thought is not so much the Koran but the current Western philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger."

But Mohammed Mohammed Ali, a moderate Shiite scholar propagating interfaith harmony as the only possible means to bring peace to Iraq, does not see things that way.

"In the last 10 years there have been huge transfers of funds to Iraq to make Muslims convert from their own sect to extreme Wahhabism," he said. "This happened with the support from politicians in the Gulf states and many other Arab countries."

While a prominent Wahhabi cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Bin Saalih al-'Uthatmeen, condemned terrorist outrages such as suicide bombings, saying their perpetrators would go to hell, the tradition of Wahhabi violence has a history of almost a quarter of a millennium.

In "The Wahhabi Movement," historian Ted Thornton reminded his readers that in their zeal Wahhabis even once declared holy war on fellow Muslims, an act expressly forbidden by the Koran.

They destroyed other believers' minarets and grave markers and, in 1802, the tomb of the Shiites' Imam Husayn in Karbala, their holy city in Iraq, an event that has remained unforgotten to this very day.

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