Vakhtang Maisaia
[article originally published in: "Nowy Prometeusz" nr 11, czerwiec 2018, ss. 11-22]
As it is known, Wahhabism (al-Wahhabiya) was created in Saudi Arabia by Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab – the Muslim Sunni theologian, who lived in the XVIII century in Saudi Arabia. It became the official ideology of this country. Over the past several decades the main and most important aim for them has been, and still is, to spread their religious ideology as far as it is possible. They have spent more than 89 billion dollars on this over a two decade period of time. In comparison Soviet Russia spent 7 billion dollars on spreading communism during more than 7 decades. Saudi Arabia doesn’t focus only on the countries where all kinds of Islam dominates, but also on the regions where there is political instability and poverty in general. An example is the North Caucasus, where in the early 1990s sheikhs, emissaries and preachers from Arabic countries tried to spread Islam across the whole region taking advantage of its unstable political situation. They wanted to create an Islamic state – an Islamic Caliphate “from sea to sea”.