Taliban suicide bombers attacked the shrine of the patron saint of Lahore on Thursday evening, leaving at least 42 dead and wounding 175. On one level this is a clear effort by the Taliban to destabilize Pakistan, and bring home to urban Pakistanis that there is a price to be paid for government campaigns against Taliban strongholds in the northwest.

Beyond this fairly obvious motivation, however, the bombing show something else. The recent targeting of holy sites in Pakistan by Taliban suicide bombers (Shiite religious processions in December and February, in May a mosque of the Ahmadi sect, and now a Sufi Moslem shrine) highlights a theological divide between the radical Wahhabism of the Taliban and the overwhelming majority of the rest of the Islamic world.

Wahhabism forbids music (as is often used in Shiite religious processions) and the visiting of religious shrines to gain God’s favor (a feature of Sufism), hence the attacks on religious events and buildings the Taliban considers heretical.

Out of 1.6 billion Moslems world-wide, there are probably only about 20 million Wahhabists, and most of them live in Saudi Arabia where it is the official state religion. Only Saudi oil money gives this branch of Islam any traction at all outside of the Arabian peninsula. Oil revenues have funded mosques and religious schools throughout the Islamic world and have taken control of a lot of the Islamic media — in other words wherever money talks, it talks Wahhabi. It still hasn’t stuck at the grass roots level  most places except among the Taliban. The Taliban is a religious minority even in Afghanistan, and a fairly unpopular one at that.

They aren’t making a lot of friends in Pakistan these days either.

Here is a Pakistani report on the bombing.

Here is a report from Business Week’s correspondent in Pakistan.

Here is a commentary by Juan Cole.

About the Author: The major landmarks in Frank's historical interests range from ancient Persia through the Crimean War, World War II, and the modern U.S. Armed Forces, with a lot of stops in between. Frank is fascinated by the unusual, the overlooked, and the surprising. He is the New York Times number one best-selling author of the Desert Shield Fact Book (1991) and he is currently writing an historical novel on Alexander's conquest of Persia – from the Persian point of view.

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