One of my pet peeves is when people are not logical. Another is when a minority of people (often manifesting itself in the form of shrill activists and ideologues) claims the right to speak for the majority.

In this country, such shrill minorities often try to claim that they are "the base."

I don't want to confuse the issue by attempting to translate that annoying phrase into Arabic, but what has me thinking about this "base" type of fraud is a speech by Bernard Lewis, in which he warns that the Wahhabi ideology has become a major force in Muslim communities in the United States:

That there has been a break with the past is a fact of which Arabs and Muslims themselves are keenly and painfully aware, and they have tried to do something about it. It is in this context that we observe a series of movements that could be described as an Islamic revival or reawakening. The first of these—founded by a theologian called Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who lived in a remote area of Najd in desert Arabia—is known as Wahhabi. Its argument is that the root of Arab-Islamic troubles lies in following the ways of the infidel. The Islamic world, it holds, has abandoned the true faith that God gave it through His prophet and His holy book, and the remedy is a return to pure, original Islam. This pure, original Islam is, of course—as is usual in such situations—a new invention with little connection to Islam as it existed in its earlier stages.

Wahhabism was dealt with fairly easily in its early years, but it acquired a new importance in the mid-1920s when two things happened: The local tribal chiefs of the House of Saud—who had been converted since the 18th century to the Wahhabi version of Islam—conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This was of immense importance, giving them huge prestige and influence in the whole Islamic world. It also gave them control of the pilgrimage, which brings millions of Muslims from the Islamic world together to the same place at the same time every year.

The other important thing that happened—also in the mid-20s—was the discovery of oil. With that, this extremist sect found itself not only in possession of Mecca and Medina, but also of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. As a result, what would otherwise have been a lunatic fringe in a marginal country became a major force in the world of Islam. And it has continued as a major force to the present day, operating through the Saudi government and through a whole series of non-governmental organizations. What is worse, its influence spreads far beyond the region. When Muslims living in Chicago or Los Angeles or Birmingham or Hamburg want to give their children some grounding in their faith and culture—a very natural, very normal thing—they turn to the traditional resources for such purposes: evening classes, weekend schools, holiday camps and the like. The problem is that these are now overwhelmingly funded and therefore controlled by the Wahhabis, and the version of Islam that they teach is the Wahhabi version, which has thus become a major force in Muslim immigrant communities.

It's natural to expect that the Wahhabis would themselves claim to be the American Muslim base, just as the Buchanan-Keyes Republicans would claim to be the Republican base. But the right to claim that does not give either group any right to be the base.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds and Dean Esmay that taxonomy is important, and I do not know what to call the Wahhabi Muslims in this country. "Islamic fundamentalists" is about as accurate a term as any.

All I know that Wahhabists are not the base of anything but themselves, nor should they be, and I don't want them to get away with passing themselves off as the Muslim base.

It's one of the sad ironies that the goal of Wahhabist hegemony is often aided and abetted by those who claim the most loudly to be against it.