Dubai, July 5 (Reuters): A pair of twins allegedly killed their mother in Saudi Arabia after she tried to stop them from joining the Islamic State in Syria in a case that outraged Saudi Arabians worried about rising militancy.
The June 24 killing, in a country where respect for elders is seen as a bedrock of society, whipped up a storm of debate over the possible influence of a medieval scholar revered as a forerunner of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam.
Saudi interior ministry spokesman Gen. Mansour al-Turki said the pair were suspects in the killing.
"The only thing (we have established) is that they (the twins) follow Takfiri ideology," Turki told Reuters, opting for a phrase that Saudi authorities use to refer to Islamist militancy. The case is still under investigation," said the spokesman, who declined to give further details.
Reuters was unable to contact the 20-year-old twins, or their lawyers or family members, and could not independently confirm if the alleged killing was influenced by the Islamic State or religious ideology - or what the mother actually said.
In a statement after the attack, the interior ministry said that the twins, Khaled and Saleh al-Oraini, were arrested on suspicion of stabbing their 67-year-old mother Haila, their 73-year-old father and their 22-year-old brother at the family home in the capital Riyadh. The mother, who died of her wounds, had objected to her sons joining the IS in Syria, Saudi media reported.
The father and brother were in hospital in a serious condition, while the alleged attackers were arrested trying to flee across the border to Yemen, media said. Reuters was unable to confirm the status of family members or the whereabouts of the suspects.
"Had this come from drug addicts or ignorant youth, it would not have been unusual," Saudi writer Mohammad Ali al-Mahmoud said. "The shock is that it came from a pair of religious children acting in the name of Islam."
This is the fifth killing of family members by suspected militants in Saudi Arabia since July last year, the online Saudi news website akhbaar24 reported on June 26.
There have been similar cases of other killings of close relatives by Islamic state members, including a widely reported incident in January in which a suspected militant killed his mother in public in the Syrian city of Raqqa because she had encouraged him to leave the group. The killings compounded fears of radicalisation in the kingdom. Yesterday, suicide bombers struck three cities in an apparently coordinated campaign of attacks as Saudis prepared to break their daily fast observed during Ramazan.
The case has caused impassioned debate because Islam teaches that devotion to caring for elders is a pathway to heaven. Some scholars and media commentators have asked if it was the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, a 13th century Islamic scholar from Damascus known for his religious opinion about takfir that were behind young militants killing family members they regarded as apostates.
The IS embraces the concept of takfir, often quoting Ibn Taymiyya to exhort its followers to kill other Muslims seen as apostates, including relatives. The word takfir is derived from the Arabic word kafer, which means unbeliever. It was Ibn Taymiyya who inspired the founder of Wahhabism, the 18th century Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul-Wahhab.
Wahhabism, the religious movement espoused by rulers of Saudi Arabia, demands rigid adherence to what it sees as Islam's original practices.
These links, as well as shared practices such as the use of beheading as a means of execution, led some western commentators to accuse Riyadh of sympathy with groups like the IS which holds territory in Iraq and Syria.
However, western-allied Riyadh says Ibn Abdul-Wahhab was a reformer. The Saudi government rejects any talk of links between his message and that of the extremists.
But Riyadh's official stance has not prevented scholars and commentators from seizing on the latest killing to dissect the degree to which Ibn Taymiyya is responsible for motivating today's extremists.
