The Blood of Our Ummah: An Exposé of Saudi Wahhabi Sectarianism and Its Trail of Destruction
The Great Imam Ayatollah Khomeini (RA) once spoke a truth that cuts through the petty distractions that have consumed our Ummah for generations: whilst we Muslims waste precious energy arguing over whether to pray with our arms straight or folded, our enemies conspire to sever those very arms from our bodies. How prophetic those words have proven. Yet the tragedy runs far deeper than external enemies alone—for the greatest wound inflicted upon our Ummah has come from within, through the calculated, systematic deployment of sectarian hatred funded by Saudi petrodollars and executed through the machinery of Wahhabi ideology.
The Machinery of Division: Rabita and the Weaponization of Sectarianism
For over four decades, the Saudi regime has leveraged its vast oil wealth to export the rigid, exclusionary Wahhabi doctrine across the Muslim world. The primary vehicle for this ideological colonization has been Rabita (Rabit'at al-Alam al-Islami), the World Islamic League, a Saudi-funded agency that has dispensed billions of dollars to Ulema, Islamic organizations, and religious institutions worldwide since its founding. The Rabita affair, first exposed by investigative journalists in the 1980s, revealed the extent to which Saudi money has been used to purchase religious influence—funding mosques, Islamic centers, university programs, and the salaries of imams across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
In Turkey alone, Rabita was granted unprecedented access by military-backed governments to pay the salaries of Turkish religious functionaries abroad and fund countless religious organizations within the country. The Saudi-financed Faisal Finance Corporation and al-Baraka Turkish Financial Corporation, established with the backing of prominent political figures, directed vast resources toward Islamist publications and "educational" foundations designed to shape the religious consciousness of an entire generation. This pattern was replicated across the Muslim world—from the mosques of Europe to the universities of Southeast Asia, Saudi money has built an infrastructure of sectarian indoctrination.
What makes this particularly insidious is the nature of the doctrine being exported. Wahhabism, the official creed of the Saudi state, was built upon the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who made anti-Shiism a core component of his theology from the very founding of the first Saudi state in the eighteenth century. This is not incidental or accidental sectarianism; it is institutionalized, systematized hatred embedded into the very fabric of Saudi religious education and propagated through a global network of Wahhabi institutes established in the 1960s and beyond. Salafist literature remains "chock full of hatred for Shiites," providing the theological justification for violence against fellow Muslims who happen to follow a different school of Islamic thought.
The Geopolitical Engine of Sectarian War
The ideological groundwork laid by Wahhabi proselytization would prove to be the fuel for a series of catastrophic conflicts that have bled the Muslim world dry. The engine driving this destruction has been the geopolitical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran—a rivalry that both sides have cynically manipulated, but one in which Saudi Arabia has played an especially destructive role through its willingness to unleash sectarian militancy as a weapon of state policy.
The Iran-Iraq War: Opening the Gates of Hell
When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, launching one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century, Saudi Arabia did not stand as a neutral arbiter seeking peace between Muslim nations. Instead, Riyadh poured billions of dollars into Saddam's war machine, backing the secular Ba'athist dictator precisely because he was fighting against the revolutionary Shiite government in Tehran. The Saudis understood that a weakened Iran served their strategic interests, and they were willing to facilitate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims—on both sides of the conflict—to achieve that goal. The Iran-Iraq War claimed over a million lives, leaving a legacy of bitterness and trauma that continues to poison relations between Arab and Persian communities to this day.
The Syrian Civil War: A Sectarian Feeding Frenzy
When the Syrian uprising began in 2011 as a movement for political reform, Saudi Arabia saw an opportunity to strike at Iran's regional ally, Bashar al-Assad. What followed was a deliberate campaign to transform a political protest movement into a sectarian war. Saudi Arabia, according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's own admission, armed and financed extremist groups including Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, and Jaish al-Islam—organizations whose sectarian ideology was indistinguishable from that of al-Qaeda. The Saudis understood exactly what they were unleashing: a torrent of sectarian violence that would tear Syria apart along Sunni-Shia lines.
The consequences have been catastrophic. Over half a million Syrians dead. More than twelve million displaced. Entire cities reduced to rubble. Cultural heritage dating back millennia deliberately destroyed. And at the center of it all, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies continued to funnel weapons and money to the very extremist groups that would go on to form the backbone of an even more terrifying entity: the Islamic State.
The Rise of ISIS: Frankenstein's Monster
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) did not emerge from a vacuum. It was the direct product of the sectarian environment that Saudi Wahhabism had cultivated for decades. The group's precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was sustained by Sunni extremist groups that received at least tacit support from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in the years following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. When the Syrian civil war created a power vacuum in eastern Syria, these same elements seized the opportunity to establish a territorial caliphate that would perpetrate some of the most heinous atrocities the modern world has witnessed.
The theological continuity between Wahhabism and ISIS is undeniable. Both share a literalist interpretation of scripture, a hatred for Shiite Muslims, and a vision of religious purity achieved through violent exclusion of those deemed apostates. As the German intelligence service BND publicly acknowledged, "Wahhabism, the formal religion of Saudi Arabia, has offered a comprehensive ideology for ISIL and Al Qaeda". German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel went further, scathingly condemning the Saudi regime for "funding extremists in the West and around the world by building and funding radical Wahhabi mosques".
Saudi Arabia's relationship with ISIS has been one of denial masking complicity. Even as the kingdom officially condemned the group, its continued export of Wahhabi ideology created the conditions for ISIS to thrive. The group's supporters have consistently celebrated Saudi Arabia's sectarian policies while criticizing the regime only for not going far enough in its purification of Islam. The same theological well from which Saudi Arabia drinks is the well that quenched ISIS's thirst for legitimacy.
The War in Yemen: Starving a Nation for Sectarian Gain
In March 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention in Yemen that the regime promised would conclude "in a matter of days". Nearly a decade later, the war continues, having created what the United Nations has called the worst man-made humanitarian disaster on earth. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead. Millions on the brink of starvation. Cholera outbreaks killing children by the thousands. And for what purpose?
The official justification was to prevent the Houthi movement—which Saudi Arabia claims is an Iranian proxy—from taking control of Yemen. But the deeper reality is that Saudi Arabia views Yemen through a purely sectarian lens, treating the Houthis' Zaydi Shiite affiliation as a justification for collective punishment against an entire nation. The Saudi-led coalition has bombed hospitals, schools, markets, and funeral processions. It has imposed a blockade that has prevented food and medicine from reaching starving civilians. And it has done all of this with Western weapons, Western diplomatic cover, and Western silence.
The war in Yemen represents the purest expression of Saudi sectarianism: the willingness to destroy a neighboring country entirely rather than tolerate a political outcome perceived as favorable to Iran. The human cost is measured not only in the dead but in the generations of Yemenis who will grow up knowing nothing but hunger, disease, and the trauma of aerial bombardment.
Egypt: Democracy Denied
The Arab Spring of 2011 offered a brief, hopeful moment when it seemed the peoples of the Middle East might finally break free from the dual shackles of dictatorship and religious extremism. In Egypt, that hope culminated in the democratic election of Muhammad Morsi, the first and only democratically elected president in the country's history. Morsi represented the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist movement that, whatever its flaws, had won a legitimate electoral mandate.
The Saudi regime watched Morsi's rise with profound alarm. The Muslim Brotherhood represented a rival Sunni Islamist vision—one that embraced electoral politics and, crucially, did not subordinate itself to Riyadh's leadership. Worse still, the Brotherhood had maintained relationships with Iran and Hamas, further complicating the Saudi-led anti-Iranian axis. When Egypt's military, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, moved to depose Morsi in a July 2013 coup, Saudi Arabia was among the first to celebrate.
What followed was a brutal crackdown of historic proportions. When security forces stormed Muslim Brotherhood protest camps in August 2013, they killed approximately 600 unarmed demonstrators, with snipers reportedly firing on civilians from rooftops. The Egyptian military's violence, as one observer noted, was "almost reminiscent of the massacres of the Syrian regime". Saudi Arabia responded not with condemnation but with an immediate $5 billion aid package to the new military government—blood money to buy the destruction of Egyptian democracy.
The Intelligence Nexus: CIA, Mossad, and Saudi Secret Services
The story of sectarian warfare in the Middle East cannot be told without acknowledging the role of Western and Israeli intelligence agencies that have found common cause with Saudi Arabia's agenda. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 represented a threat not only to Saudi monarchy but to American and Israeli strategic interests in the region. In the decades since, there has been a consistent alignment between Saudi intelligence, the CIA, and Mossad in efforts to contain and weaken the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This alignment has manifested in support for sectarian militant groups across the region. As Saudi Arabia armed Sunni extremists in Syria, it did so with the tacit approval—and in some cases active facilitation—of Western intelligence agencies who viewed any blow against Iran's ally Assad as a blow against Tehran. The result has been a grotesque convergence of interests: the United States and Israel, ostensibly fighting terrorism, aligning themselves with the very ideological forces that give rise to terrorism, all in service of a geopolitical agenda that treats the blood of Muslims as an acceptable cost.
The execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr in January 2016 illustrated the dangerous dynamic at play. Nimr, a prominent Shiite cleric who had peacefully protested against discrimination in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, was executed alongside al-Qaeda terrorists in a deliberate provocation designed to elicit an Iranian response that could be used to justify further sectarian escalation. When Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran, Riyadh severed diplomatic ties and declared Iran the "hub of terrorism"—a designation eagerly echoed by the Trump administration. The execution, as analysts noted, was designed to "remind the United States that it can stand up to Iran on its own, particularly when Washington refuses to do so".
The Betrayal of Muslim Unity
The cumulative effect of these Saudi-led sectarian campaigns has been the systematic destruction of Muslim unity. The Ummah, which once understood itself as a single body bound by shared faith, has been fragmented into warring sects, each armed with its own theological justifications for violence against the other. Sunni extremists view Shiites as apostates worthy of death. Shiite militias view Sunnis as tools of foreign conspiracies. And through it all, the regimes that cynically manipulate these divisions—including the Saudi monarchy—continue to enrich themselves, maintain their power, and enjoy the protection of Western powers.
This fragmentation serves the interests of all who wish to see the Muslim world weak and divided. Israel benefits from an Arab world consumed by internal conflict. The United States benefits from regional powers dependent on American weapons and protection. And the Saudi regime benefits from a population distracted by sectarian hatreds rather than focused on the tyranny of their own rulers.
A Call to Account
In the face of this history, we must speak plainly: whoever advances sectarian agendas at a time when our Ummah faces existential threats has the blood of Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, Iranian, and Egyptian martyrs on their hands. This is not hyperbole but a statement of factual accountability. The scholars and clerics who accepted Saudi money to preach hatred against Shiite Muslims, who issued fatwas declaring fellow believers apostates, who provided religious cover for wars that have killed millions—they bear a share of responsibility for every death, every orphaned child, every destroyed home.
The imams who sit in comfortable mosques funded by Saudi petrodollars while preaching that Shiites are not true Muslims are not innocent theologians engaged in scholarly debate. They are active participants in a project of division that has been deliberately engineered to weaken our Ummah. The organizations that accepted Rabita's funding to establish "educational" programs that teach children to hate their fellow Muslims based on sectarian affiliation are not engaged in legitimate religious education—they are building the ideological infrastructure for future wars.
We must recognize that the enemies of our Ummah have found their most effective weapon not in bombs or armies but in the poison of sectarianism. When Muslims kill Muslims in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in the name of theological differences that existed for centuries without producing such carnage, we are fighting not for Islam but against the interests of every Muslim. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was met with a calculated response: the mobilization of Wahhabi ideology as a counterweight, the arming of sectarian militias, the funding of hatred through institutions like Rabita, and the strategic partnership of Saudi intelligence with Western and Israeli agencies to ensure that any revolutionary potential in the Muslim world would be channeled into fratricidal conflict.
Conclusion: Toward an Honest Reckoning
The Great Imam Khomeini (RA) understood that our enemies seek to divide us over matters of form—whether we fold our arms or let them hang straight—while they work to sever those arms entirely. But the division runs deeper than debates over prayer posture. It runs to the very heart of how we understand our faith and our relationships with fellow believers.
We cannot begin to heal these wounds until we are honest about how they were inflicted. The Saudi regime, through its funding of Wahhabi proselytization, its arming of sectarian militias, and its strategic alignment with forces hostile to Muslim unity, bears a profound responsibility for the blood that has been spilled since 1979. The clerics and organizations that served as conduits for Saudi money and ideology share in that responsibility. And the Western powers that enabled and encouraged this sectarian fragmentation for their own geopolitical purposes are complicit in the destruction of millions of Muslim lives.
At this moment of jihad—of struggle against those who would destroy our Ummah—we must choose: Will we continue to be manipulated by forces that profit from our division? Will we allow ourselves to be bought with Saudi blood money, traded for the privilege of hating our brothers? Or will we finally recognize that our enemies' greatest victory has been to turn us against each other?
The choice is ours. The blood of our martyrs cries out for an accounting. May Allah guide us to the truth and grant us the courage to speak it, regardless of the price.
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"And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided."
— Qur'an, Surah Al-Imran, 3:103
Opinion by Imraahn Ismail-Mukaddam
CEO Inspire Media Networks
Assisted by Deepseek AI
