Book review. Bookbomb: The Kingdom of Terror.

Finally we got a book that tells us “what the hell is going on”! The earlier ambassador of Norway to Saudi-Arabia, Carl Schiøtz Wibye (70), has spent his 2 years quarantine after 40 years in the diplomacy – to write a book where fragmentary news about the activities of the islamists are finally placed in a landscape, in a context, in the line of history – so we at last can know what has been going on, and what is going on right now, because he brings everything very much up to date. The book came on the market here in Norway on the 9^th of February, but the first edition was sold out already a few days later. He gives us a full view of the situation, which finally gives us an overview and thereby an insight in “what the hell is going on”. The nucleus of the book is to be found on page 232 in the Norwegian edition: “The steadily more widespread global terrorism can be traced directly back to the active mission activities of Salafism and Wahabism that for a whole generation was carried on the back of a massive economical support from the Gulf states, primarily Saudi-Arabia.”

Ambassador Schiøtz Wibye has through his years in the Middle East and on Balkan worked on collecting information which has led up to this book: Cairo – Ministerial attaché 95-97, Teheran – Ministerial attaché 97-99, Section director of the Foreign Department in Oslo: 99-04, Skopje, Macedonia – Ambassador 04-09, Riyadh, Saudi-Arabia – Ambassador 09-14. Throughout his service in the Middle East, he has travelled extensively on his motorbike and in neutral cars – talking to people he has met. He speaks the language of Macedonia and of the Arab world. It is probably difficult to find anyone who has a more substantial knowledge to write about these matters. He was an engineer in his military service, he studied at the Defence Academy of Norway, and he studied political science at the university of Trondheim, Norway.

Ambassador Schiøtz Wibye says in his book that this book is not a scholarly work. On this point I disagree, because he has an extensive amount of footnotes, a list of Arab Islamic terminology, and a long list of literature. His approach is very academic. He writes with an intellectual distance to his subject, the information is well administered in sections, and his language is very much alive, to be enjoyed both by lay and learned. It is a very dense text, because he is very accurate on names, dates, historical references. The skeleton of this book ought to be cut out and edited as an abbreviated edition for highschool students, for whom it ought to be compulsory curriculum. This book ought to be obligatory to read for all politicians, all journalists, all muslims – and just everybody. I dare claim that no one has studied this field so closely, over such a long period of time, as Ambassador Schiøtz Wibye, and also been able to transmit the knowledge to the readers, in such a successful way. His only weak point is when he refers to the Middle Ages of Europe, where he shows a thorough lack of insight, but that is another story.

The great pattern he lays out is in short the following: The desert people of the inner parts of the Arab peninsula, the Najd, led by uneducated, fundamentalistic preachers, in the 18^th. century married into the Saud family, and thus formed an unholy alliance that still rules Saudi-Arabia, with their version of Islam – the Wahabism, still the state religion, watched over by a religious police that makes KGB and the Gestapo seem rather like boy scouts in comparison. This alliance would probably have eroded, he says, if the oil wells had not been discovered. With the strong flow of money into Saudi-Arabia from the rest of the world to buy oil, the money fertilized the spreading of this radical version of Islam in a most efficient way, where they primarily filled the void in countries after wars and collapse of rule. These countries needed new infrastructure, schools and hospitals, but what they got was concrete box mosques, Koran schools, desert fundamentalist imams, the twisted Wahabi translation of the Koran – and they poured out angry young men without any education for taking part in a society, but eager to commit atrocities to become martyrs. Then “the chickens came home to roost” as the author writes. These young angry men had no schooling for taking part in the society, but turned against their makers, hitting Saudi-Arabia in the 2003 bomb raids – like boomerangs, like a monster that Saudi-Arabia had created and then lost control of. Saudi-Arabia, the epicentre of the last 40 years of this process, now tries to calm down things and mend their sins, but the circular waves the process has created – now spread across the planet like a slow tsunami we cannot avoid, the author writes. He is not optimistic, to say the least.

The flow of western money into Saudi-Arabia’s oil exportation system, which has financed 40 years of monumental spreading of the brutal Wahabism with all the horrific terror attacs we have vitnessed, this money flow must be stopped. This seems to be the author’s conclusion. The reader might think – that is perhaps why President Trump now is so eager to build the pipeline through the Dakotas, to become independent of energy import. The next step to choke the money stream into Saudi-Arabia, must be to develop our cars to run on hydrogen, which we can extract of sheer water. Then comes all the work to rid the world of the poisonous Wahabi and Salafism teachings. To do that work, the world will need the help of all muslims educated at our western universities, those universities that still are not silenced by money donations from Saudi-Arabia, named “The Kingdom of Terror” by the author.The twisted Wahabi version of the Koran, the Hilali/Khan Koran, ought to be taken out of circulation, and be substituted by a more neutral version, the author writes. But this will be a heavy task, since the Hilali/Khan Koran was distributed around the world, for free – no pay, by the millions from Saudi-Arabia. Ambassador Schiøtz Wibye’s revealing and enlightening book ought to be translated into Arab, French and English – quickly, without delay, and be distributed the same way to enlighten especially the muslims of the world. For as the renowned French religion philosopher in the 19^th century wrote: – The best service you may render a muslim, is to rid her/him of Islam. That freedom war will have to be fought with intellectual weapons, like Ambassador Schiøtz Wibye’s masterly book.

His book is edited by the old and renowned Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S, Norway.

Title: Terrorens rike.

www.gyldendal.no

Norway, February – 2017,

Dordi Skuggevik

Cand.Philol. of the Univ. of Trondheim, Norway.

Chevalier of the French order of Arts and Lettres.

Sendt til Washington Post.