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Originally Posted by T@T
I agree with most of this but most Islamic country's do not separate religion and state, Saudi Arabia has actually beheaded a couple of people for even suggesting it.
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Saudi Arabia is a Salafist country, and particularly strict in it's interpretation, and have spent vast sums of money to spread their doctrine world wide. In essence, it's not unfair to say that most problems with Islam can be directly linked to this one country.
In the history of Islam, Salafism is a rather recent development, but honestly a growing problem. Trying to tackle it as a problem with Islam in general will however only muddy the waters.
To quote from Wikipedia:
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Its largesse funded an estimated "90% of the expenses of the entire faith", throughout the Muslim World, according to journalist Dawood al-Shirian. It extended to young and old, from children's madrasas to high-level scholarship. "Books, scholarships, fellowships, mosques" (for example, "more than 1,500 mosques were built from Saudi public funds over the last 50 years") were paid for. It rewarded journalists and academics, who followed it and built satellite campuses around Egypt for Al Azhar, the oldest and most influential Islamic university. Yahya Birt counts spending on "1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres and dozens of Muslim academies and schools" at a cost of around $2–3bn annually since 1975. To put the number into perspective, the propaganda budget of the Soviet Union was about $1bn per annum.
This spending has done much to overwhelm less strict local interpretations of Islam, according to observers like Dawood al-Shirian and Lee Kuan Yew, and has caused the Saudi interpretation (sometimes called "petro-Islam") to be perceived as the correct interpretation – or the "gold standard" of Islam – in many Muslims' minds.
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Of course these guys are "our" "allies", despite the majority of Saudis being hostile in attitude towards the US and largely towards the West in general. But hey, during the cold war era they weren't communists, so that's all that matters I guess.