Last week, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah was welcomed to the White House by President Obama. According to the Washington Post, their meeting provided an opportunity “to demonstrate the friendship between their countries, a point the king was particularly keen on highlighting. ‘I would like to say to the friendly American people that the American people are friends of Saudi Arabia and its people, and they are friends of the Arab and Muslim people, and they are also friends of humanity,’ Abdullah said.”

Did you, friendly American person, happen to notice that while His Highness confirmed that Americans are friends of Saudis, Arabs, and Muslims, he did not say that Saudis, Arabs, and Muslims are friends of Americans? If you think that’s being picky, consider: Also last week, Nina Shea and Bonnie Alldredge reported that the textbooks used in Saudi-funded schools around the world remain decidedly unfriendly. They teach “that Jews and Christians are ‘enemies,’ and they dogmatically instruct that various groups of ‘unbelievers’ — apostates (which includes Muslim moderates who reject Saudi Wahhabi doctrine), polytheists (which includes Shiites), and Jews — should be killed.”

Is there a relationship between such teachings and what Obama calls “violent extremism”? Is it more than coincidence that 15 of the 19 violent extremists who carried out the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001 were Saudis? These are questions not likely to be seriously examined on the many campuses — e.g. Georgetown, Berkeley, Harvard — where Middle Eastern—studies departments receive multi-million-dollar grants from friendly Saudi princes.

Also recall: Osama bin Laden, born in Saudi Arabia, became radicalized while attending college in the Saudi city of Jeddah where his instructors included Muhammad Qutb. Muhammad Qutb’s brother Sayyid Qutb studied in the United States from 1948 to 1950, where he learned to abhor American materialism, individualism, and the “animal-like” mixing of males and females — “even in churches.” Sayyid Qutb’s many books and articles helped shape modern Islamism, which I would define as the movement dedicated to Islamic supremacy and domination; a world ruled by Muslims under sharia — Islamic law which, Islamists believe, is God’s law and therefore is unchallengeable.

Not all Muslims are Islamists — far from it. But to say that Islamists have hijacked Islam is also mistaken. Mohammad, who established the religion in the 7th century, was not only a prophet. He was a warrior and a conqueror as well. At the end of his life, Mohammad instructed his followers “to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

Saudi history in a nutshell: In the 9th century, the scholar and theologian Ahmad Ibn Hanbal founded what would become a small, strict school of Fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence. In the 18th century, this Hanbali School produced Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a religious scholar who made a fateful alliance with Muhammad ibn Saud, an Arabian tribal chief.

Ibn Saud pledged to spread al-Wahhab’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, later known as Wahhabism. In exchange, al-Wahhab agreed to lend theological legitimacy to the Saudis — but not to their rivals. Continue here to page 2 of the National Review