Saudi Founding Day Quotes

just agreed to buy some decommissioned Saudi antiaircraft missiles for twelve million dollars and is planning to kidnap a racehorse as down payment. “The chrysanthemums are beautiful,” says the woman. “Exquisite.” A kidnapped racehorse was not ideal, as far as Martin Lomax was concerned, but if both sides were happy with the arrangement he has ample stabling by the paddock. He has done business with the Ukrainians before and found them violent but trustworthy. Martin Lomax will get the local Scout troop to run a refreshment stall on one of the Open Garden days. Water and so on. People need water, he has noticed. They go crazy for the stuff.

The Society of Muslim Brothers was founded in 1928 by a young schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna. As a Sunni Islamic revivalist movement, its establishment followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent end of the caliphate system of government that had united the Muslims for many hundreds of years. Al-Banna, who was just twenty-two years old, believed Islam was not only a religion but a fully comprehensive way of life, based on the tenets of Wahhabism, a strict and repressive form of the religion better known these days as Islamism and espoused by the Saudis, as well as unsavory characters such as Osama bin Laden.

Just days later new and much louder alarm bells sounded. The new Bolshevik government in Russia had found a copy of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in the deposed Tsarist government’s archives. They sent it to the Turks who passed it on to Husayn as proof of his British and French allies’ bad faith. When he, understandably incensed, asked the British to explain the document they hastened to assure him that it was a forgery. Husayn, although still not entirely convinced, decided that his own interests were likely to be better served by fighting on on Britain’s side than by withdrawing his troops or changing sides to support the Turks. Days

I looked at the pilgrims kissing the Black Stone. I was disturbed by the paganistic and ritualistic qualities of the scene. But I knew this was an ancient rite utterly distinct from the stone worshippers of centuries earlier. Muslims are very clear that only God is worthy of worship. The stone is only honored because Muhammad (PBUH) demonstrated his reverence for it by kissing it, but never worshipped it, worshipping only his Maker,,, so I found, as I would time and again in the days ahead, that in this of holiest of Islamic rites, deeply pagan rituals had survived the passage of time, persisting even after the dawn of Islam.