Detention Threat for Malaysian blogger

Malaysian Patriot writes "The Malaysian blogosphere is currently in uproar as one of their most famous bloggers, a political observer named Jeff Ooi, has been threatened with action under the country's draconian ISA (Internal Security Act) law which allows a person to be detained without trial if he is thought to threaten "national security". The whole problem started with a comment made by a reader of the blog. The comment is alleged to have been insulting of Islam. A national newspaper (whose editor has frequently been a target of Ooi's blog) took up the story and accused the blogger of insulting Islam, while Ooi in his defence states he warned (and later deleted) the offending commenter when he was alerted to it. Malaysian bloggers meanwhile are outraged that a blogger should be held responsible for comments made by readers. In the case of Ooi's blog, which attracts thousands of hits per day, it is logistically impossible for Ooi to read and moderate every comment made. The whole saga can be followed in Jeff Ooi's Screenshots blog."

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This is the Islamic equivalent of the Puritans

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

A Movement Bred in the Isolation of the Desert
by Tarek Heggy

Here's the complete series:

1. The Big Change in Islamic Societies
2. Muslims & The Clash of Civilizations
3. The Mentality of Violence... and the Games Nations Play!
4. A Movement Bred in the Isolation of the Desert
5. The Fall of the Oppressors and the Emergence of the Sword
6. The Crisis Facing Non-Wahabbi Islam

The man who founded Wahhabism was not a theologian but a proselyter who was determined to convert the faithful to his harsh brand of Islam. Intellectually close to the dialectical Islamic theologians who asserted the primacy of tradition (naql) over reason (aql), Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab was a disciple of ibn-Taymiyah, a strict traditionalist who allowed little scope for reason or independent thinking. He was also a product of his geographical environment, a remote outpost of history.

Unlike Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, where ancient civilizations had flourished and made their mark on human history, or places like Dubai and Hijaz, which lay on trade routes and dealt extensively with the outside world, the desert of Najd in the Eastern Province of what is now Saudi Arabia had no civilization to speak of before Islam. Nor did it ever become a cultural centre like the capitals of the Caliphate, Medina, Damascus and Baghdad. Thanks to its arid, barren landscape, Najd remained a cultural backwater, its sole contribution to the arts a traditional form of poetry that spoke of narrow tribal matters.

The harsh and unforgiving environment in which the Najdis lived explains why Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab found a receptive audience for the equally harsh and unforgiving brand of Islam he preached. The same environment that produced the founder of Wahhabism later produced the radical Ikhwan movement which challenged the authority of King Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud. In the nineteen twenties, the king took on the Ikhwan, who were openly accusing him of deviating from the true faith. When he returned to Riyadh after joining Hijaz to his kingdom, the Ikhwan said he had left on a camel and come back in an American car!

This was just one of many clashes between the movement and the king over such issues as whether the radio was sinful or the telephone an invention of the devil, in short, over any of the fruits of modernity which threatened their fundamentalist vision of the world. It is a vision that can only be understood by studying what is known as the secret sects of Islam (radical fringe movements that never became part of mainstream Islam), as well as the message of Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab, the product of many factors, including the sociological and geopolitical environment of the deserts of Najd.

These factors allowed the Wahhabis, after they invaded Hijaz, to impose their austere understanding of religion throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Among other things, they banned headstones and any structures identifying burial sites, insisting on unmarked graves flush with the land. They combated Sufism in Mecca and elsewhere as contrary to the teachings of Islam. They even entered into an armed clash with the Egyptian mahmil, a splendidly decorated litter on which the Egyptians sent a new cover for the Ka'bah every year. The mahmil ceremony was a merry occasion celebrated by the Egyptians with their traditional love of music, dancing and revelry. For the Najdis, who had launched their puritanical revival movement to purge Islam of what they saw as deviations from the straight and true path of orthodoxy, such unseemly displays of levity could not be tolerated.

What I want to cast light on here i