GATESTONE INSTITUTE: Now the extremist rage has reached sub-Saharan Africa.
At the beginning of July, Ansar Al-Dine (Volunteers of Faith), a Wahhabi Islamist group previously allied with Tuareg (a Berber group) rebels in Timbuktu, Mali, began systematically demolishing centuries-old Sufi shrines and mosques.
Timbuktu is known as the "City of 333 Muslim Saints," and has been the depository of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and documents in libraries and private collections.
In 1988, the United Nations added the three main mosques in the city, and 16 cemeteries and mausoleums, to its World Heritage registry.
Wahhabi ideology, however – the official interpretation of Islam in Saudi Arabia – is destructive of Islamic heritage. Wahhabi doctrine holds that the preservation of sacred funeral monuments and prayers at them are a dilution of Islamic monotheism and a prohibited form of idol worship.
In Saudi Arabia, Islamic heritage, including houses and mosques associated with the prophet Muhammad, have been destroyed or damaged.
Elsewhere, Wahhabi devastation was mainly seen in raids on Shia holy sites in Iraq during eighteenth and nineteenth-century Wahhabi forays into that country, as well as in the recent Iraq war. Fundamentalist assaults on Sufi sanctuaries then spread in Pakistan. Wahhabi violence against Sufi installations also appeared in the Muslim Balkans. With the political changes in Egypt and Libya, Sufi shrines have been targeted by so-called "Salafis" (a cover term for Wahhabis).
Now the extremist rage has reached sub-Saharan Africa. » | Irfan Al-Alawi | Wednesday, July 11, 2012
