A clash of cultures or ideologies?

Seth Frantzman
Terra Incognita/JPost
19 January '10

In the waning months of 1775 an elderly imam named Sayf ibn Ahmed al-Atiqi lay dying in Sudayr, a region north of Riyadh. Atiqi was a well known imam of the Nejd and he had spent his dying days opposing a new religious movement named Wahhabism. Two years before his death, this movement, led by the tribal sheikh Muhammad Ibn Saud, had conquered Riyadh, a sleepy desert oasis, and turned it into the capital of a new Islamic fundamentalist state.

In April 1775, on the other side of the world, American colonists were rousted from their beds in communities west of Boston by the cries of Paul Revere. The lonely rider warned them that the British had set out that very night to destroy their stockpiles of arms. The resulting conflagration was known as the "shot heard round the world" and would result in creation of the United States.

Although many have written about American involvement in the Middle East, few have realized that the eruption of Wahhabism and the founding of America were contemporary events. Those who cover US-Saudi relations usually date their beginnings to 1931 when the US recognized the government of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud. Further important events occurred when Standard Oil was given a concession in the kingdom in 1933 and when Franklin D. Roosevelt met the king in 1945. However that meeting merely represents one milestone in the history of two states whose ideologies have come to dominate the modern world.

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The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University