Global Post: Editor’s note: Saudi Arabia’s religious landscape has sometimes appeared as a monochromatic terrain of pious Muslims following an intolerant, puritanical version of Islam. If that picture was ever accurate, it is certainly not today.
Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a slow but major social transformation in part because its largest-ever “youth bulge” is reaching adulthood. This transformation involves changes in the religious attitudes of ordinary people as well as shifts in the relationship between the House of Saud and its official religious establishment. The time when the state could use religion — instead of bald repression — to enforce uniform social behavior and impede political action has passed.
This is Part One of a five-part series to be published in the coming days.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — When Hamza Al Salem was in his 20s, he could recite the Quran from memory, wanted banks shut down because Islam bans the charging of interest and vowed to avoid non-Muslim countries when he traveled.
“I was a very pure, fundamental Wahhabi,” said Al Salem, whose university-level religious studies were in the ultraconservative Wahhabi approach to Islam named after the 18th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad bin Abd AlWahhab.
Categories: Answers to Anti-Islam, Arab World, Asia