Saudi Arabia forced to rethink ideology in fight against IS - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/12/saudi-kingdom-versus-caliphate.html#
A kingdom that prides itself on a pan-Islamic ideology such as Saudi Arabia should in theory embrace transnational links rather than fear them. However, Baghdadi does not only promise to eradicate the old colonial borders but also seeks to merge Muslims in a multi-ethnic military force where local culture, language and ethnicity are submerged in one Islamic identity and polity. In the IS media empire, the diversity of Muslim nationalities among their fighters is celebrated to appeal to Muslims everywhere. A kind of perverse cosmopolitanism seems to be very dominant among the young fighters who have joined IS. But IS tolerates them only if they quickly abandon this cosmopolitanism and embrace an Islam totally detached from their own local cultures and ethnicities.
Isn’t this what the kingdom tries to do despite its rhetoric about pan-Islamism? Both the nascent caliphate and the Saudi kingdom offer models of transnationalism that are so similar with both reaching out to Muslims across cultures but with a view of homogenizing them and eradicating their difference. Both the kingdom and the recent caliphate are far removed from the ancient model of the caliphate that flourished in Damascus and later Baghdad. The kingdom and the caliphate are so similar that they are repulsed by each other. It seems that here similarity breeds contempt.