Arabic → English transcript

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman admitted that his

country’s promotion of Wahhabi

extremism was a demand made by its allies in order to counter the expansion of the

influence and penetration of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

In an interview with the newspaper The Washington Post, he said that

successive Saudi governments lost their way in spreading the hard- line

Wahhabi ideology, stressing that the time has come to set things right.

In striking remarks filled with many admissions, Saudi Crown

Prince Mohammed bin Salman acknowledges that his country’s promotion of hard- line

Wahhabi ideology was an inevitability

imposed by Western interests and dictates on Riyadh in order to counter the

expansion of the influence and penetration of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The roots of Saudi investment

in schools and mosques go back to the period of the Cold War, when the allies

asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent the Union from achieving

influence in Islamic countries. I believe that Islam is rational and simple,

but some are trying to hijack it. It is the cold war then, so you did in Riyadh

what you did, for according to the words of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,

Riyadh is today paying the price for the West’s exploitation

of its money in the war against communist ideology. But in return,

there is a frank admission by the young prince that the many accusations leveled at

the Al Saud regime of funding terrorist groups and extremist ideologies were the

result of the governments of Saudi Arabia losing their way. The time has come,

the prince says, to set things right. The successive Saudi governments

lost their way, we must now set things right.

Today, the funding of Wahhabism comes to a large extent from private

institutions based in the kingdom, not from the government. Dialogue with

the religious establishment was long.

What is striking in these statements is their explicit

contradiction of Wahhabi foundations that The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

was built on it. The unique juristic

interpretations of the Saudi schools were the straw that broke the back of many

homelands and plunged them into the inferno of a multidimensional civil war,

such as Algeria in the 1990s.

Today the same debate is returning to the forefront of the

sectarian conflict in the country. Here the question arises: What repercussions will

bin Salman's statements have regarding the future of the Salafi current in Algeria?