Crown prince affirms Ibn Abdul Wahhab is not Saudi Arabia

Bogor, W Java (Indonesia Window) – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has emphasized the Kingdom’s position with regard to Wahhabism as well as its tolerant and flexible approach toward both its Sunni and Shiite population.

In his interview with the American magazine The Atlantic released on Thursday (Mar. 3), he reaffirmed that Ibn Abdul Wahhab is not Saudi Arabia.

“I would say that Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab is not a prophet, he is not an angel. He was just a scholar like many other scholars in who lived during the first Saudi state, among many political leaders and military leaders,” the crown prince said.

“The problem at that time in the Arabian Peninsula was that Ibn Abdul Wahhab’s students were the only people who knew how to read and write and history was written from their perspective. Ibn Abdul Wahhab’s writing has been used by many extremists for their own agendas. But I’m sure that if Ibn Abdul Wahhab, Ibn Baz, and others were alive today, they would be among the first people to fight these extremist ideas and these terrorist groups.”

“The thing is, ISIS doesn’t use as an example any living Saudi religious figures. When they die, they start to use their words and twist their views out of context.”

“We are going back to the roots, back to pure Islam, to be sure that the soul of Saudi Arabia, based on Islam, our culture, whether tribal, or urban, is serving the nation, serving the people, serving the region, serving the whole world, and is leading us to economic growth. And that’s what happened in the past five years,” the crown prince said.

Reporting by Indonesia Window