When Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh described Islamic State and al Qaeda as "kharijites" last month, he was casting them as the ultimate heretics of Muslim history, a sect that caused the faith's first and most traumatic schism.
That sort of rhetoric aimed at expelling militants from the Muslim mainstream has grown increasingly common among top Saudi clerics in recent weeks as they work to counter an ideology that threatens their political allies in the Al Saud dynasty.
But while Saudi Arabia's official Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam attacks Islamists as heretical and "deviant", many of its most senior and popular clergy preach a doctrine that encourages intolerance against the very groups targeted by IS in Iraq. [Reuters] Read more
