The Geopolitics of Deciding Who Is Sunni5SEP 25, 2016
By Noah Feldman
It’s delicious to watch the Saudi outrage at being excluded from a conference in Chechnya to define who counts as a Sunni Muslim. Wahhabism, the Sunni offshoot that dominates Saudi Arabia, has done more than any other movement in Islamic history to read other Muslims out of the faith, and turnabout is fair play. Unfortunately, the conference, organized by Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, is actually part of Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiendishly clever plan to weaken Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally. The entire episode shows how ideologically vulnerable the Saudis feel in the age of Islamic State -- and how good Putin is at affecting Middle Eastern politics.
INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCES AT PLAY. PHOTOGRAPHER: CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES
The conference, which took place in the Chechen capital of Grozny in late August, was notable as much for who wasn’t invited as for who was. More than 100 Sunni clerics attended -- but none from Saudi Arabia.
Ahmed el-Tayeb, the state-appointed grand imam of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, was the event’s headliner. Although it has declined in recent decades, Al-Azhar was for centuries considered the most influential Sunni scholarly institution. Its head, known as the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, is by job description alone a major figure in the Sunni world.
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